Adyghe institution of atalyks and modern sport

THE ADYGHE INSTITUTION OF ATALYKS AND THE MODERN SPORT: TRAINING OF GOAL SETTING

For centuries, the Circassians have had the institution of atalyks that formed its own traditions and peculiarities which characterized exclusively the Circassian people. As German diplomat Jacob Reineggs noted in the 1780s, "When a son is born in the princely family, the prince has to convince his mother with gifts and pleas to allow him to take the child. If mother agrees, the vassal with seven other noblemen comes at night to the Prince's house, takes away his child and brings up him in his own house. The witnesses are observing his education process, starting from the moment when the sign is put and tied to the child. And when it is necessary to make a list of changes (in a growing child), all seven witnesses gather to notice all details of the changes which are written then by the mullah, so that all suspicions about the substitution of the child can be rejected" (1).

No doubt, learning under the atalyk contributed to the education of the Prince’s son in severity and the formation of his character. According to the description of Jacob Reineggs, "the young man learned all that the Circassian Prince should know, he is taught in religion, reading and writing; he studied all secrets of riding, shooting and robbery, and when he was 16 years old, his adoptive father had to dress him in all new according to his rank, to provide a new chainmail, sword, dagger, gun, bow and arrow, horse and slave" (1).

At the same time, everyone could not be atalyk or "adoptive father". Only the one who really deserved such high honor. As it was noted by the German historian and ethnographer Julius Heinrich Klaproth in the early XIX century, " the father gives his son for education to one of his uzdens (approached men), each of whom seeks to ensure this honor.... Parents don’t pay him anything for his efforts, nor for food and clothing of the child. But for this, as soon as his fosterling grows up, the tutor receives from him (the father of the child) the best part of the prey captured by him in wars or robberies" (2). Meanwhile, whoever atalyk was, taking the princely child for education, he had to "teach, dress and feed the child until the day when it is necessary to bring him home to his parents" (2).

The education of the pupil lasted until the age of marriage. And the training includes itself, as the Dutch consul Edouard Taitbout de Marigny described, " a variety of physical exercises to develop strength and dexterity in riding, theft, military campaigns, shooting with bow, rifle, pistol, etc. They are also trained to eloquence, and considered justice; this provides them credibility in public gathering" (3). And only after the celebration of the return of the pupil at home, the atalyk was offered with gifts and he was endowed in the family of his pupil with "the title of his father that could be saved by him for the whole life and was indestructible" (3).

However, the education of the Prince's son was a responsible and difficult task. And the atalyk treated it with seriousness, realizing that he had to educate and prepare a worthy replacement for the Prince. As the Russian general Johann Blaramberg noted in the 1830s, "the atalyk teaches his pupil from a very young age to exercises that harden his body and develop his dexterity; for this, he makes small forays with him for prey, teaches him to deftly steal at first the properties of his peasants - a sheep, a cow, a horse; and later he sends him to his neighbors to steal their cattle and even people" (4). As a rule, "all prey which is possible to be taken by the pupil, belongs to his tutor. Until the education is not complete, the father can only occasionally see his son, and it would be a great shame for him to speak to him in the presence of an outsider." (4)

At times, the atalyk's excessive effort was fraught with difficulties for his own family. According to the description of the German botanist Karl Koch, "he must take care of everything for his pupil. He has to provide food to the nurse with the baby and dress them. He must teach his grown-up fosterling to shoot with weapons which he has to offer him, and he must teach the pupil also to ride, providing him a horse. The needs of the pupil grow over the years, and when he is able to take a heavy bow, to shoot with a gun and to ride skillfully a horse, the tutor leads him for the first time to battle, but here he has to take care about the wellbeing of his pupil. He gets only one thing, it is a big part of the prey ...To become everything for the pupil, he sacrifices his family, and while the pupil is well-dressed and well-armed, the children of the tutor can be hungry and run in rags" (5).

