Disclaimer: I’m not an anthropologist myself and have only read the one book.
Disclaimer #2: Sorry for the horrible Photoshop; clothing on the right isn’t from the Inughuit but from the Baffin Island Inuit, though the one on the left is from the “North Greenlandic Inuit” which I presume to mean either the Inughuit or a very closely related group. Hairstyles are obviously completely unrelated. The background is actually Siorapaluk, where Malaurie spent most of his year among the Inughuit.
I’ve recently read *The Last Kings of Thule*, a 1955 book by French geographer, explorer and anthropologist Jean Malaurie. Malaurie – with very minimal support – spent a year living in Siorapaluk among the polar Inuit, or Inughuit, the northernmost Inuit group and one of the northernmost people on Earth.
Until contact was made by John Ross in 1818, the Inughuit had lived in total isolation: around the 17th century, temperatures cooled and they lost the ability to build kayaks, making contact with other Inuit groups impossible. As such, they seem to have been unaware of the existence of any other people. When Malaurie visited, there were a grand total of 302 Inughuit. Just 150 years before that, these few hundred people in their villages of dirt and peat would have believed themselves to be the only humans in the entire world. In turn, the extremely harsh conditions of their polar home led them to sometimes practice extremely harsh measures in order to ensure the survival of the group, including an in-depth knowledge of their own genealogy to prevent inbreeding, regular infanticide (especially in the case of orphans, where it used to be nearly systematic for toddlers), and, in the case of this meme, occasional senicide, or the killing of the elderly.
While the practice of “leaving the elders on the ice floes to die” as sometimes seen in popular culture is obviously a massive exaggeration, it was expected, in times of hardship, that the elderly would just let themselves fall of a sled during a hunt or while moving to another place. The practice was not limited to the Inughuit, with the last recorded senicide taking place in 1939. While the practice of straight-up *killing* elders had never been that frequent and had completely died off by the time Malaurie visited, he noted that the Inughuit did seem to show scorn towards the elderly.
3 Comments
Disclaimer: I’m not an anthropologist myself and have only read the one book.
Disclaimer #2: Sorry for the horrible Photoshop; clothing on the right isn’t from the Inughuit but from the Baffin Island Inuit, though the one on the left is from the “North Greenlandic Inuit” which I presume to mean either the Inughuit or a very closely related group. Hairstyles are obviously completely unrelated. The background is actually Siorapaluk, where Malaurie spent most of his year among the Inughuit.
I’ve recently read *The Last Kings of Thule*, a 1955 book by French geographer, explorer and anthropologist Jean Malaurie. Malaurie – with very minimal support – spent a year living in Siorapaluk among the polar Inuit, or Inughuit, the northernmost Inuit group and one of the northernmost people on Earth.
Until contact was made by John Ross in 1818, the Inughuit had lived in total isolation: around the 17th century, temperatures cooled and they lost the ability to build kayaks, making contact with other Inuit groups impossible. As such, they seem to have been unaware of the existence of any other people. When Malaurie visited, there were a grand total of 302 Inughuit. Just 150 years before that, these few hundred people in their villages of dirt and peat would have believed themselves to be the only humans in the entire world. In turn, the extremely harsh conditions of their polar home led them to sometimes practice extremely harsh measures in order to ensure the survival of the group, including an in-depth knowledge of their own genealogy to prevent inbreeding, regular infanticide (especially in the case of orphans, where it used to be nearly systematic for toddlers), and, in the case of this meme, occasional senicide, or the killing of the elderly.
While the practice of “leaving the elders on the ice floes to die” as sometimes seen in popular culture is obviously a massive exaggeration, it was expected, in times of hardship, that the elderly would just let themselves fall of a sled during a hunt or while moving to another place. The practice was not limited to the Inughuit, with the last recorded senicide taking place in 1939. While the practice of straight-up *killing* elders had never been that frequent and had completely died off by the time Malaurie visited, he noted that the Inughuit did seem to show scorn towards the elderly.
In May 1951, Malaurie and the Inughuit Kutikitsoq returned from their trip to the magnetic North pole, which they had been the first men to reach, and accidentally stumbled upon the (supposedly secret) construction of Thule/Pituffik air base on the lands of the Inughuit, which had been expropriated and moved to Qanaaq, a new village about a hundred kilometres north. Malaurie stood up against the construction of the base, and reoriented himself towards anthropology, being notably close to Claude Lévi-Strauss, with his book *The Last Kings of Thule* being the first one of the *Terre Humaine* series, the second of which would be Lévi-Strauss’s *Tristes Tropiques*. He spent the rest of his life fighting for the rights of Arctic peoples.
Jean Malaurie died earlier this year, on February 5, at the age of 101.
Excellent context. You’re making bold assumptions about the “popular understanding” of this subject tho lol. As in, there is none.
You guys really need to watch Shogun.
If you don’t you’re a Jesuit asshole. /s