It is difficult to attribute any other commonality to this densely populated, multi-part, and vaguely delineated geographical world than that which it acquired as a meeting place for people and a fusion of many stories.

(Fernand Braudel, "The Mediterranean Sea and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II")

The first impressions of a Russian coming to Southeast Asia are usually associated with its nature ("nature") - hot sun, humid, like in a bath, atmosphere, islands of unusual lush vegetation, alleys of palm trees. Such a picture appears before your eyes already on the way from the airport. As part of the tropical nature, elegant dark people are also perceived, of course, whose culture often remains a book with seven seals for the visitor. Their unusual affability, courtesy, and smiles are sometimes thoughtlessly written off due to naivety, frivolity, or even a desire to seduce foreigners by hiding their true underlying feelings from them.

However, the appearance of most megacities in Southeast Asia, whether it is Bangkok, Jakarta or Manila, with elegant skyscrapers or expressionless buildings also seems to be of the Western type, with supermarkets or small shops stuffed with goods that are not so different from those that are sold on every corner, with passers-by dressed lightly, but not very exotic - it doesn't cause much surprise. Unless the towers of pagodas in the" Buddhist " continental part of Southeast Asia or the domes and minarets of mosques in its island sub-region remind us of the local high culture, although brought here from outside, from India or from the Middle East, not to mention the not so rare Christian temples here, especially numerous on Catholic sites. mostly in the Philippines. It is not always understood as part of the local culture and enveloping the visitor diverse language element, especially since it is necessary to explain to the locals as far as possible in English, which is well-spoken here by officials, businessmen, hotel staff, sellers...

Of course, there are still "cultural programs" intended for tourists, which most often include folk dances in their variety versions, or even singing that preserves local intonations. But these smoothed, dissected echoes of art are most often replaced in our impressions by the atmosphere of hotel halls, air-conditioned cool rooms, delicious meals, shopping trips replete with souvenirs designed mainly for non-demanding taste. Probably, the average Western tourist who has visited Moscow has about the same superficial impressions - a bus tour of the city, the Bolshoi Theater, the pedestrian Arbat, maybe a trip to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra...

In fact, the process of relentless Westernization has taken over most of Southeast Asia over the past century, and the search for a local unique culture that began to take shape long before Christ is a painstaking and difficult task, given the mosaic nature of this vast region. The underlying elements were hidden under later cultural layers and, consequently, underwent significant changes over the centuries-old history of Southeast Asia.

NOT BY FORCE, BUT BY SKILL

The current culture of this vast region began to take shape four to five thousand years ago, when the so-called Neolithic revolution and the resulting population growth in East Asia spurred the migration of part of the Mongoloids to the south. Some of them, including the Monkhmer and Laquiet (the ancestors of today's Vietnamese), moved down the Ira-Wadi, Mekong, and Hongh (Red River), while others-the ancient Austronesians (the ancestors of the Filipinos, Indonesians, and Malays) - followed the sea route along the eastern coast of the South China Sea, gradually going deeper into China. island Southeast Asia. In new places, they met relatively few aboriginal Australoids-hunters, gatherers, primitive farmers. Mixing with them and changing, the newcomers formed the current population of these regions, attributed by anthropologists to the southern Mongoloids. The first waves of immigrants were followed by new ones that swept over them , for example, the Burmese ancestors did not gain a foothold in the upper Irrawaddy until the tenth century.

The pioneers brought their own agricultural culture with them to the sparsely populated, lush tropical vegetation, fertile river valleys of virgin lands, which could not help but transform in new conditions. Their initial achievement, which is important for the entire world civilization, is the introduction of rice culture into agricultural circulation. The cultivation of swamp "floating" rice, which was first practiced by pioneers, has been transformed over the centuries into a system of efficient farming.-

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irrigation rice farming, which is developed primarily in the lower reaches of the Mekong, in the river valleys of West Sumatra, Java, Bali and in some other areas. One of the most impressive features of this culture is the vertiginous terraced rice fields of Ifugao, a mountain people living on the island of Luzon, in the foothills of the Central Cordillera.

Not surprisingly, it is the diverse varieties of rice that are becoming the main preferred food of the indigenous population. People living in the interior of the continent or large islands ate rice mainly with meat seasonings, the inhabitants of the coasts-mainly with fish and other seafood. Of course, all sorts of side dishes from (originally wild) vegetables were used, and spices became an integral part of seasonings, and the dishes of the Malays, as well as some other peoples of the island part of the region, were famous for their sharpness. Today's urban (even inexpensive) cuisine of Southeast Asia is distinguished by a peculiar refinement and includes a number of dishes borrowed from local Chinese, for example, noodles prepared in all possible ways. Local dishes, often spiced with Indian curry sauce, are generally acceptable for a non-diet European, not to mention the accompanying tropical fruits, among which various types of bananas are most popular (some of them are edible and delicious only when fried). Some dishes may seem too exotic for visitors, but no one will offer them, for example, boiled mulberry caterpillars, beloved by the Vietnamese, or the tasteless sago jelly-papeda, which the inhabitants of the Moluccas eat.

