Worldviews of the Greenlanders

An Inuit Arctic Perspective

Birgitte Sonne

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781602233386
• eBook ISBN: 9781602233393
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ninety years ago, Knud Rasmussen's popular account of his scientific expeditions through Greenland and North America introduced readers to the culture and history of arctic Natives. In the intervening century, a robust field of ethnographic research has grown around the Inuit and Yupiit of North America—but, until now, English-language readers have had little access to the broad corpus of work on Greenlandic natives.
Worldviews of the Greenlanders draws upon extensive Danish and Greenlandic research on Inuit arctic peoples—as well as Birgitte Sonne's own decades of scholarship and fieldwork—to present in rich detail the key symbols and traditional beliefs of Greenlandic Natives, as well as the changes brought about by contact with colonial traders and Christian missionaries. It includes critical updates to our knowledge of the Greenlanders' pre-colonial world and their ideas on space, time, and other worldly beings. This expansive work will be a touchstone of Arctic Native studies for academics who wish to expand their knowledge past the boundaries of North America.

CHAPTER ONE

Space and Time

Introduction

Corresponding to theory of practice, Inuit do not separate time and space in actual life; in indicating time they live up to Ricoeur’s thesis that time markers would not exist if there was no “right time” (or place) for an activity (cf. Munn 1992; Adams 1994). Similar to Western idioms such as “space of time” and “a long time,” the Inuit use the affix -wik/-vik/-fik to indicate time and place for both a usual human activity and a recurring event in nature (Fortescue et al. 1994: 398; 2010: 440).¹ Aspects of the polysemous sila, such as both the annual round silap ingerlasia and its use to refer to one’s close environment, similarly cover both time and space.² Indeed, Inuit and Yupiit have no words for abstractions of space and time (ibid.; see also Nagy 2006). The Greenlanders have piffissaq, the time for something going to be done, and pivik, for doing something. The spatial meanings of sila are the “out of doors”: the environmental field of vision of land, sea, and, in particular, the airy space between earth and the heavenly vault, qilak. The great sila, silarsuaq, is the world.

Space and time are combined in structuralist representations of worldviews such as Bourdieu’s of the Kabyle world.³ Like most perceptions of spatial world, the house or dwelling serves as the model while the annual round of nature and human activity structures the changes in time. The basic Kabyle opposition is man versus woman and the opposed key metaphors are wet versus dry (Bourdieu 1990a [1972; 1977]: 155–57).⁴ Saladin d’Anglure provided a similar detailed exposition of the Canadian Inuit worldview on three levels of “houses,” the biggest one being the outside world, the middle one the human house on earth, and at the lowest level the much smaller interior “house” of the fetus in its womb. The basic opposition is similarly that of genders united in building the skeleton and blood of the fetus by male semen and female blood, respectively, and its (mediating) flesh from the animals eaten by both parents. The key metaphors are light versus darkness and heat versus cold (1986: 39). The Greenlandic sources may permit substantiation of a replica, but this time-consuming job must be completed by people younger than me. My analysis, though not avoiding the numerous binary oppositions encountered, will be a structurally less ambitious one, context-dependent as my method primarily is. One central focus is on the analogies of bodily positions, movements, and the senses, which dominate relations between This World and the Other World(s). Meanings of standing erect, awake, conscious, and keeping one’s balance are my main concern, as are orientation and movement—in general the sign of life versus death. Among the senses, sight and vision stand out as decisive means for keeping up the relations between This and the Other World. Fienup-Riordan’s emphasis on the senses has been of inspiration (1990: 49–67; 1994: 356), but I do not treat taste, touch, speech, hearing, and thinking as thoroughly as sight, which is tantamount in the perception of “light,” the Inuit shaman’s metaphor for vision and a means of seeing the Other World.

