Wandering Spirits: Loneliness and Longing in Greenland 9780226610733

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Wandering Spirits

Wandering Spirits Loneliness and Longing in Greenland ja n n e f l o r a

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­61042-­9 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­61056-­6 (paper) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­61073-­3 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226610733.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Flora, Janne, author. Title: Wandering spirits : loneliness and longing in Greenland / Janne Flora. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018031841 | isbn 9780226610429 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226610566 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226610733 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Inuit—Greenland—Social conditions. | Loneliness—Greenland. | Loneliness—Social aspects—Greenland. | Social isolation—Greenland. | Suicide— Greenland. | Interpersonal relations—Greenland. | Kinship—Greenland— Psychological aspects. | Inuit—Kinship—Greenland—Psychological aspects. Classification: lcc e99 .e7 f565 2019 | ddc 998 /.20049712—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031841 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments  vii

1  The Return  1 2 Loneliness 30 3  Persons Apart  48 4  Nobody Wants to Be a Qivittoq  69 5  Be-­Longing  82 6  Who(se) Are You?  105 7  Asking Why  122 8  You Are Given Your Name So You Won’t Be Lonely  140 Appendix 1: Kinship Terminology  163 Appendix 2: Glossary of Other Greenlandic Language Terms  165 Notes  169 References  175 Index  183

Preface and Acknowledgments

There is a long tradition in the Arctic literature of portraying the circumpolar region as remote and isolated from the rest of the world. This is part of a common romantic depiction of the Arctic as a region of majestic, pristine icescapes, harsh climates, and some of the most admired (and controversial) wildlife in the world: polar bears, walruses, seals, whales. Interspersed with all this, we like to imagine, live peaceful fur-­clad communities in isolation from one another and yet each in perfect harmony with the others and the world around them. Although all this imagery may ring true in some isolated contexts, it is also the case that this depiction probably serves the people who write about the Arctic more than it does reality. Nearly a fifth of the way through the twenty-­first century, it is plain to see that the Arctic is not a region that is isolated from the rest of the world, neither in terms of climate and ecology nor in terms of humans and culture. For centuries the Arctic has been part of global politics and key to the making and perception of European and North American nation-­states. Of the many explorers and seafarers who have traveled to the Arctic, some made it their final destination. Others returned to the South, where they showed maps of the land and the sea routes they had conquered and told heroic tales of their battle against the most unforgiving nature in the world. The people who live in the Arctic have also migrated long and short distances to, from, and within the entire region for millennia, bringing their own cultural, material, and genetic histories with them. In this way they have made the Arctic their home. The climate in the Arctic tells a story too of human activity across the world: ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet that reveal a sudden rise in carbon emissions from the industrialized world around the time of the European industrial revolution and even contain a record of the historical volcanic eruption at Pompeii. Similarly, the

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levels of mercury pollution (also from the industrialized world) in marine mammals throughout the region have biologists and medical scientists concerned and questioning the extent to which local food resources are safe for human consumption. We should also note that the Arctic is a region rich in contrast; in terms of climate, wildlife, and human history there are vast differences throughout the Arctic and even within just a couple of hundred kilometers. Colonialism has made its own imprint on recent history as well, so that differences (and similarities) that may exist in terms of languages and ethnicities are complicated further by colonial histories. As an anthropologist, I have been conditioned to see the Arctic as a place that is characterized by human activity rather than as one whole untouched and pristine realm. Even though the romantic gaze of the Southerner is indeed a powerful one, and also is sometimes preferable to less flattering depictions of the Arctic (of which there are several), it is also a dangerous one that freeze-­frames the region and the people who live there. After having lived for a time in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, as a teenager in the early 1990s, I returned to Greenland in 2003—­this time to the Qeqertarsuup Tunua (Disko Bay) area. This is a region of Greenland with a long human history and some of the oldest known archaeological remains in the country, dating back to 2400 BC. The bay is host to numerous glaciers whose convergence with seawater has created unique ecosystems that have attracted animal and human life for millennia. The largest town in the region, Ilulissat, takes its name from the colossal icebergs that float through the bay. The entire bay, which stretches longer than some two hundred kilometers from its southern to its northernmost point, is home to ten permanently inhabited towns and villages. Prior to the 1950s and 1960s, which in historical terms were characterized by colonial modernization and centralization policies, the number of human settlements was much higher. The people who live here, Kalaallit (Greenlanders) are perhaps better known by the name Inuit (or, in colonial times, Eskimo). They are descendants of the Thule-­Culture Inuit who arrived in Greenland around AD 1000 from what today is known as Nunavut in Arctic Canada. They were seminomadic hunters who quickly settled the coastal areas throughout Greenland, including the Disko Bay. Around the same time, the Norse arrived from Iceland and settled in the southern parts of west Greenland and lived there until they met their fateful conclusion during the Little Ice Age. People in Qeqertarsuup Tunua today live by the mixed economies of subsistence hunting, halibut fisheries, wage labor, tourism, and professional employment in the private and public sectors. I first arrived in the region to a small village that I have given the pseudonym Illorsuit, intending to carry out ethnographic fieldwork studying the problem of suicide. Along with its

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Arctic neighbors in Nunavut and Nunavik, Greenland has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. My concern was not to explore the whys and wherefores of this problem, which is clearly not only a statistical problem but also one that affects real people and real lives. Rather, I wanted to try to understand what kind of death suicide is in a world where people seem to have firm beliefs in reincarnation and where the demarcation between life and death therefore might not be as neatly drawn as we would expect. My approach was to not discount anything I found as trivial or unimportant. I wanted to explore the problem of suicide (not the act of suicide itself) by looking at everything else around it. While there, I had an internet messenger chat with one of my colleagues (telephones and dial-­up internet connectivity had been installed in most west Greenlandic households at that point). Relaying to her where I had been that day—­on the sea ice with a family setting nets under the ice to catch seals—­she replied by typing in a series of question marks on my messenger screen. The question marks were quickly followed by the question. “Do you study hunting now?” she teased. The misunderstand­ ing was a contextual one. From her disciplinary perspective, we should narrow our focus of study; from mine, we should broaden it. My argument was, as it is now, that even though hunting and suicide might not necessarily be related in any way, hunting is nevertheless part of the world in which the suicide occurs—­just as suicide is part of the world in which hunting occurs. My research evolved into a focus on kinship and loneliness. Both were themes that seemed to come up all the time, and I took both to be extraordinarily important concepts in Greenland and beyond. Of those two, however, only one (kinship) has really grabbed the attention and imagination of anthropologists. Bar a few exceptions, the other (loneliness) has traditionally belonged to the philosophical realm. Part of my mission here is to avoid thinking of these concepts as polar opposites. I prefer to see them as part of the same process; not as two sides of the same coin but components of the same frame. Suicide has a place in this. The name of the village as well as those of the people who appear in these pages have all been disguised. My decision to do so was not a straightforward one. Some of my colleagues would argue that anonymization is pointless because the people whom the book is about will recognize themselves and one another anyway. Others would argue, especially for the Arctic, where the sting of colonization lingers, that the decision to make people nameless and faceless is offensive and yet another act of colonialism. By the same token, the opposite could also be argued: that putting people on display by revealing their identities is equally an act of colonialism that conjures up images from the decades where Inuit were kidnapped, held captive, and paraded in European

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and American zoos and so-­called freak shows for entertainment. Recognizing that there cannot be just one universal approach to whether or how anthropologists should anonymize the communities they work in, I agree with all these points. We must make a decision informed by the context and time in which we write, carefully taking into consideration what we hope to achieve or avoid by doing one or the other. Today, anonymity has become a matter of privacy more so than it ever was before. Social media have become commonplace. Individuals and their communities have become identifiable by a few tabs and clicks whether they want to be or not. Since the end of the first decade of the twenty-­first century, Greenland has been one of the hot spots for climate change science and tourism, which has produced photographic coffee-­table books and television documentaries offering snapshots of the change, the end, the last hunters, and the outermost vanishing world. This exposure comes at a cost, however, and many people whom I know regularly express apprehension at being put on display, being portrayed out of context, and, worse still, realizing that neither we nor they have any control over how their identities circulate in forums other than the one for which they were originally intended. For me, anonymization comes down to the subject matter of this book and the fact that the predominant Danish discourses about Greenland and Greenlanders since the mid-­twentieth century have focused on social problems. These are discourses that most, if not all, the Greenlanders whom I know feel only applies to them in terms of the prejudices they encounter be­ cause they happen to be Greenlandic. In other parts of the world, people would call this racism. Although I want to avoid telling this same old story, I cannot escape the fact that the subject matter of this book is of a sensitive nature. My concern is to remain true to the subject matter, because I think it is an important one, while also remaining true to the people in Greenland, whom I consider my friends and family. Another reason I have decided to anonymize the names of people and places is the unfortunate tendency there has been in anthropological writings to isolate the people we write about from the rest of the world—­even the rest of the country. Though geographical and socioeconomic distances are great in Greenland, and each place has something that makes it special and distinct from all other places in Greenland, we should be cautious not to depict these places as remote or the people who live in them as isolated tribes with a “The” prefix. People in Greenland travel all the time. Many settle in new places and make these places their home. Some may return, others may not. My decision not to call the village by its real name is thus an attempt to free up and make the ethnography, which is clearly located in space and time, reach beyond the finite boundaries of one locality and the people who happen to live in it, since neither are actually finite at all.

