Tuvans Erotic

The Tuvans live in a basin of grassland and taiga tucked between the Sayan Mountains and the Mongolian steppe, and the geography does most of the work of explaining them. They are a Turkic-speaking people whose closest linguistic relatives are scattered across Siberia — Khakas, Altai, Yakut — but whose religious and cultural orientation runs south, into the Buddhist world of Mongolia and Tibet. That split is the basic fact about Tuvan identity: a Turkic tongue spoken by Tibetan Buddhists who herd horses, sheep, yaks, and reindeer on the northern edge of the steppe nomad belt.

The Tuvan language is unusual among Turkic languages for its pharyngeal vowels and the sheer density of its consonant clusters, and it is one of the few Turkic languages where Mongolian loanwords sit comfortably alongside the inherited vocabulary rather than displacing it. Most Tuvans are bilingual in Russian, but the language is in healthy enough condition that it remains the working speech of pastoral households and small towns outside Kyzyl. The Tozhu, a forest-dwelling sub-group in the northeast, speak a distinct dialect and keep domesticated reindeer rather than horses — a livelihood shared with a handful of other small Siberian peoples and almost no one else on earth.

Buddhism arrived from Mongolia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and layered itself over an older shamanic tradition without fully replacing it. A Tuvan family today may consult both a lama and a shaman without sensing any contradiction; the Soviet period destroyed most of the monasteries and drove both practices underground, and what has come back since 1990 is a self-conscious revival rather than an unbroken thread. The Dalai Lama has visited, and a new generation of monks trains in India.

Tuva spent the early twentieth century as a nominally independent republic — Tannu Tuva, a country chiefly remembered now by stamp collectors — before being absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1944. That late incorporation is part of why so much of the older pastoral life survived: collectivization arrived, but only briefly, and the herding economy reasserted itself. The cultural export Tuvans are best known for abroad is khoomei, the throat-singing tradition in which a single voice produces a sustained drone and a whistled overtone melody simultaneously. It is genuinely difficult, genuinely strange to a first-time listener, and central enough to Tuvan self-presentation that performers routinely carry it into concert halls from Moscow to San Francisco.