The natural conditions of Southeast Asia, with its torrential tropical rains and heavy floods, encouraged migrants to build pile dwellings, which largely determined the specifics of local rural architecture. Fear of the surrounding jungle, inhabited by countless dangerous animals, and even hostile tribes, was probably not the last reason for the emergence of "long houses" on high stilts characteristic of the Monkhmer and a number of peoples of Indonesia and the Philippines, which reached the land of Kalimantan (Borneo)at the dayaks 400 meters in length. Little by little, the pile houses gave way to buildings on wide platforms supported on low massive piles, and then to land-based houses erected in safe places, which had long been predominant among the Vietnamese, Javanese, Balinese or Madurians. However, as in the previous pile dwellings, the walls of these houses were made of wicker bamboo for better ventilation, and the roofs were made of leaves of the nipa marsh palm or bamboo shingles. The grand platform houses of Minangkabau (west Sumatra) and Toraja (central Sulawesi), with their sloping walls, richly decorated exterior panels and curved saddle-shaped roofs, are considered masterpieces of traditional rural Southeast Asian dwellings, giving them (perhaps in memory of the sea voyages of their ancestors) the appearance of ships.

It may be assumed that the ancestors of the southern Mongoloids modified their clothing when they arrived in the equatorial belt, but only a small part of them, after mixing with the indigenous population, limited themselves to the bast loincloths and short skirts that are still worn today by the aborigines of the Malacca Peninsula, Sumatran Kubu or the inhabitants of the Mentawai archipelago. Most of the southern Mongoloids, if we talk about the main elements of folk costume, settled on unstitched or sewn skirts, like the Burmese longji or Javanese sampin-ga, while the Khmer sampot or Thai panung, being wrapped around the hips, were then passed between the legs, thus forming a new type of clothing -"unstitched trousers". As for clothing covering the torso, a variety of open jackets or sweatshirts were used here, and in some relatively isolated areas (the outback of Laos, the island of Bali, etc.), the fair sex left their breasts open for a long time.

For centuries, local women have made their own patterned fabrics, and weaving is still common in Vietnamese, Kampuchea, Lao, Thai, and Burmese villages. At the same time, if Vietnamese rural weaving, which supplied the domestic market with silk and cotton fabrics, was famous only in its homeland, then Javanese cotton pads - batiks, along with cotton and - less often-silk ikats (the threads of which are first dyed-

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and then they are woven), justly attributed to the peaks of local applied art, have won truly world fame. The gold and silver brocade produced in Sumatra and parts of West Malaysia is not inferior to them. Unfortunately, the urban and then rural population of Southeast Asia has recently been switching en masse to European-style clothing, and local costumes in all their splendor can only be seen during holidays or at performances of theater and dance ensembles.

In order not to get lost further in the praise of highly developed, but declining local crafts, only a small fraction of which somehow keeps afloat thanks to the tourist market, I will mention only two more top achievements of regional material culture that belong to long-past times.

One of them is shipbuilding, thanks to which the ancestors of modern Indonesians and Malays are becoming the main sea carriers of the western Pacific seas and almost the entire Indian Ocean basin at the turn of the new era. Their huge sambau ships, equipped with balancers, and developed over time by some other peoples of Southeast Asia, served as the main means of communication from China all the way to the coast of East Africa in the first millennium AD. There is much evidence that the ancient Austronesians were the first seafarers in the world at that time. Today, only a few small vessels of Eastern Indonesia remind us of the large ships that laid sea routes in the southern latitudes of the Eastern Hemisphere.

It is impossible not to mention the bronze metallurgy that emerged in Southeast Asia around the second half of the second millennium BC. Its peak was the so-called Dong Son culture, whose numerous monuments belong to the Lakviets and were first seriously analyzed by the Russian scientist V. V. Golubev, who worked in French Indochina. From what is now Northern Vietnam, the art of casting bronze soon spread to the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and possibly throughout the Old World. Tools, weapons, and unparalleled ritual bronze drums with bronze resonators are the glittering monuments of an ancient civilization that was dying out by the third century AD.

BOUNDLESS SEA OF FOLKLORE

Speaking about the local spiritual culture, first of all it is necessary to mention the ancient myths about the incestuous marriage of a brother and sister - tribal ancestors who survived after the flood that destroyed everyone and everything. These myths are still preserved in the memory of the Austronesian aborigines of Taiwan, and they were recorded relatively recently among the mountain Khmer people, as well as a number of archaic tribes of Luzon and North Kalimantan. These myths, which probably belong to the common mythological heritage of the southern Mongoloids of continental and insular Southeast Asia, may later give way to the mythological ideas of two brothers who are the gods of the upper and lower worlds, while (among the Bugi people of South Sulawesi) each of them is married to the twin of his brother, that is, and on his own sister, connected, however, with another world. It is possible that as a result of the division of this mythologeme, a dynastic myth about a celestial male deity and his divine consort, often turning into a snake and referring to the water element, later arose (in particular, among the Khmer and Javanese), which did not interfere, on the other hand, with the existence of numerous mythological traditions associated with the magical bird wife, recorded, for example, at the Muong of Vietnam or at the Sarawak dayaks (North Kalimantan). These and similar traditions are believed to be related to the dualistic organization of local societies, which since the Bronze Age were divided into two categories - residents of the upper reaches of the river and inhabitants of the lower reaches. The former were fed mainly from forest land, the latter-with the help of irrigation rice and thanks to the gifts of the sea.

