ABSTRACT
The Kets were the last group of hunter-gatherers to outlast the northward spread of pastoral people across landlocked Northern Asia, only abandoning their mobile lifestyle during the forced Soviet collectivisation campaign of the early 1930s. Most contemporary river names in the areas once roamed by Eniseian-speaking people have transparent Ket etymologies. Underpinning the diverse facets of traditional Ket conceptualisations of central Siberian geography is a spatio-temporal pattern involving horizontal north-to-south space, vertical space, horizontal east-to-west space, the river contrasted with the forest, and even the procession of past, present and future time. Central Siberia is populated today chiefly by Russians, who live alongside several small Turkic, Tungusic and Samoedic minorities the neighbours of the Kets in pre-Russian Siberia. In the Ket language, tree nouns belong to the masculine gender class, usually reserved for positive, useful or powerful objects as well as for male humans and animals.
