Veronica Veit (ed.): The Role of Women in the Altaic World.
Scharlipp, Wolfgang-E.
Veronica Veit (ed.): The Role of Women in the Altaic World.
Permanent International Altaistic Conference 44th Meeting, Walberberg,
26-31 August 2001. Asiatische Forschungen Bd. 152. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007. 335 pp. ISBN 0571-320X.
The PIAC is a rather old institution in the field of Oriental
studies. The tradition of dealing with such diverse topics as Turkish,
Mongolian, Manchu etc. has been questioned, but it did not threaten the
continuation of this conference, although the arguments against an
"Altaistic" institution might not be unfounded, if the
activities are restricted to linguistic topics. It seems to be one of
the strengths of the PIAC, that various aspects of the cultures of
ethnic groups which are regarded as Altaic are being treated in the
conferences. Nevertheless, there seems to be a change going on in the
personal and topical composition among the contributors. Of the 37
contributions, only seven are dedicated to Turcological topics (in a
wider sense) and only one of them concerns Turkey. The larger remainder
concerns mainly Mongolistic themes, followed by Manchu and one article
about Tokharian (which is a bit out of place here).
This concentration on Mongol topics might have several reasons. One
seems to be that there are now many more participants from countries
like Mongolia, China and the Central Asian Republics who take the chance
of the "relatively new" open borders to be integrated into the
international scientific community. Another reason might be--this is
only a hypothesis--that Turcological research has always concentrated
more on philological topics while Mongolian Studies, despite linguistic
and literary research, have also always had an anthropological branch
stronger than in Turkish studies. This could explain the distribution of
the articles under the title of this conference.
In order to give an impression to the reader of the diversity of
the contributions, we will give just three examples from different
fields of Altaic studies: a linguistic example, one of literary history
and one of history. An example of the first category is an article by
Alpatov, about the different ways of speaking by women on one hand and
by men on the other, in Japanese. The examples given show that women
when speaking to men, for example, use formulations which express more
friendliness than the male equivalents. The author of this contribution
argues that this fact reflects the lower status of women in the society,
compared to that of men. The contribution by Chmielovska is a short
summary of "The Image of Woman in Turkish Literature in the Second
Half of the 20th Century," which is a topic that could fill a whole
book. An article from Mongol studies (Gol'man) deals with the role
of women as they are described in Russian archives of the thirteenth
century. These documents, which in principle deal with business and
diplomatic relations between Moscow and the Mongols, give a clear
picture of the power and self-confidence of Mongol women, at least of
the upper class. (In this context, I would like to draw attention to the
detailed study of Karin Quade-Reuter: ... denn sie haben einen
unvollkommenenen Verstand--Herrschaftliche Damen im Grossraum Iran in
der Mongolen--und Timuridenzeit; Aachen 2003).
These few examples demonstrate how manifold topics and fields of
research in Altaic studies are. This leads us to the first point of
criticism, which is not very serious. It would have been a definite help
to the reader if the articles had been sorted into certain chapters,
thus Mongolian contributions should be in one chapter, Turkish ones in
another one etc. In this volume the articles are in alphabetical order
according to the author's name, which is not a great help in such a
book of collected papers. The second criticism is more serious.
Something has gone wrong with the transcriptions in several articles.
Before mentioning details, it should be taken into consideration that
inconsistencies will mostly be due to the individual authors as their
transcriptions are usually taken over without unifying them in the
various articles. Thus we find the velar /g/ in different forms, once as
gh, once as Greek gamma.
Another irritation is caused by the colloquial way of writing
transcribed words. Why is sh used in "Shejere-i Terakime" for
a sound for which a special Turkish transcription sign exists? Why is j
used for a sound for which it is usually not used in Turkish; why is
there no length sign above the a in "Terakime" (all 111ff)?
Obviously this way of writing this title has been taken over from other
secondary literature. This might be the decision of the author and a
short explanation would have elucidated the matter.
Much worse is what happened to the article about "The Image of
Woman in Turkish Literature ... " by D. Chmielowska. Here we
neither find the modern special Turkish letters, being slight variations
of Latin letters, nor the very normal /o/ and /u/, resulting in the
incorrect orthography of almost every name mentioned (one of the worst
being "Furuznan" instead of "Furuzan"). Why does a
publishing house with the reputation of Harrassowitz not pay attention
to such obvious mistakes?
Wolfgang-E. Scharlipp
University of Copenhagen