Being in Sila

The polysemous sila—which means weather, reason, sight, and second sight beyond its primary meanings of space, air, and the visible world—is in my view best grasped by theories of the human body’s being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s Dasein and Ingold’s life-world): moving, lying down, and rising, with its senses and mind of perception. I prefer this approach to attempts at having all meanings of sila unite in a single philosophical synthesis. The ordered way of the world may cover such a synthesis, but it does not tell how this order works or might implode. The body-centered way of orientation appears reflected in binary ideas about the balance of the world, of light versus darkness, movement versus nonmovement, and in sayings about sila that are about body-sense perspectives of humans in contrast to that of nonhumans (and practicing shamans). Similarly, theories of praxis govern my focus on aspects of time. Sila includes the cosmography of the Other Worlds traveled by shamans, depicted in stories, and peopled with beings related to humans in binding ways.

The Other World, Asia or Silam Aappaa

The Other World was invisible, and its inhabitants spoke taartaq, the language of darkness, which named the space of This World naaq, stomach (O. Rosing 1957–61, I: 92). Admittedly, my concept of the “Other World” is in part a biased abstraction. According to the reactions of Teemiartissaq, a female East Greenlandic shaman apprentice cut off from her carrier, there is no one Other World. She told Thalbitzer that “Asia [‘the other side’] means all the other countries [lands] inhabited by beings touching us without being together with us . . . for instance another place to which one is bound out of interest or kinship or other” (Thalbitzer 1930: 84–85, tr. BS).^5,6 These bindings are precisely expressed in the West Greenlandic term silam aappaa, meaning the other sila of a couple.⁷ Silam aappaa is one reason for my use of the (Western) shorthand term the Other World. Another reason is the idea of a common language, taartaq (belonging in darkness) spoken by all residents in the Other World, be they the inuat, allanat (“aliens,” or allanertat), or deceased relatives, and no matter to which “country” of the Other World they belong. A third decisive reason is the idea of changing sight from This World to the Other World, which could be experienced unintentionally by laypeople and mastered by shamans. The shaman’s silaninneq, or coming to see (acquiring the knowledge of) the entire Other World, as called forth while alone in the wilderness was also staged and obtained in public during saqqummerneq, the shaman’s public initiation (see chapter 4). This mental process of silaninneq corresponded to the change in sight between This and the Other World, experienced by pupils and shamans on a smaller scale, no matter which part of the Other World they approached. So while the Other World was separated from This World by its language (taartaq) and its invisibility, mutual dependency reigned between the “couple” or pair of silas. Similarly, on the symbolic house level, its interior was related to the outside and vice versa by the common word taqqama, meaning the opposite “world” of either. The responsibility of keeping the relationship with the opposite world in balance rested with humans, who were to observe pre- and proscriptions placed at decisive points in time of the annual round and individual life cycle. Consequently, when I discuss ritual behavior in chapter 2 (under the heading “Times of Ritual”), my distinction between the two worlds cannot help becoming blurred. I discuss the particular “geography” and “times” and language of the Other World separately in chapter 3.

Biocultural Time

Experientially, theories of praxis about lived time appear evident. To quote Munn: “In practice. . .calendars or similar nature-bound ‘collective representations’ [cannot be distinguished] from the personal ‘time,’ the stream of consciousness (Bergson’s durée) in our minds. This does not mean that calendars do not exist, or that grammars including our own do not distinguish between past, present, and future. But cognitively we cannot put back the clock. No time is static. Present and future meddle with remembered past, and past and present into our (always) future-oriented ‘projects.’ This meddling provides our acts with their meaning” (Munn 1992). Along the same line of thought, Adams contrasts our Western dominant clock time, the “machine time” objectified into a commodity, with four common aspects of time that are still in use, albeit “invisibly” and that refer to biocultural rhythms of nature and society. “Temporality” is the course of our irreversible life. “When time”—which refers to concepts such as “bedtime,” “springtime,” “childhood,” and “opening hours”—can be fixed by clock and calendar but usually refers to the rhythms of nature, or social norms, or political decisions. “Timing” appears analogous to kairos, or Ricoeur’s “right time.” Finally, “tempo” is the subjective feeling of time that runs, flies, or drags on (Adams 1994). These ways of experiencing time are probably as universal as the mingling of circular and linear time, annual rounds, and the irreversible time of events. Ritual celebrates the first, biographies the latter, though rarely in a linear order until put into writing.

