Call Me Angakkuq: Captain George Comer and the Inuit of Qatiktalik
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through many years of dedicated fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic, Captain George Comer laid a solid foundation for the future of museum anthropology. With the support of Franz Boas, Captain Comer—a New England whaling master with little formal schooling—assembled an extensive collection of Inuit ethnographic and archaeological artifacts, photographs, sound recordings, and natural history specimens for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, as well as major museums in Berlin, Ottawa, and Philadelphia. This article examines a remarkable segment of that collection, the production of Inuit facial casts—portraits of over two hundred men, women, and children—created by Comer at Qatiktalik (Cape Fullerton), a whaling site on the west coast of Hudson Bay. In tandem with photographs taken by Comer, Geraldine Moodie, and others at the time, these facial casts comprise a vital chapter of Inuit social history, preserving the memory of individuals and families who lived, worked, and traded at Qatiktalik. Accompanied by detailed biographical documentation prepared by Captain Comer, this extraordinary collection acknowledges the significance of personhood, a key concept in modern anthropological theory, and provides meaningful insight into the early social, cultural, and political history of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".