Certainly the atalyk was to try to execute successfully his duty as a tutor and to achieve that they would speak about his pupil or "puе" so as well as the English military James Bell wrote in the late 30-ies of the XIX-th century, namely: "This young man showed us, in addition to the remarkable art of riding a horse and skills at full gallop to remove the gun from the holster, to raise the trigger and to shoot a hat thrown to the ground, another manifestation of agility, which I had not previously seen, namely, to jump out of the saddle on the ground, and almost at the same time, to load the rifle and to snatch the sword from the scabbard " (6). The educator should keep the pupil in severity and to teach him to achieve his goals. In general, the education under leadership of the atalyk lasted six to eight years, including childhood, adolescence and even youth of the pupil.

Strangely, but today the atalyk's education is similar to sports mentirship. And although modern trainers resemble only partly the Adyghe atalyks and the young athletes are not the sons of the Circassian princes and they are not cut off from their home, parents, and families for educational purposes, their similarity is evident. The English correspondent J.A Longworth. wrote in the late 1830s that "the young people enjoyed continuing their sport. The main of the sports was a race, but rather even hunting when one rider was pursued at full gallop by several other riders, and he tried to evade them, using not only the high-speed qualities of his horse, but also various kinds of tricks and irregularities of the terrain. To prove the talent of a good shooter, they train shooting at a long distance, shooting from a backup, and also they shoot at full gallop, knocking down the hat, and the art is to grab instantly a rifle hanging behind their back in a felt cover; the same exercise is executed with a gun. Archery, although it is not such popular as gun shooting, also has its admirers. … It should add to these exercises struggle and pushing big stones" (7).

Indeed, the atalyks and the Circassians, in general, attached a great importance to the physical education of the younger generation. To do this, from early childhood, they have introduced the children to ritual games with strength exercises, they have tried to explain at gatherings how to perform a particular exercise, how to win a particular competition, they have prepared demandingly the young people for games, races and competitions. But not only for a victory in village competitions, the Circassians trained young men. For known reasons, " the main focus of physical training of the Adyghes pursued military purposes. The perfection of a possession of the weapon was preceded by constant exercises" (8, 165). Horse games are also relayed with physical exercise. There was a kind of equestrian sports exercise with taking of coins and other light objects from the ground. It was a kind of djiguitovka or trick riding that Adyghes named "l’yghe gheunekhu" - "proving the manhood" (8, 166). In addition, many folk games such as: chen ("knucklebones"), chermechets ("touching hats"), kheshak (a type of hockey), sapekhete ("playing with a knife") and others played an important role in the system of education, especially of physical qualities. In addition, they contributed to develop will, character, sense of purpose, endurance, ability to navigate in space. Thus, all these exercises and games were subordinated to one goal – to develop certain psycho-physical abilities at the younger generation, ensuring thereby the protection of their lands. And because of this, the Adyghes had a purposeful interest to educate a person in a certain psycho-physical, moral and ethical orientation. To this end, the Circassians elaborated a successful organizational system of the education (8, 176).

Centuries later, the love of the Circassians to sport and sport activities is not passed, although the Institute of the atalyks and the ritual folk game are disappeared and became only a historical datum, characterizing the educational traditions in the Circassian society. Meanwhile, the sports education of modern of the Adyghes, deprived over time of traditions of the Adyghe education organizational system, also doesn’t use so widely innovative approaches, elaborated in modern psychology and pedagogy. And some of them have similarities with the traditional Adyghe approach to the education. These include the model of training of athletes in goal-setting at the stages of long-term preparation, elaborated by the head of the department of psychology of the Adyghean State University (ASU) Susanna Kimovna Bagadirova and presented in her monograph "Formation and development of goal-setting in the process of professionalization of the person (for example, sports activities)" (2018).

"The modern sport, as a highly competitive activity, imposes strict requirements for the preparation of athletes, that stimulates sport science to detect and disclose psychological resources determining their competitiveness. The psychology already accumulated a rich experience in applied researches of the problems of psychological support of athletes as a resource to improve their good performance. However, the country doesn’t develop a complete system of psychological support for athletes. Speaking about it, first of all, we mean the absence of a full theoretical and methodological justification of the psychological support. The applied aspect of this problem is presented, though not systematically, but especially in national teams," - the scientist notes (9).