The epic traditions of the inhabitants of insular Southeast Asia also show a close connection with myths (on the continent, the local epic was mostly replaced by Indian epic-mythological narratives that were later transformed on local soil). So, in the tales of the Tingians (one of the mountain tribes of Northern Luzon), the heroes 'movements throughout the Tingian cosmos - from earth to heaven, from human villages to the dwellings of spirits, their inevitable meetings with marriage partners, who first appear in the form of the sun, the adopted son of the "forest mistress", a bird, tree branches, or indispensable nuptials the title characters with a paternal cousin (sister) - all this testifies to the mythical, and in the origins of their kin-tribal character of the Tingian traditions, while the creation of a monogamous family mainly as a super-task, the importance of the hero's (heroine's) personal feeling for their subject, the episodic appearance of the main character - Aponitolau in the form of a pathetic stepson of fate can be interpreted as the primary signs of a fairy tale.

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The mythical basis is easily seen in the works of the Malay epic-cherita. Their performance, which can still be heard in the remote corners of the Malacca Peninsula and Sumatra, and to this day is sometimes accompanied by sacrifices and spells designed to please and send back the spirits of the ancestors who are invisibly listening to the storyteller, which are mentioned in the legends. The cherita "Gading Jobang and his brother Gading Semerah Lengang", which I recorded in Kedah in 1996, tells, for example, about two brothers-princes avenging their father, who was killed on the orders of their uncle, and then, after a difficult contest in the magic art, they get a princess to marry their older brother, who lives on a mountain that goes into the sky. The main character of the story is the younger brother Gading Semerakh Lengang, endowed with supernatural powers due to the steady veneration of the divine ancestors, who finally appear to him for a decisive test in the guise of a giant elephant and a huge snake.

If there is no doubt about the totemic character of the first ancestors appearing in the Malay epic legend, this cannot be said with certainty about the heroes of the largely similar "animal tales" of the peoples of Southeast Asia. One might think, however, that the stories about the hare that are common among the Khmer, Cham, Burmese, and Tai are about the dwarf deer (kanchi-le) - the most popular fairy-tale hero of the Javanese and Malays-or about the monkey, which is one of the main characters in the animal epic of the Toraj (Sulawesi Island) and Tagalog (Second World War). They were formed in the East Asian subtropics (this is indicated by the common motifs found in them) and only after the settlement of the ancestors of the southern Mongoloids were assigned to certain local animals. The essence of these narratives, however, remained the same: a small and weak creature, thanks to its cunning, makes fools of the forest giants, or even becomes their king. Local " animal tales "most likely recall the times when the ancient inhabitants of Southeast Asia, telling them before hunting, were" charged " with magical power, which was supposed to help them cope with the powerful inhabitants of the surrounding jungle.

Short lyrical songs, called, for example, by the Burmese - tichhin, by the Laotians - pheng, by the Tai - phleng, by the Viet - kuankho or hatzam, by the Malays - pantun, and by the Javanese - parikan, also go back to ancient tribal rituals. These rituals, which were preserved until recently among the mountaineers of Southern China and Southeast Asia, were often associated with agricultural holidays and accompanied, in particular, the rites of choosing marriage partners. So, in Laos, young men and women, lined up in two rows facing each other, could exchange couplets for hours, of which the first contained a riddle (hint) and required the intended partner (partner) to develop in the response couplet (for Khmer people, the ball was thrown simultaneously to the addressee to be sure). The best of these folk songs, whose analogues are not uncommon among other peoples of the Eikumene, reach an amazing depth and expressiveness, forming a true decoration of the folk literature of the region.

An overview of the folklore of the peoples of Southeast Asia would be incomplete without mentioning the numerous historical traditions that have come down to us partly in the form of a living tradition passed down from generation to generation (for example, the dynastic chronicles of Roti, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands), or have been preserved as interspersed in the monuments of local medieval literature, whether "Collection of wonders and mysteries of the Land of Viet", or written in Malay "Kuteysky genealogies "(East Kalimantan). As for the vast area of local traditional law that has been preserved in popular memory for centuries, a significant part of its provisions has also been recorded in a number of collections of laws, such as Khmer satras, Lao and Siamese sat, Burmese tachan, or a significant part of the works of Minangkabau (West Sumatran people) written in the genre of undang-undang (laws). In the monuments of local literature, you can also find moral rules, aphorisms, proverbs and riddles that are not repeated, although in many ways they echo similar folklore genres of other peoples.

(To be continued)

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