Visual Art as a Source for Reconstructing Trade and Exchange Relationsof the Peoples of the Far East (Eighteenth-Twenty First Centuries)
The article deals with the art of Manchu-Tungus peoples of the Far East (with special regard to Uilta and Evenks of Sakhalin) which is viewed as an emotional source of data on their mobility and barter relations and as a commodity itself. Starting from the eighteenth - early nineteenth century trade exchange among China, Russia and Japan developed rapidly and involved the peoples of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin, as well as the Japanese, Chinese and Manchus. Local markets and other exchange relations reflected in art works. A visual “word”, along with actual vocabulary, is able to tell us much about the spiritual being of a people, be it in the form of the ethnic culture’s self-expression or that of a “narrative” on a foreign one. Some of the significant spaces for the “memory” of generations of peoples historically related to different states appear to be the areas of Amur, Sakhalin and the adjacent marine waters. Trade relations among different ethnic groups in this region encouraged the opening and development of transportation routes. A route itself and the nearby territories became a familiar space not only for those who travelled and traded along it, but for the whole ethnic community the traders belonged to. Thus the trade routes which a piece of folk art followed do not seem to have temporal or spatial limits.