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From its conception to its current form, this book has been several years under way. The journey both I and the book have been on would not be possible without the help and support of many people. First, I want to express my gratitude to a host of people in Greenland, especially Sofie Schultz Christiansen, Ingrid and Jakob Lindenhann, Susanne and Julius Sandgreen, Thora and Sakarias, Regine and the late Mikkili Tobiassen and their respective families for looking after me, housing me, feeding me, encouraging me, and making so many impossible requests possible. I am grateful to them and to the people in the village I refer to as Illorsuit for their patience, unconditional hospitality, their affinity, and everything they have taught me. Ilaqutarakka kamalaatikkalu asavassi, qujanarujuk! Words of encouragement, generosity, inspiration, literature suggestions, helpful discussions, astute comments and critiques of early drafts are countless, and I am thankful for them all. At Cambridge, in Denmark, and beyond I want to thank my colleagues, friends, advisors and examiners: Piers Vitebsky, Barbara Bodenhorn, Hugh Brody, Michael Bravo, Kirsten Hastrup, Signe Gundersen, Catherine Baxter Buckwell, Lydia Wilson, Signe Nipper Nielsen, Iris Monterro, Natalie Kaoukji, Farès Moussa, Katie Earnshaw, Julie Coimbra, Olga Ulturgasheva, Luis Guilherme Resende de Assis, Elana Wilson, Elena K. Rockhill, Larry K. Rockhill, Peter Evans, Hugo Reinert, Martina Tyrrell, Jackie Price, Astrid O. Andersen, Marcelle Chabot, Remy Rouillard, Ruth Horry, Tania Kossberg, Eleanor Peers, Fiona Scorgie, Laur Vallikivi, Rane Willerslev, Sophie Elixhauser, Giovanni Da Col, Vera Skvirskaya, Isabella Warren, Matthew Carey, Niamh O’Mahony, two anonymous readers, the Magic Circle Seminar at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, and the late Jamie Starr, whose notes and words inspire so much. Neither this book nor the decade of research and fieldwork it is based on would be possible without the generous financial support from the Danish Research Agency / Forskningsuddannelsesrådet; the Carlsberg Foundation; the Wenner-­Gren Foundation; and the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. Sections of the chapter “Asking Why” were previously published in “ ‘I Don’t Know Why He Did It. It Happened by Itself ’: Causality and Suicide in Northwest Greenland,” in The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnog­ raphic Approach, edited by C. High, A. Kelly, and J. Mair (New York: Palgrave, 2011). I am grateful to Palgrave for allowing me to reproduce those parts here. Finally, I want to thank my family in Denmark, in Greenland, and in Satu Nou . . . for everything. I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Ester Flora.

1

The Return

I signaled to her that I had finished my coffee and that I intended to leave by stacking my cup and saucer on the side plate. Still she didn’t move. Sitting ac­ross from me at their dining room table, she—­her name was Sikkersoq—­ pushed the plate of buttered raisin buns toward me. Her eyes offered me one of them to eat. We were alone. Conversation was slow and inhibited by the fact that we were strangers and that we spoke different languages. She spoke Greenlandic and I spoke Danish. Granted, I had planned that learning Greenlandic would be part of my fieldwork, and since her position as a nurse in the village necessitated that she speak to Danish doctors at the municipality hospital some one hundred kilometers away—­something she found quite difficult—­one of her intentions for our meeting was for me to help her learn Danish. At some point during the afternoon we would agree that I teach her Danish and that she in return would teach me Greenlandic. We were a generation apart. I was in my late twenties, whereas she was fifty years old, born in the same year as my father, married, and a mother to five children. In the 1980s her firstborn had died of pneumonia at only six months old, and an enlarged golden-­framed photograph of the baby had pride of place on the wall above the sofa. Sikkersoq had telephoned me earlier in the day to invite me to this kaffemik (celebration with coffee and cake) for her daughter’s birthday. Her daughter and I had not met before. Nor did I know her oldest child, a son, nor any of her three daughters. I had met her husband several times, however. His name was Aqqalu. He was always smiling, and I usually saw him helping a frail old man named Inuk around the village. Aqqalu had spotted me earlier that day as I struggled with a heavy gas cylinder I had bought in the shop. He had offered to help carry it up the steep flight of stairs along the cliff wall and

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to install it to my cooker. My television set filled the silence that otherwise penetrated my old house. It transmitted the memorial service of the assassinated Swedish politician Anna Lindh in September 2003. There were hymns, tributes, mourners, politicians, world leaders, public displays of horror, sadness, and disbelief. Aqqalu looked at the television screen. He sighed while moving his hands toward his chest and made a gesture that I took to mean something like a “heavy heart.” Her death saddened him. Lindh’s parents’ grief and her family’s grief saddened him. This much I understood. Later that afternoon, as I looked at the framed photograph of Aqqalu’s own firstborn child that hung above the sofa in his living room, I was to learn that his feelings of sadness and compassion for Lindh’s parents came from somewhere very real. He too had lost a daughter. I hadn’t really understood why his wife had invited me, a perfect stranger, to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. Nevertheless, I found the house. As described on the telephone, it was a dark green house adjacent to the shore, with the Greenland flag raised on a short pole tied to the gable. I noticed that flags had been raised by other houses too; some Danish, others Greenlandic. Steering clear of the white sled dog1 and her inquisitive puppies examining the hem of my flared jeans, I tried to open the makeshift gate—­a bespoke plywood board—­that kept the sled dogs out of the porch area. I stepped over it and unknowingly broke all social conventions by knocking on the front door. I knocked again and yet again, until Sikkersoq finally opened it, smiling while drying her wet hands on a towel. She brought me in through the kitchen, where meatballs were sizzling—­presumably a birthday dinner for the family—­and into the living room, where the coffee table and dining table were both laden with cakes. My heart sank; I was the only guest. Having lived in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, as a teenager, I had been to kaffemik before and therefore anticipated a house full of guests. When Sikkersoq invited me, I immediately realized that this would be my first opportunity to introduce myself to other people in the village in a relaxed setting and, I hoped, lay the foundations for making acquaintances and friendships. We sat there drinking coffee. The meatballs in the frying pan in the kitchen were no longer sizzling; she had turned off the stove. I gazed out through the window to my left and out across the water. An open boat lay moored to some rocks. A heavy fog rolled across the water from the shore on the other side, making the water appear heavy, dark, thick, and shiny, almost like oil. We didn’t know what to say to each other. At that point it seemed unlikely that these would be the moments—­these quiet, awkward silences—­that would cement what was to become a close kin relationship. In time, she would want me to call her “mother.” Instead, I would call her “aunt” (aja), because another

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woman called Karla had beaten her to that kinship position. It was only much later that I realized that I could have had several mothers without offending anyone. It would have been just as natural and logical as it was for Sikkersoq to have several daughters. I didn’t imagine then that one day we would sit on the sofa just behind us, underneath the framed photograph of her oldest deceased daughter. Nor did I imagine that, one day, we would hold hands and gossip, just as she would with her own daughters and nieces, one of whom was the namesake of her deceased daughter. Outside the window the white sled dog howled. It must have heard Aqqalu rustling by the side of the house since, at that moment, he appeared holding a heavy sack of halibut heads over his shoulder. It was feeding time. The food consisted of offcuts from the fish factory, which hunters could purchase cheaply when the hunting wasn’t good, or if they hadn’t had the opportunity to go out. At this time of year, when the dogs weren’t working, they didn’t eat as much as during winter. Besides, as far as I had understood in Aqqalu’s case, it was the outboard motor that was the problem. It needed a spare part, and those were not easy to acquire. He threw a few offcuts to the dogs and stored the rest in the shed for later. These would be kept—­Sikkersoq told me—­for the rest of their dogs, which they kept on a small island during summer, where they could roam free. She wanted to know if I could help her with her Danish, and, in return, she would teach me Greenlandic. She also wanted to know if I would join the church choir. Singing, she assured me, was a good way to learn Greenlandic. I reassured her that I would go, but at this point I was much more interested in knowing where her daughter was. Where was the birthday girl? And where were all Sikkersoq’s other children? I had estimated that there were three, maybe four children in total, from the framed photographs on the living room walls. None of them was present. Naja, whose sixteenth birthday it was that day, as well as her younger sister, both lived in dormitories in the city some one hundred kilometers away and three or four hours by boat, depending on ice and weather conditions. Like all the other teenagers from the village, they went to school in the city because the local school could only take them until they reached the age of fourteen, at approximately seventh or eighth grade.2 Petrine, the oldest sister, who was eighteen, was visiting her boyfriend in another town farther north, and their son was away working on a fishing trawler. It was a birthday celebration for a daughter who wasn’t there. In fact, none of her children was there. It was hosted by a mother who was, for that day and for the time being, at least, partially without children. As I made my way back up the hill a couple of hours later, I puzzled over the fact that I had been invited to a birthday party for someone’s daughter

