I have always viewed my Inuit research as a part of mainstream sociocultural anthropology. My entry to the field in the late 1950s placed me between the older theoretical approaches represented by my work with advisors Edmund Leach at Cambridge and Fred Eggan in Chicago and the array of newer possibilities taught by Jack Fried and Toshio Yatsushiro at McGill and, later, by David Schneider and Clifford Geertz in Chicago. This division between the old school and the new school in anthropology around 1958–1960 was reflected in my doctoral dissertation “Taqamiut Eskimo Kinship Terminology” (published in 1964) versus my earlier work Lake Harbour, Baffin Island: The Decline of an Eskimo Community (1963) based on 1960 research. The latter (successfully) urged the Canadian government to reverse the trend of outmigration and to rebuild the 93-person community back to over 400, as I found on my return in 2000.
After arriving in Salluit, the Inuit community in Nunavik on the Hudson Strait, for my first fieldwork in summer and fall 1959, I soon put away all my anthropology books and focused on the contemporary concerns of the Inuit: extended families (camps) organized around Peterhead boat ownership, problems of changing marriages patterns, and the new opportunities of commercial ethnic arts. In the years 1959 and 1960, I was lucky to work for the Canadian Northern Coordination and Research Centre, a government program to evaluate change in Inuit lifeways as Canada implemented new educational, health care, and housing policies in the 1950s and 1960s, employing more researchers per year than anywhere else in the world, including prominent female anthropologists June Helm and Jean Briggs, as well as John J. Honigmann, James Van Stone, and Diamond Jenness and neophytes Bill Willmott, Sally Wolfe, myself, and many others. This massive deployment of anthropological force ultimately stemmed from Canada’s crucial geopolitical position during the Cold War era, something I observed and researched in person over several years. The Inuit of Canada and Alaska had experienced its impact firsthand and are still living with it decades after the anticipated “War over the Arctic” never materialized.
More perhaps than my Eskimologist contemporaries at Chicago—David Damas, Ernest Burch, and Lee Guemple (all featured in this book)—I tried to bring my findings beyond the Eskimology realm, studying ethnic and tourist arts that opened the arts/identity/nationalism field, later enlarged by Arjun Appadurai, Ruth Phillips, Chris Steiner, Fred Myers, and the parallel field of tourism studies, established by Eskimologist Valene Smith in 1974. The fieldwork of the 1960s and 1970s was not preconstructed collaboratively but arose from my abandoning the themes of the classical anthropology texts or teachings of my professors and following local Inuit’s own concerns and interests.
Field research in the Arctic these days requires community permissions, individual consent, and institutional reviews, formalities that did not exist in my early years. But my later research foci—contemporary arts, schooling and identity, urban survival, and repatriation of artifacts, photos, and memories—were immediately received as collaborative and were enthusiastically aided and taken up by community members. Similarly, rather than imposing a set of research questions, my students at Berkeley have followed the concerns of the local Inuit constituencies and made them into their anthropological foci, such as health issues (John O’Neil), making saleable arts and crafts (Molly Lee), family socialization for education and employment (Pam Stern), and problems of youth and suicide (Lisa Stevenson).
While personally witnessing the scope and depth of change in Eskimo/Inuit studies over 50 years, I have tried to show on several occasions that for many of us the enlargement of the indigenous concerns into ethnographic themes and eventually theoretical constructs has both advanced the field and helped close the gap between the concerns of researchers and those of the contemporary Inuit. Having lived through the transition of the 1960s and the transformation of Eskimology into “Inuit studies” during the 1980s (as described in this book), I believe that the new research directions have enriched the anthropological mainstream, diverted it from dated historical questions, and brought the Inuit into contemporary anthropological research and scholarly meetings. Having known Igor Krupnik since I stayed with him in Moscow in 1989, I am not surprised at his expansive stewardship of this volume and at the observations of its many contributors. I look forward to applying what I learned from this book about the changing nature of our discipline to more serendipitous collaborations on my visit to Nunavik in spring 2015 and in the years ahead.
Nelson H. H. Graburn
Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
January 2014