Hunters, predators and prey : Inuit perceptions of animals / Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered 'prey par excellence': the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as 'inua' (owner) and 'tarniq' (shade) over European concepts such as 'spirit 'and 'soul', the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Anthropologists Laugrand (Univ. Laval, Québec) and Oosten (emer., Leiden Univ., Netherlands) are seasoned students of the Canadian Arctic. They summarize in this book an amazing, wonderful world of knowledge: the central Canadian Inuit knowledge of animals and hunting. After a brief and very rich chapter on animals in Inuit thought, the authors move to detailed chapters on the principal animals in Inuit life: raven, wolf, dog, polar bear, caribou, seal, and whale. Laugrand and Oosten summarize knowledge from research over two centuries, from the surprisingly detailed and shrewd observations of travelers in the early 1800s to the classic ethnographies of Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen (a Native Greenlander himself and a traditional Indigenous ethnographer). Although the authors do not use the term, they are fully aware of, and writing within, the "ontological turn"-the recent rediscovery in anthropology of the importance of indigenous world views for understanding humanity and the great achievements of the human spirit. This is a beautiful and deeply humbling book whose detailed accounts show the depth, power, and wisdom of a worldview too often dismissed or forgotten. For all scholars of the Arctic and indigenous peoples and of major interest to thoughtful philosophers. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Eugene N. Anderson, University of California, Riverside