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who wasn’t even there. What eventually made me leave was the fact that so many people had suddenly arrived and I was occupying a seat that rightfully belonged to one of the guests who were now all standing between the kitchen and the living room waiting for a seat to become available. I had been there the longest; it was time to go. Sikkersoq, my host, was now busy in the kitchen and she no longer had time to entertain an awkward visitor who demanded more of  her attention than anyone else. She was making more coffee and had started up the frying pan again so that the smell of cooking was beginning to pervade the atmosphere. Two little boys, maybe four or five years old, were under the coffee table playing with plastic toys imported from the South. These were the sons of one of Aqqalu and Sikkersoq’s nieces—­a woman I had also greeted quietly once or twice when our paths had crossed. She was now shaking hands with everyone, including Aqqalu, Sikkersoq, an elderly couple, her own younger sister who carried the name of the infant in the photograph above the sofa, and even with her own parents. She congratulated them all: “Pilluaritsi!” which prompted each of them to respond in turn, “Qujan, illillu” (Thanks, you too). Apparently, Sikkersoq was not the only one who took the birthday seriously; her extended family did too. They all celebrated Naja’s birthday as if she were there herself. Or perhaps it was because she wasn’t there? Returning through Loneliness This book is about how the inhabitants of a small Greenlandic village—­which I have given the pseudonym Illorsuit3—­live and reinvoke human relatedness. They do so by bringing into play notions and experiences of loneliness and longing. Loneliness is not, this book contends, merely an obstruction to kinship or human relatedness. Nor is it located outside the human experience of sociality, which is where anthropology generally tends to locate it, place it, or leave it be. Loneliness is equally a state of being, a social process, and a human potential, and it is a key part of what makes human relations in Illorsuit relevant and affective. Human relations, like humans themselves always possess the potential to fail, disappoint, or cease to exist. If relations do fail, we may regard loneliness as an outcome of relatedness. Although not produced by relatedness, loneliness certainly results if relatedness fails. Yet loneliness and associated concepts, such as longing and homesickness, may equally be a prerequisite for relatedness to occur. This will be especially evident if we dwell a little longer on the Greenlandic concept of return (uterpoq), which is one I see as an overall guiding principle for understanding relatedness in Illorsuit and in Greenland in general.

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It almost goes without saying that any kind of return necessitates a period of some degree of absence and separation: one cannot return unless one goes away. This book contends that it follows that there is no point in returning unless you are longed for, or you yourself long to return. Some people, like Sikkersoq’s daughter, may be absent for some time, while they are at school in the city, and therefore are without closest family on their birthday. Or a husband might be gone hunting or fishing for some time, until homesickness sets in, or the weather closes in. Other people go away for treatment in hospitals in the South or they go away in death, in disputes, in embarrassment or in anger. In each of these scenarios, people return (uterpoq). Students will return for extended weekends and holidays, or suddenly if their homesickness becomes overwhelming. The hunter will return home with his catch, and with stories. And the dead, if all goes well, will return when their name is bestowed on one or more infants. Animals return too. They give themselves to the hunter, whose role is not to kill but rather to facilitate the animal’s return. In some parts of the Arctic, this means that the seal will be welcomed and shown hospitality by being offered a drink of freshwater. In other areas it may mean that one or more of its ribs, which contain the soul, is cast back into the sea, where it will grow a new body. In some places or circumstances or times, it is not the rib of the seal that is significant but the bladder of a walrus. Or it may be the head of a beluga whale that is placed back into the sea, where it will grow a new body. The variations in belief throughout the Arctic are enormous, not just in terms of the specificities of event but also in terms of their prevalence, meaning, and relevance. Proper treatment of a catch, which will facilitate its return as a living being, also ensures that it will return to the hunter. Among people in Illorsuit, the return of a large sea mammal such as a beluga is facilitated by being welcomed with loud cheers or applause when the animal is hauled onshore. The whole community will gather to welcome the animal and to show their happiness and appreciation, not just to the hunter for their share of the catch but also to the animal who has offered itself up to the hunter. Some people direct expressions of gratitude and appreciation at the hunter, others at the whale. And some people, in a display of happiness and sharing, throw showers of loose change in the air for the crowd to scramble and collect. A good hunter is not just a hunter who knows his way around the land or sea. Nor is he (or she, as is sometimes the case) merely someone who can track an animal for hours, without losing sight of it. Neither is he merely a strong character possessing a finely tuned balance of self-­confidence, caution, and stamina. Nor is he just a good shot. A good hunter is all of these things. The adjective pikkorik (clever, skillful, proficient, and competent), however, when

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applied to a hunter, also means someone who is not stingy or greedy toward his community and extended family. A good hunter shares his catch and does not keep everything to himself and his household. An animal, be it a seal or a fish, a caribou or a whale, will not offer itself to someone who doesn’t share. Therefore, the ability to be a good hunter is also about sharing; in principle, at least, this ensures that the hunter continues to be a vehicle through which animals can return. Human names (aqqit, plural of ateq) carry with them the identity and personhood of the people who carried the names before them. According to folklore, names leave the body (timi) upon death and travel to the northern lights (arsarnerit), where they play ball with walrus skulls.4 Occasionally, older people would warn me not to whistle if there were northern lights in the sky. Whistling would, or could, summon the ateq of an ancestor who desired to return. When a child is born in Illorsuit, as in other Inuit communities across the Arctic, he or she will invariably be bestowed with the name of one of the more recently deceased relatives or community members. It is through the bestowal of names, which in Greenland occurs via Christian baptism, that deceased relatives return. Names denote personhood and identity, and children who are a deceased person’s namesake (atsiaq) thus enter the kinship positions appropriate to those of their namesakes. In blurring the boundary between the living and the dead, the present and the absent, as well as between what we might consider the biological and the social, these naming traditions raise quite obvious questions about what we in the South (Euro-­ America)5 may take for granted as constitutive of a family, and of a human person as a relative and an individual within that family. In Greenland, a little girl may at one moment be addressed in one household as Mother, and in another household as Grandfather, at the same time being a biological daughter and sister in her own household. The following two figures are incomplete representations of Sikkersoq’s family as it was structured in 2005. The first is a strictly biological representation, and the second is a representation of the return of the name. The study of kinship or human relatedness is not only one that overlaps directly with Arctic societies, but it is also one with a long history that dates back to Morgan (1870) and Spier (1925). This early generation’s focus on terminology, residence, and marriage practices revealed what became known as the Eskimo Type of Kinship. This type of kinship is a bilateral kinship system with uxorilocal/matrilocal residence that did not appear to vary drastically from Euro-­American kinship or, in fact, from the kind of relatedness I have represented in figure 1. By devoting their focus to small variations in terminology, Morgan and his followers were primarily interested in uncovering the regional variations that this

Nukaraq

Karla

Mikaali

Therecia

Aqqalu

Sikkersoq

Nivikannguaq

Paninnguaq

Piitaq

Paninnguaq

Petrine

Naja

f i g u r e 1. This kinship diagram depicts biological and marital relations between relatives, mainly in Therecia and Mikaali’s family. Several of their relatives and descendants who are not featured in this book have been omitted. Instead Aqqalu and Sikkersoq’s family features prominently.

Nukaraq

Mikaali

Karla

Therecia

Nivikannguaq

Aqqalu Sikkersoq

Paninnguaq

Petrine

Piitaq

Paninnguaq

Naja

f i g u r e 2. This kinship diagram demonstrates the principle of how names return: a dead person (signified by a diagonal line) has returned, through his or her name, to a new slot in the kinship diagram. Each dashed, dotted, or curving line represents a name and not a relation in the same sense as the biological (solid vertical and horizontal) lines. Names are returned in the next generation: Mikaali’s granddaughter is the atsiaq (person named after a deceased person) of his mother. Since he often addressed his mother as ningiu (old woman, or the female head of a family), he would sometimes address his granddaughter affectionately by the same name. We also note how names can be returned to biologically unrelated people: Karla’s father’s name has been returned to one of  Therecia and Mikaali’s great-­grandsons. People can also be named after several people, as is the case with Petrine, who is named after both her maternal uncle and her older sister. And finally, names can be returned irrespective of gender: each of Paninnguaq’s middle names is returned to her siblings, including her brother. Since they are her biological siblings, she is their angerlartoqut (person named after a deceased brother or sister): the dead have come home.

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system might contain. Their study, however, never went beyond the confines of typological analysis (see, e.g., Dunning 1962; Fainberg and Hughes 1967; Giddings 1952; Hughes 1958). Malinowski was among the first to draw attention to the notion that there is more to kinship than its reduction to complicated models and equations drawn on paper. Kinship to him was about “flesh and blood, the result of sexual passion and maternal affection, of long intimate daily life, and of a host of personal intimate interests” (Malinowski 1930, 19). He believed that the insistence among some circles of anthropologists to see and treat kinship otherwise was also a dehumanization of kinship itself. Among Arctic anthropologists, it was not until the mid-­twentieth century that another school of study regarding Inuit kinship began to emerge. Damas (1964), Graburn (1964), and Guemple (1965) were the first in their field to ask questions about the extent that affection and closeness played in how kinship was lived and experienced among Inuit. Thus, the study of kinship moved even further away from the classificatory systems. Damas focused on the value that Igluligmiut communities placed on terms such as affection and closeness and on the role these play in the structure and maintenance of Inuit kinship relations. He argued that such terms were central to how Inuit more broadly organized their societies. Graburn’s (1964) study of Northern Ungava Inuit also showed that it was cohabitation and cooperation that lay at the heart of how Inuit realized kinship. That is to say, Ungava kinship did not begin and end with biological relations but rather through varieties of closeness and interaction in e­ veryday life, which then created meaningful and real kinship relations. ­Guemple (1965), in turn, took seriously the notion of adoption and “shared names” as a metaphor for “shared bone” in the Qiqiqtamiut community on Belcher Island. Going against the grain of his predecessors, Guemple argued that Inuit kinship essentially boiled down to relations that had little to do with genealogy but about people who “share bone.” People who share bone do so because they are named after the same person. Hence, relatives need not be genealogical kin to be close relatives—­an argument that has since become almost a truism in the anthropological study of kinship among Inuit, as well as in general. Guemple (1965, 1979, 1988) echoes Graburn’s (1964) cohabitation argument, thus rendering the family as constituted by closeness, cooperation, and alliances rather than a fixed idea about genealogy. Inuit move in and out of relatedness as they move through villages, work together, cohabit, or begin or cease to share. In this way, we could depict the Inuit family and even society in general as being surrounded by a piece of elastic. Families are able to expand as people enter proximity and are able to contract as people leave, without the elastic ever snapping or slacking. However, in contrast to his contemporaries,

