Conference "Encounter with the Udmurts, a Finno-Ugric culture of the Volga region".

The conference

Thursday, April 20, at 2 rue de Lille, an introductory conference on Udmurt culture will be held, presented by Professor Eva Toulouse and organized by the Foundation.

The Udmurts are a Finno-Ugric people, living mainly in Udmurtia, a region of the Urals in Russia. Although they never formed an independent state, the Udmurts retain a culture all their own. A pagan people, their beliefs were originally closely linked to nature. In line with their faith in multiple deities, they organize a series of rituals every year, which Eva Toulouze and Liivo Niglas have documented.

The conference will take a closer look at these ceremonies, through the screening of the documentary "Elen vös'" by Liivo Niglas, film director and visual anthropologist, who teaches at the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu.

The program:

6pm: Lecture by Eva Toulouze
6:45pm: Screening of the documentary Elen vös' in the presence of director Liivo Niglas
7:30pm: Discussion
8pm: Reception

Free admission on registration.

Inalco and Udmurtia

The links between Inalco and Udmurtia are strong both in the teaching of its language but also in a cultural program that has never ceased to focus on Udmurt culture. The Udmurt language was first taught at Inalco by Professor Jean-Luc Moreau in the early 2000s, and has been taught again since the start of the 2022 academic year, at the initiative of the Europe Department and the CFVE, as well as Eva Toulouze, professor of Finno-Urgrian languages and cultures at Inalco, supported by the Inalco Foundation. by Eva Toulouze, professor of Finno-Urgrian languages and cultures at Inalco, supported by the Inalco Foundation. If you are interested in learning Udmurt, or would like more information on the subject, you can click here.

The Inalco also honored Udmurt culture during its participation in the Udmurt Days in Paris, and invited numerous Udmurt personalities to present their work as part of the "Paroles de créateurs" cycle. Inalco was honored to welcome poet Tatjana Hohrjakova, as well as Nikolaj Anisimov, oral culture specialist and singer. More recently, the exhibition "Varkled-Bodja: initiation rituals for young people in 1993 and 2017" presented photographs of the initiations of village boys and girls. At the end of these initiations, they become adult members of the community, which enables them to marry and practice the oudmourtes rituals.

This new event will enable us to approach this culture from the angle of its traditions and rituals, thanks to the intervention of two specialists in the field. It will also be an opportunity to draw attention to the fact that Udmurt is an endangered language, and that its preservation requires both teaching and awareness-raising. Indeed, this is not an isolated episode, as there is a real phenomenon of accelerating language extinction. Back in 2009, UNESCO warned that over 2,500 of the world's 6,000 languages were under threat. Every time a language disappears, knowledge, stories and poems disappear with it.