The Cat in Folklore Traditions of the Kalmyks, Other Mongolic and Far Eastern Peoples

The article observes the material about cat in the culture of Kalmyks and other Mongol-speaking peoples. Contrary to expectations associated with the nomadic culture, in new materials on Kalmyk folklore, the cat is represented in Kalmyk folklore in a significant number of various examples. The cat, saved from death by the new owner who bought it, together with the dog becomes his assistant. A similar story is found among the Buryats and Koreans, who have many motifs related to the cat and similar to those of Kalmyks, Mongols and Buryats. It is important that the cat acts as a guardian of Buddhist manuscripts and khuruls, it is possible that the distribution of cats in Central Asia and the countries of the Far East is associated with the spread of Buddhism both in events and in time. Goal. In connection with the large amount of new material about the cat in Kalmyk folklore, it became necessary to clarify ethnographic materials on the characteristics of the Kalmyks attitude to the cat, to identify parallels to the stories and tales about the cat among Kalmyks, to reveal the unity of the cultural component in the stories about the cat among Kalmyks, Buryats, Mongols , Chinese and Koreans, to assess the degree of similarity of the compared texts, to determine the independence of ethnographically significant elements in the compared texts, to distinguish the characteristics of realia from purely narrative folkloric detail. Results. The connection of some notions related to the cat in the form of their implementation in folklore and everyday attitudes to the cat in the life of Kalmyks in the 1920s–1930s according to ethnographic sources is noted. The prevalence of individual plots in which a cat and a dog are present is traced among the Mongolian peoples with their analogies in Inner Mongolia, China and Korea, and it turns out that in the folklore of Koreans, the cat cult is presented in the most eloquent way and is associated with the tiger cult (cats are thought to be descendants of the mating union of a man and a tigresses). The spread of cats is associated with the abolition of the tradition of killing old people. The proliferation of cats in the folklore stories of Kalmyks, Koreans and Tuvans is associated with the need to get cats in Buddhist monasteries so that cats protect Buddhist manuscripts from mice, this way distribution of cats among the peoples of Central Asia and the Far East is associated in time with the spread of Buddhist religious doctrine in this region. At the same time, the cultural components related to the attitude to the cat among Buddhists are not related to the respectful attitude to the cat in Islam, correlated with the personality of the Prophet Muhammad.

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