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Guemple did not seem to regard kinship as particularly important to the general social structure in Inuit society. Social relatedness, he argued, begins in the local group rather than in the kinship tie, and so he regarded the notion of family as a metaphor for expressing other kinds of relations that he regarded as more central to the structuring of Inuit communities.6 Schneider (1984) drew an almost natural distinction between nature and code, or what has since been dubbed the biological and social (or fictive) kinship. He challenged the anthropological tradition that appeared to assume that blood is necessarily thicker than water, or that nature is more valid than code, which he saw as the guiding principle for the way anthropologists studied kinship. Since it was the guiding principle for kinship in the West, biology came to be seen as the universal structure for kinship. To explain that this wasn’t the case, Schneider made a leap to argue that kinship existed only in the West. This argument has since been questioned; but at the time it was taken so seriously that twenty years later, Carsten asked whatever had happened to the study of kinship (Carsten 2004). Here, she alerts us to the fact that Schneider’s original juxtaposition of nature and code, between the biological and the social, is not as straightforward as he had originally argued. We cannot, for instance, reasonably separate kinship into two distinct mutually exclusive fields without also running the risk of falling into the old trap of Western dualism. This dualism, or the idea of “the West and the rest,” offers kinship as something that we have in the West, whereas everyone else has an obscure, or othered, way of reckoning each other’s kin. In my experience, the distinction between the biological and the social among people in Illorsuit is often resolutely maintained by, for instance, attaching the affix -­ssaq to a kinship term to signify a “step” or a “foster” kind of relationship. Why and how this distinction is sometimes useful varies a lot, depending on the particular situation. It may be used to emphasize distance and inauthenticity. For example, once when I spoke of a man I had taken to be the father of one of my friends, a young man corrected me: “He is her stepfather.” Yet, another time, a young woman tried to catch the attention of an elderly woman who was close to the family by using the word anaanassaq (stepmother or like-­a-­mother), thus emphasizing the exact opposite of what the young man had emphasized; namely, closeness and affinity. Most of the time, this distinction is blurred and not straightforward at all. This distinction is a point also brought up by Bodenhorn (2000), who argues that although biology does exist as a category of relatedness in Barrow among Iñupiat, it is the acting as kin—­for instance, through labor—­which renders Iñupiaq kinship real. In Iñupiaq kinship anyone can become kin through adoption, and therefore an almost infinite number of relatives is,

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in theory, available to most people. This, however, does not mean that all relations remain active all the time, nor that everybody acts as relatives all the time or even at the same time. Iñupiat remain relatives only if they act like relatives. If the action terminates, so too does the relationship. The type of kin that Bodenhorn discusses here is what is often discussed in Arctic literature as adoptive kin—­kin because they act like kin and carry out activities together, such as hunting. Although biological kin cannot usually be denied without incurring social disapproval, this does not imply that all biological ties among Iñupiat are constantly active nor that they mean more or are somehow more valid or more permanent than adoptive relations. In other words, permanence and realness are underpinned by meaningful action, and not by biology—­a point that resonates with Nuttall’s work in a Greenlandic village some hundreds of kilometers north of Qeqertarsuup Tunua (Nuttall 1992, 1994, 2000). He demonstrates how people in this part of the world do not restrict themselves to recognizing as kin only people with whom they have biological relation. He shows that biologically unrelated people, through daily interaction and concrete activities such as hunting, can come to consider each other as family and to act as if they were family members. He also discusses the role that the ateq plays in the formation of personhood and kinship, underscoring the point that a named person is kin of his deceased namesakes’ kin as well as his own biological family. A named person is a relative in many households, regardless of whether there is any biological relation. Here too, kin can be chosen, just as kin can be disregarded or can cease to exist as kin. Kin ties remain relations for as long as they are rec­ ognized, relevant, and acted on. There are three overall critiques I want to raise here. The first concerns a somewhat overplayed argument regarding the distinction between what we call the biological and the social, which is anything but straightforward. What we might consider social kin may be every bit as real as what we consider biological kin; and vice versa. Similarly, permanence may not necessarily be something we should ascribe to biological kin since so-­called social kin may be reckoned to be family for much longer than biological kin; and vice versa. It is important to note here that even though the ties that bind humans together as family may not always be biological, the expression that renders them real originates in terminology that relates directly to biological relations. So, when Sahlins draws extensively on Nuttall’s work on naming in Greenland and argues that kinship is about the “mutuality of being” and not biology (Sahlins 2013), it seems odd to me to pitch two kinds of relatedness against each other in a rock-­paper-­scissors sort of fashion. Biology need not be contained, as he claims, by the mutuality of being. For indeed, the notion

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of the return among the people of Illorsuit might just as well be a case of demonstrating the reverse: mutuality of being is contained by biology. Bestowing names of deceased people on infants is a way of making kin and creating kinship relations between people who would not otherwise be kin. However, we should remember that naming is about much more than merely making kin out of people who are biologically unrelated. The whole point about naming is that it restores, returns, relations between living and dead kin who used to be biologically related, in the same way that it is the biological relations of today that will become the named relations in the future. I would therefore argue the opposite of Sahlins and assert that named relations are only real and relevant in the present because they are returned and because the relatives continue to address each other, or reinvoke their relationships, by using the terminology that once was appropriate not to a social relation but to their biological relationship. In addition to this, there is a crucial point that Sahlins overlooks in his discussion of Inuit kinship in Greenland: naming does not always work. Naming does not mean the same thing to everyone all the time, nor does it carry the same affective weight for everyone. This is a problem that arises when we work with ideal models, and it is part of my point; namely, ideal models of this kind of kinship are also idealized models that fail to attend not just to the fact that things can go wrong but also why it is so important that models both can and will go wrong and what this going wrong may produce. If naming is supposed to supersede or contain all other kinds of kinship, yet, as it turns out, does not always actually work, what then of the kinship (or mutuality of being) that naming is supposed to produce? This brings me to my second point, which concerns the underlying uncertainty that to me seems inherent in Inuit kinship. Relations, whether they are biological or social, may dissolve at any point, and the implications of Guemple’s (1979, 1988) overall argument is that kin relations are relevant only for as long as people are cohabiting or are part of each other’s everyday lives. Guemple has been particularly critiqued on his point that kinship is somehow less important to Inuit than any other kind of relation they may produce, and I would second that critique by saying that people in Illorsuit are nothing if not kin. Guemple nevertheless raises an important point about the ease with which relations may fizzle. What has often struck me in my work is the intensity with which people are kin when they are present and the relative ease with which they overcome their closeness in times of separation. It is as if relatedness lays dormant, waiting to be reactivated at the next encounter. But equally the reverse is also true. Distance often causes anxieties of separation, homesickness, longing, and feelings of loneliness. Either way, it speaks to the impermanence and uncertainty of relations. We could wonder what

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might have happened had Sikkersoq decided to ignore her daughter’s birthday. And in doing so, we can see that having a kaffemik for their daughter in her absence was anything but coincidental. It was a way for Sikkersoq and Aqqalu to fill their house with guests on an important day when they probably felt a little more lonely than usual. Likewise, it was an important day for Naja, who was separated from her family and who would be feeling more homesick than usual; that is, she was having her longing reciprocated in a very public way. Having a kaffemik was a way for Naja to experience closeness in longing and absence. Similarly, it was a way of experiencing longing and absence in closeness. Thus hinting at what I believe is a much more important distinction for kinship in Illorsuit and beyond than the aforementioned distinction between biology-­or-­not, this brings me to my third and final point. The distinction is situated between relatedness and loneliness and simultaneously separates them into two distinct categories. Whereas loneliness is dangerous, relatedness is more than the norm and is an ideal, in theoretical terms—­ergo, relatedness is good. At the same time, loneliness is not just part of the experience of being human, it is a necessary part of it. Relatedness, like loneliness, can become excessive and uncontrollable, and even dangerous. Although they are at opposite poles conceptually as well as in terms of lived experience, it is not as simple as saying that relatedness is good and loneliness is bad. Relatedness and loneliness are therefore intimately connected, as we shall see as this book progresses; they are not just two sides of the same coin. We find both, so to speak, on each side of the same coin. Let me explain. For a return even to be contemplated, some kind of separation is necessary. This separation may be experienced in terms of geographical or temporal distance. People may travel far away, as Naja has, to go to school in the city. Or friends, relatives, and couples may see each other every day but may have lacked intimacy and closeness for some time. Or separation may be emotional and emerge suddenly owing to disagreement and quarrels or as a result of hurt and disappointment. Regardless of how this separation or absence is experienced, it is necessary for a return to occur. Yet, at the same time, a return requires a sense of relatedness; a particular kind of relatedness as it is expressed in separation through longing and loneliness. Without loneliness, there would be no desire to change the separation in the first place and thus make a return happen. Without loneliness, separation would remain separation and the relation would be terminated. Dead people long to return. It is said, that they, or their names, appear in the northern lights that dance across the dark winter skies and remind the living of the dead who long to return. The dead appear in the dreams of families who

