Early Inuit Studies

Early Inuit Studies

Author: Igor Krupnik

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 1935623710

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This collection of 15 chronologically arranged papers is the first-ever definitive treatment of the intellectual history of Eskimology—known today as Inuit studies—the field of anthropology preoccupied with the origins, history, and culture of the Inuit people. The authors trace the growth and change in scholarship on the Inuit (Eskimo) people from the 1850s to the 1980s via profiles of scientists who made major contributions to the field and via intellectual transitions (themes) that furthered such developments. It presents an engaging story of advancement in social research, including anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and linguistics, in the polar regions. Essays written by American, Canadian, Danish, French, and Russian contributors provide for particular trajectories of research and academic tradition in the Arctic for over 130 years. Most of the essays originated as papers presented at the 18th Inuit Studies Conference hosted by the Smithsonian Institution in October 2012. Yet the book is an organized and integrated narrative; its binding theme is the diffusion of knowledge across disciplinary and national boundaries. A critical element to the story is the changing status of the Inuit people within each of the Arctic nations and the developments in national ideologies of governance, identity, and treatment of indigenous populations. This multifaceted work will resonate with a broad audience of social scientists, students of science history, humanities, and minority studies, and readers of all stripes interested in the Arctic and its peoples.


Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884

Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884

Author: Ludger Muller-Wille

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1487513291

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In the summer of 1883, Franz Boas, widely regarded as one of the fathers of Inuit anthropology, sailed from Germany to Baffin Island to spend a year among the Inuit of Cumberland Sound. This was his introduction to the Arctic and to anthropological fieldwork. This book presents, for the first time, his letters and journal entries from the year that he spent among the Inuit, providing not only an insightful background to his numerous scientific articles about Inuit culture, but a comprehensive and engaging narrative as well. Using a Scottish whaling station as his base, Boas travelled widely with the Inuit, learning their language, living in their tents and snow houses, sharing their food, and experiencing their joys and sorrows. At the same time he was taking detailed notes and surveying and mapping the landscape and coastline. Ludger Müller-Wille has transcribed his journals and his letters to his parents and fiancé and woven these texts into a sequential narrative. The result is a fascinating study of one of the earliest and most successful examples of participatory observation among the Inuit. Originally published in German in 1994, the text has been translated into English by William Barr, who has also published translations of other important works on the history of the Arctic. Illustrated with some of Boas's own photos and with maps of his field area, Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884 is a valuable addition to the historical and anthropological literature on southern Baffin Island.


Hunters, Predators and Prey

Hunters, Predators and Prey

Author: Frédéric Laugrand

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1782384065

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Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered ‘prey par excellence’: the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as ‘inua’ (owner) and ‘tarniq’ (shade) over European concepts such as ‘spirit ‘and ‘soul’, the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.


Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic

Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic

Author: Heather E. McGregor

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0774859490

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Since the mid-twentieth century, sustained contact between Inuit and newcomers has led to profound changes in education in the Eastern Arctic, including the experience of colonization and progress toward the re-establishment of traditional education in schools. Heather McGregor assesses developments in the history of education in four periods � the traditional, the colonial (1945-70), the territorial (1971-81), and the local (1982-99). She concludes that education is most successful when Inuit involvement and local control support a system reflecting Inuit culture and visions.


The Book of Unconformities

The Book of Unconformities

Author: Hugh Raffles

Publisher: Verse Chorus Press

Published: 2022-04-18

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1891241745

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From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.


Early Ethnography in the American Arctic

Early Ethnography in the American Arctic

Author: Kirsten Hastrup

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1000952908

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This book offers a portrait of early ethnographic work in the American Arctic, with a focus on understanding the mutual constitution of the Inuit and their early ethnographers. It draws mainly on a rich repository of written testimonies from the early twentieth century, the ‘great ethnographic period’ when new scholarly interest in the region took off. Supplementing the movements and observations of whalers, traders, and missionaries, the early chroniclers offered new knowledge of Inuit life. Although their descriptions of the Inuit bear the marks of their time, the texts have left a deep mark on later developments and contributed to a long-lasting view of human life in the Arctic. The chapters show the infiltration of lives and landscapes, of thoughts and materials, of Inuit and ethnographers. The book will be relevant to anthropologists as well as historians, geographers, and others with an interest the Arctic region and Indigenous studies.


Settlement, Subsistence, and Change Among the Labrador Inuit

Settlement, Subsistence, and Change Among the Labrador Inuit

Author: Andrea H. Procter

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0887554199

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"On January 22, 2005, Inuit from communities throughout northern and central Labrador gathered in a school gymnasium to witness the signing of the Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement and to celebrate the long-awaited creation of their own regional self-government of Nunatsiavut. This historic Agreement defined the Labrador Inuit settlement area, beneficiary enrollment criteria, and Inuit governance and ownership rights.


History and Renewal of Labrador's Inuit-Métis

History and Renewal of Labrador's Inuit-Métis

Author: John C. Kennedy

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 9781894725156

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History and Renewal of Labrador's Inuit-Métis is a collection of twelve essays presenting new research on the archaeology, history, and contemporary challenges and perspectives of Inuit-Métis of central and southeastern Labrador from Lake Melville south to Chateau Bay. It reports on results from "Understanding the Past to Build the Future," a Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in partnership with the southern Labrador communities represented by the NunatuKavut Community Council. Contributing authors include veteran Labrador Studies specialists as well as emerging scholars. Many of their findings challenge longstanding assumptions about Labrador's Aboriginal history.


Meta Incognita project

Meta Incognita project

Author: Stephen Alsford

Publisher: University of Ottawa Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1772824291

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The Meta Incognita Project investigates Martin Frobisher’s Arctic expeditions of 1576-1578 (which included the first English attempt to establish a colony in Canada and mine its mineral resources) and their effects on the culture of the Inuit he encountered. This report focuses mainly on the field investigations conducted in 1991 by a number of Canadian and American archaeologists, anthropologists and geologists and includes papers on their preliminary findings as well as on the historical context and the issues of the project.