Visibility governs ideas about the dependency between space and spatial time in This and the Other World of the Greenlanders. Space visible to humans out of doors is sila, or the environment. Arching over sila is qilak, the sky arch, which is traveled by the sun during the day and at night by the other heavenly bodies who look into naaq (“stomach” in ordinary speech and “night” in the spirit language). Fading and growing visibility similarly mark the liminal naar-times, dawn and dusk. Both are announced audibly by the raven’s cry, and they mark the when-times of both shamans and nonhumans for crossing the border between the two worlds (O. Rosing 1957–61, I: 92; Victor & Robert-Lamblin 1989–93, II: 241, 249; for details, see chapter 3). Places and devices for passing or open up spatial boundaries are numerous. They will be described all along and summed up in chapter 6, “Conclusion.”

Orientation

The Way of the World in Time and Space

Silap malillugu, “following the way of the world” (i.e., the ritual circling following the direction of the sun), was a pan-Inuit/Yupiit term (R. Petersen 1966/67: 262; Saladin d’Anglure 1986; 1990a; Fienup-Riordan 1994: Chap. 12) for a panglobal ritual. Alternately, the West Greenlandic silap ingerlasia means the annual round of changing seasons, of weather, light, and life cycles of nature’s beings (e.g., Sonne 2005: ID 769). To respect, understand, and follow this cosmic order in whatever situation of life was to use one’s sila in the meanings of being sensible and clever, as underlined by Saladin d’Anglure (1991: 28). It took a lifetime of experience to understand the way(s) of sila, especially to learn the signs of changing weather, personified by Canadian Inuit as a giant baby, raging at times silaittuq (without sila)—like any baby beyond pedagogical reach (A similar figure, the baby-husband of the East Greenlandic inua of precipitation, Asiaq, received more restricted connotations, see p. 134.) The annual round of sila, ukioq, a year, also meant “winter” in the same way that Danes and other Europeans used to count years in summers. I shall refrain from further comparisons in symbolic meanings of Inuit winter versus European summer and merely point to the Inuit genderizing of the two half-years, assigning men the upper hand. Winter, in taartaq (the language of the spirits of the Other World), is “the time of men,” angutaaneq/angitaaneq, in contrast to summer, “the time of women,” arnaavoq (O. Rosing 1957–61, I: 87; Victor & Robert-Lamblin 1989–93, II: 255; Saladin d’Anglure 1997: 46). The subject of summer, arnaavoq, however, is also male: “the time when the men [males] have to do with the women [females], or are much occupied with them” (Thalbitzer 1923: 488).

The seasons were four like ours, ukioq (winter), upernaaq (spring), aasaq (summer), and ukiaq (autumn) (West Greenlandic), if slightly differently named among the Inuit groups. For more precise reckonings, affixes like -ssaq, or “approaching,” are used. In this context -ssaq literally means that one season is considered the material for the next, as in the statement Ukiassariartorami ukialerpoq: “Having used (-riartorami) the material for autumn, ukia-ssaq (approaching autumn = late summer), ukiaq (autumn) -lerpoq (began).” In short, “late summer is the material for autumn” (Sandgreen 1967, II: 26). The appearance of the twin stars Aassuutit (Altair + Tarazed in the constellation Aquila) marked New Year among all Inuit and Yupiit (Holm 1972: 137; 1914: 105; MacDonald 1998: 44).⁸ At the turning of the sun in December, Greenlanders can actually feel the earth tremble, the stronger the farther north (Juuaka Lyberth pers. comm.). In Ammassalik the two stars were said to save the sun from drowning at winter solstice (O. Rosing 1989), and in the view of the Yupiit of Southwest Alaska they lifted up the sun continuously from December to March (Fienup-Riordan & Rearden 2013: 66). About the same time, in April, when the rising sun took over their point of rising on the horizon, they marked spring in Ammassalik (Holm 1972: 137; 1914: 105). The altitude of the sun marked equinox as did forceful high tides in spring and autumn; the farther south in Greenland, the higher the flood (see below).

