Early Ethnography in the American Arctic

<p>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.</p>