If we take modern sport trainers, sports mentors, who play. in their essence, the role of the atalyk, today the list of their professional competencies doesn’t include the psychological support for athletes. The level of knowledge, learned by trainers in the course of their professional formation in the field of psychological support of athletes is introductory. Surely, today their job does not include the training of "eloquence and judicious justice to give them a credibility in the public gathering" for their athletes as the atalyks practiced in the education of the princely sons. Their main task is to educate physically, technically and tactically a trained athlete, capable of showing good results. And the psychological support should be provided by specialists - sports psychologists.

Because the sports schools haven’t psychologists, the modern trainers have to teach their athletes a wisdom of achieving their goals, as Adyghe atalyks. As Susanna Bagadirova notes, "the psychology of sport has a tradition to explore a goal as a tactical or strategic mechanism for the management of the athlete’s activity. Clearly defined goals mobilize actions of the athlete, support his sense of purpose and perseverance, define strategies for development of new special skills, affect the effectiveness through their impact on personal goals, determine a quantity and a quality of those physical and mental resources that are to be spent to achieve a goal, as well as to develop of activity-related personal qualities of the athlete" (9).

According to the results of the scientist's research, "the practice of purposeful training in goal-setting of athletes is absent at the stages of long-term formation, in most cases the goal-setting is carried out by trainers intuitively, that does not contribute to the organization of full-fledged training of athletes" (9). Meanwhile, the importance of goal-setting training in sport education is high. "Goal-setting is a mechanism of arbitrary regulation of sports activities. Mastering the goal-setting significantly expands the possibilities of the athlete in the planning, implementation and analysis of achieved results (goals). This becomes possible because the goal-setting consists structurally of: goal-formatting, involving the formulation of an image of goals, decision-making, as well as planning, involving the construction of a hierarchy and the definition of a time frame for implementation of goals; goal-keeping, ensuring the preservation of the aspiration to the goal(s) adopted by the subject; goal(s); goal-realization, involving the achievement of the goal by specific means, as well as an assessment of the achieved result and a comparison with the initially set goal" (9).

Choosing goals, the athlete determines for himself an hierarchy and an order of implementation of his activity goals; he correlates individual and group goals; assesses the degree of application of voluntary efforts to overcome the difficulties encountered in achieving the goal and he determines the external pressure on his goal setting; an impact and an interdependence of goals and motivation of sport activities. At the same time, we should not forget about the feedback which gives an idea of the need to adjust the set goals; determines a degree of the influence of knowledge about previous results of the athlete's activities on the setting of his goals (9).

For centuries, the Adygs had to resist external forces, protecting their lands, and for this they paid with their own lives. Teaching his pupil, atalyk sought to teach him everything that would allow him to become a worthy warrior and a successor of his father. In these circumstances, the national physical education, the Circassians have pursued military-applied purpose. The boy's training was built in such a way that in addition to physical development he had to master military tactics. In the fight, wrong move or mistake the purpose of defining the tactics of the fight could cost a student's life.
In modern sport, the end of a fight does not imply the life or death of an athlete as a result. Most often, the defeat in sports harms the psychological health of athletes, especially young ones. Therefore, one of the General lines of preparation of athletes for the competition should be the analysis of the main errors of athletes that arise in setting the goals of sports activities. Such errors often include "inability to set real (adequate) goals; lack of clarity (specificity) in the formulation of the goal; setting too many goals; the wrong arrangement of priorities in the process of goal setting; setting of conflicting goals; the lack of a clear time frame for the achievement of the objectives; lack of clear criteria for achieving goals; adjust goals if their achievement difficult; the loss of connection motivation and purpose" (9).

