Living in a world of becoming

Early scientists and ethnographers researching in circumpolar regions often described how the environment, the cold seas and the Arctic’s inclement weather dominated and influenced the everyday lives of the Inuit. “In considering the distribution of the tribes,” wrote Franz Boas in The Central Eskimo, “it is evident that they are settled wherever extensive floes afford a good sealing ground during the winter” (Boas 1888: 52). Nineteenth-century chroniclers of Arctic natural history and culture were also fascinated by the way the environment seemingly determined people’s physical characteristics as well as their actions, movements, social organization, cultural practices, and beliefs. Between 1877 and 1881 Edward Nelson carried out fieldwork in western Alaska and Siberia. In his account of his travels and field trips, published as The Eskimo about Bering Strait in 1900, Nelson marvelled at the “very finely proportioned and athletic” people he met slightly inland south of the Yukon River and around Kotzebue Sound. “This fine physical development is attributable to the fact that these people are so located that their hunting is largely in open tundra, or in the mountains, thus producing a more symmetric development than is possible among those whose lives are passed mainly in the kaiak” (Nelson 1900: 29). Indeed, Nelson commented that “Among the Coast Eskimo, as a rule, the legs are short and poorly developed, while the body is long, with disproportionately developed dorsal and lumbar muscles” (ibid.). Nelson’s impressions were very much in keeping with physical anthropological views of the time, but the image of Inuit living from meagre resources in an extreme environment, and the view of that environment determining their bodies, physical growth, lives and cultures persisted. In the 1920s, Danish ethnographer and geographer Kaj Birket-Smith wrote that “the life of the Greenlanders is a silent fight against cold, against starvation, indeed against space itself – the immense wastes of the Arctic” (Birket-Smith 1928: 2). In such accounts, nature is vast, empty and external and hostile to human life.

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