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are expecting a child, making it known that the child should be named after them. But as soon as the child has been named and becomes someone’s atsiaq (named after someone outside the sibling group) or angerlartoqut (named after a dead sibling), this named relation is subject to the same level of instability and impermanence as any other. That is to say, while a return may have been facilitated by the bestowal of a name on an infant, it is through everyday reinvocations that this name and the relations attached to it are actualized. It is through the utterance of appropriate kinship terminology—­in hugs and affection, in sharing, in visits, in utterances of longing—­that returns are actualized, again and again. Naming is simultaneously both loneliness expressed through relatedness and relatedness expressed through loneliness. Illorsuit This book is based on ethnographic research carried out in a small village, which I call Illorsuit. It is located on one of the many islands in Qeqertarsuup Tunua, also known as Disko Bay, in the northern part of West Greenland. Illorsuit was officially founded as a permanent trading station in the early nineteenth century, having previously been mainly used as a temporary camp for overwintering. Some old turf houses on the southern side of the island bear witness to this. The large bay is host to a vast number of fjords and glaciers, which have attracted animal life in rich quantities and, not least, over millennia to several waves of Inuit on migration from the North American Arctic. The last of at least three waves of Inuit migration into Greenland was by the group of people to whom archaeologists refer as Thule Culture Inuit, of whom present day Greenlanders are descendants. They were not so named because they were from what today is known as Thule (the northernmost inhabited parts of Greenland, and also the world—­the gateway into Greenland from Umingmak Nuna [Muskoxen Land] or Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada, Nunavut). Rather, their name has been given to them to emphasize their material distinction from the other so-­called Eskimo cultures that preceded them. Their tools and technology were radically advanced compared to the two-­thousand-­year-­ old Dorset Culture, or Tunit, which predated their arrival in AD 1200. Thule Culture coexisted with Dorset Culture in Northwest Greenland for a time, until the Tunit disappeared almost without a trace. Two hundred and fifty years later, Thule Culture Inuit occupied areas throughout Greenland. They also spread to the south, where the descendants of Erik the Red, the Norsemen, had lived until they too disappeared without a trace—­much to the bemusement of historians and archaeologists today (see also Arneborg 2003; Dugmore, Keller, and McGovern 2007). Thule Culture technology perfected the kayak (qajaq) and

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the boat (umiaq), the bow and arrow (pisisseq qasorlu), the harpoon (unaaq), and the dogsled (qamutit), which allowed them to hunt large sea mammals as well as large land mammals, such as caribou and musk ox. This practice con­ trasted with the Tunit, who mainly hunted seals at their breathing holes (see, e.g., Gad 1967, 34). Qeqertarsuup Tunua takes its name from Qeqertarsuaq (Large Island), also known as Disko Island, and means “the backside of the Large Island.” The island leaves Disko Bay unexposed to Baffin Bay. Its placement here, according to legend, is due to a powerful angakkoq (shaman) from the area who had been on a soul travel southward along the Greenlandic west coast. He was intrigued by the vegetation here. Most notably, he liked the taste and fragrance of kuanni (wild angelica)7—­a plant he had never seen or tasted before, since it did not grow in the far north of Greenland. After returning to his home, he made a rope from the strands of hair that he collected from small children and tied one end to his kayak and the other to one of the rocks on the coast of the large island in the south where kuanni was growing in rich quantities. He paddled his kayak home to the bay, pulling the island all the way northward to its current location, where it gives its name to Disko Bay—­Qeqertarsuup Tunua—­and where it is also the northernmost place in Greenland where one can pick kuanni in summer. The European influence in Greenland began in earnest in the sixteenth century. From that point onward, vessels traveling northward—­including Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque whalers, traders, and explorers from southern Europe—­dominated the voyage to Greenland. King Christian II of Denmark and Norway ordered an expedition to be sent to Greenland, but owing to sea ice, it was unsuccessful. The English encountered similar problems but persisted until the 1580s when John Davis, following Martin Frobisher’s “rediscovery” of Greenland, succeeded with three voyages to west Greenland. Most important, Davis mapped the entire area between Nuuk in the south and Upernavik in the north; an exercise not just important for scientific field knowledge but also one of great political significance. It was this broad European interest in Greenland, which also included successful voyages by the Dutch, that sparked the Danish King Christian IV to assert Danish ownership of Greenland. Eventually in 1605, three Danish ships succeeded in arriving in Greenland under the leadership of Captain Godske Lindenow. The Danes traded bearskins and tusks with the Inuit and took two Inuit men captive. Lindenow hastily returned to Denmark, where he was celebrated as a national hero. The two Inuit men were showcased for public entertainment (Lidegaard 1991, 52–­55).

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In addition to discovering new sea routes, trading, and mapping the Green­ landic coastal line, European activities in Greenland during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were mostly dominated by whaling. Lamp oil made from whale blubber was sold throughout Europe and proved to be a valuable resource, particularly for the Dutch but also for the Danish and Norwegian whalers, with whom they joined forces around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. After the whales had migrated west from Svalbard toward Greenland, Greenland became the center of European whaling activity. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the industry consisted of hundreds of vessels and employed several thousand people. Not only was whaling lucrative for European business, but it also had political, national, and scientific significance because whaling missions combined their work with scientific and mapping purposes. However, the nature of contact with Greenlanders was not merely limited to the barter and trading of walrus tusks and fur. There was also violence. Europeans fought and kidnapped Greenlanders and brought them back to their own countries, where the captives were subject to scientific experiments and public spectacle. With the assistance and blessing of the Danish king, the Norwegian Lutheran pastor Hans Egede, together with his wife and several other families, arrived in Greenland in 1721. They had intended to find the Norse and convert them from Catholicism to Lutheranism. However, they never found the Norse, which must have been of considerable disappointment to Egede. Instead he concentrated his efforts on converting the locals. According to Egede’s diaries, the Greenlanders with whom he had contact were not very hospitable. He noted that they seemed baffled by the fact that Egede, unlike the usual traders of whom they were suspicious, was not interested in trading and also that the Egedes remained in Greenland over winter. Egede pleaded with the Danish king for financial assistance, which resulted in Egede’s mission in Greenland becoming the financial and political responsibility of the Danish king in 1728 (Gad 1969, 131–­34; Lidegaard 1991, 87–­95). Danish colonial rule in Greenland concentrated on the establishment of two institutions. One was the mission, which sought to convert all Greenlanders to Lutheran Christianity and aimed to translate the Bible into Greenlandic. The other was a formal trading company, Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel (the Royal Greenlandic Trade)—­also known as KGH—­which was founded in 1776 and monopolized trade with Greenland. Both processes led to the formal establishment of Greenlandic trade stations such as Illorsuit, from which the Danes could trade and where the missionaries could preach and convert. The diaries of Hans Egede and other early Lutheran missionaries

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who followed in his footsteps are quite detailed, and they describe sometimes at length the missionaries’ difficulties and successes in suppressing the existing Inuit religion. Throughout the Inuit settlements in Greenland, the angakkoq (shaman) was a central figure for religious, medicinal, and political purposes. His powers were manifested in his abilities to cure illnesses and to negotiate with the mythically central Sassuma Arnaa (Mother of the Deep Sea) during times of famine and violent weather. Her long hair would have become soiled and tangled by taboos broken by humans and, in turn, by the animals of the sea. Whales, seals, walruses, and fish would all become tangled in her hair, causing a famine among the humans above. Tormented by her tangled hair and having had her fingers cut off by her father when she was a young woman, the only way for her to rid her hair of taboos and animals was to violently throw her body and head from side to side. The commotion would cause upheaval at the surface, and thus immense, dangerous waves and storms would prevent the hunters from hunting. Only the angakkoq would be able to journey to the bottom of the sea, where he could appease her anger and get close enough to comb her hair to release the animals trapped in it and thereby secure good weather and good hunting for humans. One difficult task for the missionaries was to convert the angakkut (plural of angakkoq) by convincing them to denounce their practice as lies and sorcery and their belief in the omnipotent spirit master Toornaarsuk as devil worship and witchcraft (Hindsberger 1997); a task which proved difficult sometimes since the missionaries themselves were perceived by some as an angakkut (Gad 1969, 110). It was one thing to convert angakkut, but quite another to convince ordinary people to no longer observe taboos, beliefs, and practices directed by angakkut and integral to everyday life.8 Thus, the conversion did not occur overnight or without problems, and it was only some years after a missionary’s arrival that he eventually baptized his first converts.9 And although the Greenlandic Lutheran Church (Kalaallit Nunaanni Ilagiit) is omnipresent in in Greenland today, people’s Christian beliefs are in some ways syncretic, incorporating subtle elements of pre-­Christian religion. In the mid-nineteenth century, an important step in the colonization of Greenland took place when the Danish administration opened two teacher training colleges, one in Nuuk (which the Danes called Godthåb) and the other farther north in Ilulissat (Jakobshavn). Both had the purpose of educating Greenlanders as sacristans so that they themselves could teach—­if not in the colonies themselves, then in the villages and settlements near the colonies (Lidegaard 1991, 155–­57; Thuesen 1988, ch. 2). The college in Ilulissat focused primarily on teaching Danish to the Greenlanders, while the one in

