A Description of Siberian Peoples. Indigenous Peoples of Siberia: Marriage and Family

G.F. Mueller, translated and published by A.Ch. Elert

In the sphere of social relations of Siberian indigenous population, the problem which has received Mueller’s utmost attention and detailed investigation was marriage and family. The scholar left no stone unturned, including the issues ethnographers of the later centuries preferred to avoid. In his comparative studies of marriage rituals, Mueller was interested not only in distinguishing anthropologic characteristics but also in “the posture in which a man sleeps with his wife”...

In this article you will find excerpts from the chapter “On marriage” from Description of Siberian Peoples, Mueller’s two-volume full-scale work, which has not yet been translated into Russian, has never been published and became known to specialists only very recently. Even though these excerpts do not give a full picture of Mueller’s views on the issues of marriage and family of the Siberian aborigines, they bear witness to a whole range of important discoveries such as clan exogamy, which, according to Mueller, was of overall and universal nature among the pagan peoples of Siberia.

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