However, the athletes would have such errors less, if, as it is noted by the scientist-psychologist Susanna Bagadirova, their ability to goal-setting developed, taking into account the age characteristics of their formation. "At each stage of the development of the ability of goal-setting, a special role is played by an adult, as a partner of the child in joint activities; he provides all necessary conditions for the development of his potential. At preschool age, the child begins to differentiate main and auxiliary goals that arise in the course of the game (leading activity). He is actively developing the ability to keep the goal in mind, to determine intermediate stages of the goal achieving. Primary school age has great potential for development of the ability to goal-setting. New formations, which are the result of this development and are arising at the end of primary school age, are a conscious arbitrary regulation of activities and cognitive processes; an ability to act internally; a new level of reflection allowing realizing the course of activity. To adolescence, there are a number of prerequisites for development of independent goal-setting. During the development process, which is fully directed and oriented by the adult, it is transformed into self-development, regulated consciously on the basis of personal goals and plans. In the early youth, the leading activity is educational and professional activity that contributes to set the goals related to time perspective, choice of profession, as well as professional and personal self-determination. By the end of the considered period, young men should have developed capacity to goal-setting, assuming possession of certain skills: formulation of essential characteristics of the goal of forthcoming activity, analysis and generalization of the conditions for goal implementation, ratio (control) of implemented actions with the actions plan and requirements for it" (9).

Probably, the atalyk didn't correlate age psychological features of his pupil with opportunities of development of his abilities. However, each atalyk knew the idea of relying on achievements and opportunities of the age. In the course of training and education, he took into account the age needs of his noble disciple. According to the description of Karl Koch, when the boy was already able to pull a heavy bow or shoot a gun, he had to provide him a weapon. And in order to teach a teenager to ride skillfully, he had to provide him a horse. When his pupil became a young man and went with him on a campaign or a battle, atalyk had, first of all, to take care about his well-being, that meant to teach him military wisdom(5).

In modern sport, where competitions and games are similar to campaigns and battles, the trainers should remember about the well-being of athletes, their psycho-physical condition, their age needs and a direct participation in their moral education. The development of the athlete's capacity to plan, implement and analyze the achieved results, so to the goal-setting at different age stages of his sports activity largely increases the level of preparedness of the athlete and will allow the trainer to solve other complex problems of the athlete’s formation. In this situation, he can be assisted by a sport psychologist, although in the old days, the Adyghe experienced atalyk solved the difficulties on his own.

Bibliography:
1. Jacob Reineggs (real name Christian Rudolf Elich) (1781-1783). The universal historical and topographical description of the Caucasus (translated by V. Atalykova). The Caucasus: the European diaries of XIII-XVIII centuries. Nalchik. Publishing house of M. and V. Kotlyarov. 2010.
2. Julius Heinrich Klaproth. The Journey through the Caucasus and Georgia, made in 1807-1808 (the magazine "Bulletin of Europe", 1812). Circassians, Balkars and Karachays in descriptions of European authors of the XIII-XIX centuries, Nalchik, 1974
3. Edouard Taitbout de Marigny. Voyages in Circassia 1818, Fr;d;ric Dubois de Montp;reux. Voyage around the Caucasus. The Circassians and the Abkhazians, in Colchis, Georgia, Armenia and in Crimea, Volume I. Nalchik. 2002
4. Johann Blaramberg (1830). Historical, topographic, statistical and ethnographic description of the Caucasus. M. Ed. Nadyrshin. 2010
5. Karl Koch. The Journey across Russia and in the Caucasian lands 1836, 1837, 1838 (translated by A. I. Petrov) . Circassians, Balkars and Karachays in descriptions of European authors of the XIII-XIX centuries, Nalchik, 1974
6. James Bell. The Diary of voyage in Circassia during 1837, 1838, 1839. Vol. 1-2. London, 1840 — translated from the English by N. Dankevich-Pushinoy. Circassians, Balkars and Karachays in descriptions of European authors of the XIII-XIX centuries, Nalchik, 1974
7. J.A. Longworth, A Year among the Circassians, vol. 1-2. London, 1840-translated from the English by A.I. Petrov. Circassians, Balkars and Karachays in descriptions of European authors of the XIII-XIX centuries, Nalchik, 1974
8. Kirzhinov S. S. About some means of physical education of the Adyghes in the past/ "Culture and life of Adyghes", Maykop, 1989, P. 164-176
9. Bagadirova S. K. Formation and development of goal setting in the process of professionalization of the person (for example, sports activity): Monograph/ S. K. Bagadirova._ Maikop: Publishing house "Magarin O,G.", 2018.- 332 p.

Written by Fatima Teuchezh
The great thanks to Susanna Bagadirova for her help in writing of this material.