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the south also functioned as a publishing house and as what we might consider an ethnographic center. It was here that the first Greenlandic national newspaper was printed and where many teachers, writers, and researchers published their material. Perhaps most notable of these publications were Hinrich Rink’s collection of Greenlandic myths ([1875] 1997), the first and still-­renowned Greenlandic grammar by Samuel Kleinschmidt, and a wide range of Greenlandic hymns and psalms. The most famous and most loved hymn is arguably Rasmus Berthelsen’s Christmas hymn, “Guuterput” (“Our God”), which remains a standard at Christmas Eve church services throughout Greenland today. The Greenlandic men who were educated in these teacher training colleges, often with the prospect of becoming teachers themselves, as well as the children born in marriage unions between Danish men and Greenlandic women, constituted what has later been defined as an early Greenlandic elite. Among them, some of the most prominent and successful took on roles as local political leaders. In 1856 politicians and administrators in Denmark consulted with these local political pioneers and, as a result of much subsequent local political determination, two Greenlandic provincial councils were elected in 1908 (Lidegaard 1991, ch. 13; Thuesen 1988, 74–­77). By the time of the Second World War (1939–­1945), villages like Illorsuit had already been formally established as trading posts for a hundred years or longer. Greenland had had a Christian presence for centuries, and by and large, the entire population was literate. While Denmark was occupied by Germany during the Second World War, most communication between Greenland and Denmark ceased, and the local administration in Greenland looked to the Danish Consulate in the United States for help and for supply shipments.10 In 1946 a delegation from the Danish press visited Greenland for the first time since the wartime Nazi occupation of Denmark, and the course of Green­ land’s history took another drastic turn. Journalists sent back reports of poverty, of inhumane living conditions, and of a tuberculosis epidemic devastating the country. This account resulted in a national campaign in Denmark, which appealed to the conscience of the Danish public and government, by conveying the message that Denmark had neglected its duty to Greenland. Coupled with pressure from the Greenlandic administration, Greenland was added to the Danish constitution in 1953. Greenlanders became Danish citizens, and Greenland changed its status from Danish colony to Danish county. This change in status was intended to iron out the inequalities between Danes and Greenlanders that had emerged by the end of the war, and before long Denmark embarked upon a vast and speedy modernization of Greenland (Høyem 1988; Lidegaard 1991, ch. 16; M. Petersen 1986; R. Petersen 1995; A. Sørensen 1995).

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Although the effort brought modern housing and living standards in line with Danish ones in some areas or for a select few, by and large, the process of modernization brought more problems than it solved. On an economic level, modernization could not keep up with its own rate of acceleration. Rather than closing gaps and fulfilling the alleged needs of the country, it widened those gaps and made the needs it had identified even more urgent. The improvement in public health caused a sudden decrease in mortality rates. This decrease was matched by an equally drastic increase in the birthrate, which, in turn, led to a population increase and necessitated yet more nurseries and schools, as well as more and larger homes for growing families. There was an increasing demand for teachers, doctors, nurses, and various skilled workers throughout the public and private sectors and particularly in the construction business. This demand required even more skilled workers to be imported from Denmark, whose import resulted in higher salaries for Danes. All this ironically resulted in a broadening of the economic gap and an increase in the inequality that the modernization process had initially sought to eradicate. In addition, many Greenlandic children had been fathered by Danish men, who had been working temporarily in Greenland and who returned to Denmark, leaving behind Greenlandic mothers and children to fend for themselves. Subsistence hunters now found themselves working in manual labor jobs or as fishermen in the thriving fishing industry, while women had become wage earners in factories, shops, or low-­ranking public-­sector jobs. On a social and psychological level, it is publicly accepted today that modernization was set in motion too hastily and without the voice of the local population being heard. The social problems that affect many communities and families throughout Greenland today, and which color the majority of stereotypes that Danes generally hold about Greenlanders, can easily be attributed to those years.11 One of the main obstacles to achieving equality, not just between Danes and Greenlanders but also between Greenlanders within Greenland, was Green­ land’s infrastructure and the great distances that exist between the ­inhabited areas of Greenland. This is an issue that continues to rear its head in Greenlandic politics today. Due to the vast distances and relative isolation of most places, it also means that it is very costly to keep villages open. In the early 1960s this issue led to another dark chapter in Greenlandic history: an aggressive centralization policy, commonly known as G-­60, whose aim was to once and for all stamp out the inequalities in Greenland by closing down many of the small villages and relocating entire populations to other larger villages and cities.12 This centralization policy, however, was not only geographical but also cultural, educational, and oriented southward toward ­Denmark. Danish

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became the official language in Greenland and, therefore, the language of instruction in schools. Under the umbrella of the well-­known charity Save the Children, a group of children were to be coerced from their homes, to be first placed in an orphanage in Greenland and later with foster families in Denmark, where they would learn Danish. They were to set an example to other children in Greenland. A year later, the ones who had not been adopted by their Danish host families returned unable to communicate with their own families. They had lost their own language and spoke only Danish. It perhaps comes as no surprise that it was during this and the following decade that the suicide rate began to rise in Greenland. In the twenty-­first century, Greenland is in a process of nation building. Thirty years after having gained home rule government in 1979, the processes of Greenlandic self-­government were set into motion in 2009 by public referendum. I first arrived in Illorsuit in 2003 for eighteen months to do my doctoral fieldwork on the problem of suicide. In Greenland, as elsewhere in the Arctic, the rate of suicide, especially among young men, has been a major public health concern. In contrast to exploring the causal links between drastic changes in society that were caused first by colonialism, then acculturation, and since by processes of decolonialism, as is usually the perspective taken in suicide studies in Greenland as well as in the North American Arctic, I wanted to elucidate what it meant to live and die—­and carry out suicide—­within a culture that, despite acculturation, maintained firm beliefs in partial reincarnation, or the return. It was an issue I could never attack head-­on, just as it was a question to which there could never be one universal answer. Although suicide is a matter of serious concern in public health, it is also one that evokes extreme caution and extreme emotional responses in the people and families who are affected by it. And whereas suicide research seems underpinned by a desire to discover its causality, in my experience, suicide, for the bereaved—­the people most affected by it—­is surrounded by an air of stigma, guilt, and a great deal of silence. An easy theoretical solution to suicide would be to argue that because those who die by suicide also return, suicide isn’t as extreme, as violent, or as incomprehensible a form of death as we tend to define it in Euro-­American discourses. However, we would be mistaken in doing so. Suicides may be considered as returns on a par with other returns, but this does not take into account the acute loss experienced by the bereaved, which will last a lifetime. Nor does it erase the fact that the death was a suicide and that it will be talked about as such. My study did not identify any resolution to suicide as a problem. Rather, my concern was about its definition, and about its location within an entire pattern of turning away and turning toward, detaching and returning, loneliness and relatedness.

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It is in part due to the difficult subject matter that I have chosen to use a pseudonym—­Illorsuit—­for the village where I did my research and have disguised the names of people who appear in this book. Aside from the obviously difficult question of suicide, it is out of respect for the fact that relatedness, longing, homesickness, loneliness, and, not least, naming are personal matters that disguise is necessary. Another reason for anonymity is that Greenland has suddenly become open to the rest of the world. Tourism to the region is increasing rapidly, and along with activity of prospectors, environmentalists, foreign politicians, and investors, the efforts of journalists, artists, photographers, television crews, and documentary makers have connected Greenland to the world in new ways since I first came to Illorsuit. Social media, the internet, and information technology have likewise made the world beyond seem much closer to Greenland than it was in the past, which in some ways is a good thing since Greenland is in a nation-­building process, but in other ways forces exposure onto small communities and individuals whether they want it or not. The feeling of objectification that some Greenlanders experience—­whether they are local hunters, academics, politicians, or young people—­demands that we show some caution in not revealing people’s identities. Within Illorsuit itself, people in this book will be able to recognize themselves and sometimes also one another—­that can’t be avoided in a village with a population of about 130—­but I can at least attempt to give them some measure of privacy from the outside world. Though Greenlanders are Inuit, they do not usually refer to themselves as such, as Inuit in the Canadian territory of Nunavut do. The word Inuit is the plural of Inuk and means “humans” or “people” in Greenland as well as in Nunavut. In Nunavut, however, the term Inuit also implies ethnic identity. Greenlanders, in turn, usually refer to themselves as Kalaallit (plural of Kalaaleq), which refers to both to a national identity and an ethnic identity, commonly in opposition to Qallunaat (plural of Qallunnaaq), or Danes.13 Greenland is called Kalaallit Nunaat and the official Greenlandic language, West Greenlandic, is called Kalaallisut.14 In addition, people in Greenland emphasize local differences: North (Avanaa), Northwest or Big North (Avanersuaq), East (Tunu), South (Kujataa) and West (Kitaa); the capital (Nuuk) and everywhere else; villages (nunaqarfiit, plural of nunaqarfik), towns, and cities (illoqarfiit, plural of illoqarfik) and the land (nuna) or landscape. These are all places that people regularly draw on to identify self and the other. Exactly how these distinctions play out is not set in stone. It all depends on the circumstances, the position, and the perspective of the eye of the beholder and of the other. Some people and places may at times be more “other” than others, and sometimes less. The affix -­miut, which means “of ” or “from”

