Negotiating Personal Autonomy

<p><em>Negotiating Personal Autonomy</em> offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland.<br><br>Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication.<br><br>An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and the North Greenland social and cultural anthropology and human geography. Her conclusion that in East Greenland the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.</p><p></p>