[From the "Sydney Morning Herald":http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/21/1064082853528.html]
bq. A Japanese mountaineer is attempting to settle once and for all the decades-long debate over the existence of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, claiming that his years of study have shown that the legendary apelike monster is in fact a brown bear.
Makoto Nebuka, 56, a senior member of the Japanese Alpine Club, plans to publish the results of his 12 years of research which led him to conclude the mysterious creature, known as the “Yeti,” is really the endangered Himalayan Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos).
Nebuka’s theory rests on a linguistic discovery: Through a series of interviews with local people in Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, he has found that “yeti” is a regional dialect word for “meti”, meaning bear.
Ethnic Tibetan tribes who are scared of the powerful bears which often attack their villages, worship the meti/yeti as a dreadful, supernatural creature, Nebuka said.
“Combining the deified image with people’s imaginations, the figure of the Abominable Snowman has been rooted in people’s minds and the apelike monster image has spread too far,” Nebuka said.
Cool, if true. It also brings to mind an obscure bit of literary and anthropological trivia: poet Gary Snyder, counterculture hero and model for Japhy Rider in Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums”, was once upon a time an anthropology student interested in both Japan and the Native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He combined these interests in a monograph on what he called the circumpolar bear cult, shamanistic bear worship from northern Europe through northern Asia and into northern North America. Among other assertions, he believed that some common characters in modern Japanese folklore had their roots in an anthropomorphization of bear gods.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22circumpolar+bear+cult%22
I wonder whether the Yeti would fit into his theories or is a bear of a different color?
September 23rd, 2003, at 5:37 pm #