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(-­mioq in singular) is an important one that people use to signify belonging. People from Illorsuit are Illorsuarmiut (plural of Illorsuarmioq), people in Nuuk are Nuummiut (plural of Nuummioq), and people from Ilulissat are Iluliarmiut (plural of Iluliarmioq). On one level this affix denotes residence; on another level it denotes belonging and placehood, which is a very different matter. Expressing belonging in this manner is also a way of communicating something about one’s dialect, what one might like to eat, the local landscape, one’s family, local sociopolitical structures, and so on. Although this affix is one that anthropologists and social scientists often use in their writings about small communities in the Arctic, it also is one that I think that we should be cautious about. Applying it in our texts is also a decontextualization in terms, as well as concept, which anchors placehood in a particular and essentializing manner. We are compelled to assume that Illorsuit is bounded and that everyone who lives there—­all 130 Illorsuarmiut—­acts and thinks the same way about everything. More important, it coerces us to assume that the people in Illorsuit never leave and, equally, that people never arrive from elsewhere. We may reasonably argue that one of the most compelling injustices carried out against Greenlanders and other Arctic peoples was the policy of forced relocations. These relocations didn’t just serve Danes and other Southerners as an opportunistic way to become wealthy but, more important, it was also a way for them to gain ownership and control of the land and the people who lived there. The experience of G-­60 (the forced relocations policy) was felt differently throughout Greenland. In Qeqertarsuup Tunua, several villages were closed down and their populations relocated to the main towns in the region. Many were housed in new apartment blocks, while others built their own houses or moved in with relatives who already lived in the city. Old places including Appat (Ritenbenk) and Ikorfat were closed down. Illorsuit was planned for closure as well, and many families had already packed up and left. In spite of this, one local man, Inuk, who lived a long life up to his death in 2005, said that he had refused to leave. So he stayed; and inspired by him, people who had moved to Ilulissat or Aasiaat as instructed returned. Eventually the authorities gave in and agreed to keep Illorsuit—­that is, the school, church, trade station, supply shop, postal service, fuel station, telegraphic communication lines, and sea travel routes—­open. The events unfolding around Inuk’s decision to stay in Illorsuit may have been comparatively modest and peaceful, yet his refusal to abide by what the authorities had ordered was not only brave but also rare. Abiding by and accommodating the expressed desires and orders of others, especially those of your elders, without argument or question was and still is today considered an expression of respect and good behavior. One question that regularly emerges when

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people today revisit the dark chapters in Greenland’s recent history is how and why it was that so few people ever questioned or refused to do what was asked of them. What Inuk did was a rare and brave moment of refusal and a proud example of momentous self-­determination. Another such moment occurred in the years after Greenland achieved home rule in 1979, when Inuk’s nephew ventured that the people of Illorsuit should be in charge of their own halibut production. By this time Greenland had taken over ownership of KGH and renamed it KNI (Kalaallit Niuerfiat). The export division of KNI—­Royal Greenland—­continued the long tradition of trade monopoly that had been established by KGH and opened fish factories in many towns and villages throughout Greenland. In this way, local communities would contribute to what was predicted to become Greenland’s major source of future export income, and in so doing, they would justify the financial cost of keeping open the small and distant villages and the public infrastructure on which the industry would rely. This nationalization of the halibut industry was particularly important in the years after the traumatic events of G-­60, not only in terms of helping local communities prosper but also in terms of taking ownership of how Greenland’s present and future should be authored. In the many villages where livelihoods in those years (as today) tended to be based on hunting activities, it resulted in subsistence hunters being able to continue their hunting activities because they could earn income trading the caught fish to the fish factory, which typically would employ staff sourced locally. In Illorsuit the authorities opened a trading post rather than an actual production line with viable freezer storage. Due to a miscalculation, Royal Greenland deemed this venture unprofitable and shut it down, deciding instead to focus its trade in a neighboring village. Almost all families in Illorsuit were affected economically as a result. Coupled with the effects of the international anti–­seal fur campaigns in Euro-­America that caused sealskin prices to plummet and which affected the sustainable seal hunting in Greenland, the economic basis for living in Illorsuit ground to a halt.15 Some years later, in the early 1980s, a fire broke out in the small community hall due to a faulty boiler. The municipality did not allocate funding for the community hall until decades later. Recollecting those years, many people in Illorsuit described them as a difficult time when many people were driven to move away to the city to search for employment, and when many also turned to drink. Together with a group of local fishermen, Inuk’s nephew, who was conversant in both Danish and English, negotiated a price with Royal Greenland for the entire abandoned trading post, including the harbor and dock, for a fraction of its actual worth. Here they established halibut production locally as a

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private limited company into which local families bought shares. The factory bypassed Royal Greenland’s monopoly by trading directly with companies in Denmark, so much so that by the early twenty-­first century the factory was thriving and exporting halibut as far away as Great Britain and Japan. In 2011, three years after Greenland voted for self-­government as a step toward independence from Denmark, Royal Greenland bought a majority of shares in the company. Nevertheless, locally, the factory continues to be a source of great pride and relative affluence. Most families are involved in it in one way or another: as shareholders, as employees, or as fishermen who sell their catch to the factory. It provides a steady income to many households, which allows hunters to acquire and maintain boats, motors, and equipment, and which, in turn, enables them to continue supporting their families through subsistence hunting. Pulaar-­ Kaffemik is a formal gathering of people in celebration of birthdays and other important cultural and religious holidays. During Easter and Christmas Illorsuarmiut spend one or two days walking from house to house, attending kaffemiit (plural of kaffemik). One day they may host a kaffemik themselves, and the next day they’ll attend kaffemiit held in other households. Though I had thought so at the time, Sikkersoq’s invitation to kaffemik was not actually out of the ordinary. Nor was the fact that she had held a kaffemik to celebrate the birthday of a person who was not even there. People frequently raise flags, light candles, and celebrate the births, weddings, and birthdays of relatives in other towns. In this particular instance, Sikkersoq had wanted to learn Danish well enough to talk to doctors without the aid of a translator, and since I was the only Dane in Illorsuit and she had already been told that I wanted to learn Greenlandic, she had envisaged that we might be able to help each other. The kaffemik was in this sense a way for us to become acquainted; but this was not the only reason. The kaffemik is an institution, and it is the formal establishment of everyday visits. Visiting (pulaarneq) is a way for people to stay in touch with one another, exchange news and gossip, and offset and maintain relationships. Visiting is a social activity; and it is the done thing. Visitors (pulaarput) return into one another’s houses several times a week, and some people return several times a day. It is a key part of social life and a relaxed, noncommittal way for people to enter and leave, without invitation, without formality, and without causing inconvenience. Sikkersoq’s invitation to kaffemik was, apart from being an invitation to help her speak Danish, or for her to fill her house with visitors because she

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longed for her daughter, also an invitation for me to keep visiting in the future. There was, however, also something more serious at play here, which was about me and my role as a lonely person who knew no one in Illorsuit. It seemed obvious from the moment of my arrival that people were worried that I would feel lonely. “Pulaarniarit” (“You must come and visit”), I was instructed by one of Aqqalu’s sisters on my first outing to the service house, where she instructed me in how to use the communal washing machines. She worked cleaning and minding the till in the service house, which is where Islanders take showers and wash clothes. “Kiserliorputit, nuaninngilaq” (“You are lonely, and that’s awful”), she continued, and her shoulders and face shuddered in dread at the thought of it. Even though at this early stage in my fieldwork, I was more or less inarticulate, I was beginning to understand a certain familiarity in her instruction. She was not the first person to have suggested “Pulaarniarit.” That very morning her sixty-­nine-­year-­old mother, Therecia, had uttered a similar instruction. Therecia and her husband, Mikaali, were my neighbors and lived a couple of minutes’ walk down the slope from my house. From their living room window they had a direct view into my kitchen and vice versa. That day—­when I had been in the village for about a week—­I had slept in. It was ten in the morning by the time I got out of bed and drew back the curtains. First I drew them back in the bedroom/living space and then in the kitchen, as I brushed my teeth over the sink. It was as if Therecia, an elderly woman I still only knew by appearance, had been waiting for that moment to happen. She emerged from her house, heading directly for mine. She entered without knocking, took off her shoes, greeted me, and handed me a bowl of lush, ripe crowberries—­all this while I stood holding my toothbrush. She continued into the living room and took a seat on one of the four dining chairs that towered over the coffee table. The crowberries were a gesture, of course, but I was later to learn that crowberries are also one of Therecia’s favorite foods and picking them one of her favorite activities. In summer she would spend most days on land picking blueberries and crowberries, which she would later distribute to friends and relatives. I quickly made coffee and offered her some. While she was dipping sugar cubes into her coffee, she told me about her family: her children, grandchildren, great-­grandchildren; their names, ages, and birth years. Some lived in Ilulissat, others in Aasiat, and one daughter had lived in Denmark since she was a teenager. I listened attentively, concentrating on trying to recognize some words in her nonstop torrent. She asked me about my family, my siblings, my parents, and my grandparents. She wanted to know their names and their birth years. “Nineteen fifty-­four?” she asked, to confirm that my father indeed was born in that year. “Sikkersoq is also born in 1954,” she responded, smiling. Sikkersoq, I already knew, was