April usually meant moving out of the houses and camping at places for fishing, sealing, and caribou hunting as well as occasional travels to places of assembly and trade. At freeze-up in September, houses were repaired or fresh ones built for wintering; these were mostly longhouses in the period of our concern.⁹ Regarding the Greenlandic names of moons, little is known compared to the recurrent Inuit and Yupiit ones that refer to events in nature (e.g., MacDonald 1998: 192–98; Lantis 1946: 171; Fienup-Riordan & Rearden 2013: 73f). “They have no calendar,” Hans Egede reports, “nor do they compute or measure the time by weeks or years, but only by months; beginning their computation from the Sun’s first rising above their horizon in the winter; from whence they tell [count] the month [months], to know exactly the season, in which every sort of fishes, sea animals, or birds seek the land, according to which they order their business” (1818: 212).¹⁰ Holm was informed by the Ammassalimmiut that they counted the new moons, twelve or thirteen, as they came (Holm 1972: 137; 1914: 105), while the more detailed information collected by Dalager in South-Southwest Greenland reveals a mix of counting and seasonal events. The first three or four moons were counted until the move from house to tents, followed by the moon of the ravens laying their eggs and the arrival of the snow buntings. The fifth moon was the time of seals and capelin, followed by the time of sealing, the eider ducks hatching their young, and the calving of caribou. At that point in summer the moon became invisible, and time was reckoned in relation to the growth of the young eider ducks and the ripening of the crowberries. Time for wintering (September) approached when the velvet was shredded from the caribou antlers, the terns left, and the seals had grown fat.¹¹ At that point nobody cared for dividing up moons until New Year, “because nothing else was hunted but seals” (Dalager 1915: 54–55). In short, in this part of the Inuit/Yupiit world events in the annual round of hunting and movements served as the points of reference; however, because more than one activity was mentioned for some moons, it remains uncertain whether these events actually named the moons. Colonization soon introduced the European calendar, as well as the week (sapaatip akunnerana, the in-between Sabbaths), which was indispensable for keeping track of the “forbidding” Sundays.

In their reckoning of linear time, the Greenlanders made no use of their numbers, which referred to fingers and toes, twenty being inuk naallugu, “a complete human being.”¹² Days were broken into morning, midday, afternoon, evening, twilight, and dawn, and the years (ukiut, “winters”), as in most oral cultures, were accurately remembered by their main events in nature and/or family life. The age of humans was divided into childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age, as well as relationally, by kinship terms.¹³ For obvious reasons the ages of important game animals were quite precisely differentiated by appellations meaning “one year old,” “two years old,” and “adult.”

For relating mutual points in time, Greenlandic is quite rich in possibilities: apart from the verbal inflected when-suffixes (past and future), the affixes -reer, -sima, -qqu, and -li refer to the past; -ssa, -ngor, or -gu/-ru to the future; and the directing -mut to both time and space (Trondhjem 2009). Particulars such as ippassaaq and ippaasaani, for instance, mean yesterday and the day before yesterday; siorna and siornaaq mean last year and the year before last; siornal-li, several years ago; itsaq or qannga, a long time ago; and itsar-suaq, qaanga-li, a very long time ago. Insofar as the examples of the modern dictionary show, the future appears less rich in particulars: tomorrow is aqagu, day after tomorrow is aqaguagu, whereas aappaagu or ukioq ataaseq kangiuppat (when one year has passed) both mean next year. In fact, research regarding premodern dating is scarce,¹⁴ but judging from the up-to-date dictionary, no Danish loan words except the names of months and the unending series of numbers have been necessary for constructing all sorts of dating (Berthelsen et al.; Jones & Petersen). But you may notice that a Greenlander less fluent in Danish grammar will use the present in telling about past events, owing to their Greenla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Space and Time
• 2. Seasonal Rituals and Rituals of Crisis
• 3. The Other World(s) and Its Beings
• 4. Angakkut (Shamans)
• 5. Angakkoq Puulik (Shaman with a Bag)
• 6. Conclusion
• Coda
• Reference List
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author