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married to Aqqalu, who I now realized was one of Therecia’s sons. It was a lesson in family. Her daughter-­in-­law and my father would, as the saying goes, make the sun shine if, or when, they would ever meet. By that reckoning, Therecia and I, or Sikkersoq and I, had something in common; we were potential relatives: we were both related to someone who was born in 1954. In time, I would begin to call Therecia Grandmother. As a newcomer and, more important, a stranger, I had no relations there. Therecia’s visit and enquiries about my family and their birth years were an attempt on her part to establish some sort of relation between us. Greenlanders treat birth years similarly to the ways they treat namesakes. People often adapt the old Greenlandic saying, “When two namesakes meet, the sun shines,” to “When people from the same birth year meet, the sun shines.” The fact that Sikkersoq and my father, as well as Therecia’s grandson and I, were born in the same year did not make us relatives per se; rather, it conferred on us a potential relationship. Put in terms of a saying: our meeting each other had the potential to be graced by the sun (i.e., to be happy) because we shared the same birth years. Therecia’s and my potential relation was connected through this commonality. The shared birth year between our respective kin was something that could tie us together. Therecia rose suddenly from her chair and prepared to leave, almost as unexpectedly as she had entered. She put on her shoes and opened the door. On her way out, just before closing the door, she turned and said, “Pularniarsuutit, ilaa?” (“You will visit, won’t you?”), pointing to the bowl of crowberries that sat on my kitchen counter, which I took to be a request to return it to her later. The archaeologist Holtved hit the nail on the head when he talked of ­visits in the old Thule Trading Station in the northernmost part of inhabited Greenland. Using the Greenlandic word (pulaar-­) rather than the Danish word (besøg) for “visit,” his diaries are full of entries in which he and his wife went—­as he called it—­pulaaring. In doing so, he seems to highlight visiting as a social activity rather than an isolated social event. Visiting is both something to do and a way to entertain oneself and others. According to Greenlanders, one of the big differences between Danes and themselves is that Danes lack impulsiveness and tend to plan and organize everything in advance. So it is with visits. When Greenlanders move to Denmark, it is difficult for many of them to maintain visiting as an everyday activity. In Denmark, guests wait for invitations, and people generally knock on the door and wait until someone answers it before entering. In Illorsuit, people tend to leave their doors unlocked, and visitors don’t usually knock and wait for the door to be opened, as I did on Naja’s birthday. People just enter slowly while announcing their arrival by knocking or calling out to see if anyone is home.

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In Illorsuit, everyone should go visiting and everyone should be ready to receive visits. It took me some time to realize that visits didn’t require an invitation. The invitations, or instructions to visit, I received during these early weeks of research, were a result of my own reservations and fear that I would be perceived as intrusive or a busybody. But as I began to understand that people generally visit with no prior announcement or invitation, and that some would even have a visiting round and go visiting at several houses most mornings, I also began to be more relaxed about visiting whenever I felt like it. Visits are generally brief and last the length of a cup of coffee and maybe a cigarette before the guest returns home or continues on to the next household. I only ever really felt comfortable visiting unannounced at the homes of Karla and Nukaraq, Sikkersoq and Aqqalu. I lived alone in an old house I had rented from Karla and Nukaraq, who had bought the house some years earlier but who had since built a larger house right next door.16 They lived there with their foster daughter, Nivikannguaq, who had been in their care since she was one year old. Over time she became my nuka (younger sister) and I became her angaju (older sister). It was through my visits to those two households in particular that I came to know other people in Illorsuit, and in time I also received unannounced visitors in my own home. Children and teenagers especially (in some cases, undoubtedly sent by their parents to see what I was up to) found a place in my house to hang out during the cold winter evenings. From the outset, people knew from word of mouth that I was a student from the United Kingdom and in Greenland to do my doctoral research. For this reason, people did not find it odd that I had rented a house; I needed a quiet space to study. However, as I grew more familiar with people and the life of the village, I found that many had been concerned to learn that my house not only functioned as a work space where I would write on my computer but also was where I lived—­ alone. The fact that I slept alone was the one thing that people found peculiar. In Illorsuit, most families live in reasonably large, newly built houses, many of which accommodate up to three generations who invariably share sleeping areas. A house with few people is a “cold” (nillerpoq) house, and the closer that people (and especially children) live in a house, the warmer and more “comfortable” (iluaq) the house becomes. “You really get warm when you have small visitors,” Nukaraq once commented, after he had noticed that children and teenagers had begun to visit my house. They were curious about me and wanted to know about my life in Denmark, my life in England, my experiences. They wanted to see photographs of my family, learn their names and birth years—­just as they wanted to tell me theirs.

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Seasonal Variations Illorsuarmiut return all the time and in many ways. Whether it is the grand trajectories of a deceased person’s name being bestowed on an infant, or in the daily visits that people pay each other, or when teenagers go to school in the city, it seems that the practice of turning away and turning toward is a constant. One way of understanding the movement between relatedness and loneliness is through Mauss’s early twentieth-­century essay The Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo (Mauss [1906] 1979), in which he sought to challenge the ecological determinism characteristic of the German school of geography (Bravo 2006). Using the ethnographic material available to him at that time, Mauss aimed to explain the seasonal migrations between large settlements in winter and small hunting camps in summer. For Mauss, the seasons were not so much a cause of Inuit convening in close winter settlements and dispersing in isolated summer camps as much they merely gave rise to the opportunity to convene and disperse. Since the seasonal movement between home and land continues to be significant to the lives of many Inuit families and communities, Mauss’s model continues to be relevant today. Some recent authors examine the ideological and practical conflicts arising from seasonal movements and stationary modern Arctic housing (Dawson 2006). Others argue that modern Arctic communities have integrated a modern lifestyle into traditional seasonal migrations in a syncretic way (Stuckenberger 2006). For Mauss it was not the search for food or the migrations of animals, or even the pronounced contrast between the seasons, which determined how Inuit gathered in large camps during winter and dispersed in hunting camps during summer. Rather, he aimed to show how the seasons merely provided a suitable opportunity for Inuit to convene and disperse, not just between different kinds of localities but rather between different—­opposite—­forms of social life: intense and close sociality during winter and social breakdown and solitude during summer. I wish to propose another reading of Mauss’s argument, which was essentially about the inherent instability of social relatedness: that is, that social relations can never be stable. Sometimes social relations are intense and at other times they have all but fizzled out. Seasonal variations are therefore much more about social variations and about how Inuit resolve the conceptual and practical movement between relatedness and loneliness; about how Inuit “turn away” and “turn toward” in everyday life as they go about being kin. Although Mauss framed his study within an overall morphology of Inuit seasonal movement in its entirety, it was not the intensity of closeness

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in Inuit winter society that puzzled Mauss. Rather, it was the prominence of its negative aspect—­the withdrawal from sociality and the social dispersal at hunting grounds on the land. In explaining this sociological conundrum, he dismissed ecological models by arguing that these could not account for the level of intensity of closeness during winter and the apparent sheer lack of it during summer. The pattern consisting of hunters migrating with the game animals they hunt was little more than cultural synchronization to Mauss and merely provided an apt opportunity for Inuit to disperse and convene (Mauss [1906] 1979, 50). In other words, he regarded ecological reductionist models as unable to account for the whole phenomenon as a social concept. In fact, Mauss offered no causal explanation for this Inuit seasonal pattern as such. Instead, he proceeded to conclude that the Inuit pattern of seasonal dispersal and congregation provided a particularly pronounced case of a human universal pattern: the need for people to seek solitude. He backs up this universal argument with a general observation in the final pages of his essay, where he argues that urban Europeans (including himself, I suppose) also tend to take vacations in the countryside during the summer (Mauss [1906] 1979, 78). Thus, Mauss’s model was not just a statement about an Inuit cultural peculiarity as much as it was a model showing that, universally, social life and society do not remain constant but instead wax and wane. Seasonal Variations was quite possibly the first text in sociology to show that social life and relatedness do not remain constant but instead follow regular rhythms of heightened and relaxed social life, thus adding a temporal aspect to relatedness—­a point developed and widely agreed on by anthropologists today. As Mauss explained, “Social life does violence to the minds and bodies of individuals, which they can sustain only for a time; and there comes a time when they must slow down and partially withdraw from it . . . an Eskimo needs a profane existence” (Mauss [1906] 1979, 79). His word profane—­obviously a clumsy one—­is spoken from the perspective of an early twentieth-­century sociologist who was puzzled by the apparent lack of seasonal sociality of the polar Inuit. To Mauss, the collapse or rejection of society or community (i.e., the “profane existence”) can only be the opposite of sociality (i.e., the sacred). Hence, he places the “profane existence” away from the settlement, on the land (nuna). Having based his study on other people’s ethnographic recordings and never having actually been to the Arctic himself, Mauss can be forgiven for uncritically equating life on the land with social breakdown, or profanity. But as we shall see later, the land in Greenland means anything but social breakdown; and withdrawal to the land during the summer hunts brings about another kind of sociality. However, the idea of humans convening and dispersing, continuously in and out of

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proximity and relatedness, demonstrates two behaviors interlocking in a system of interplay where one behavior simultaneously relegates and facilitates the other. The return, therefore, is not just to sociality; it is also conceptually, at least, a return to a degree of absence, removal, or even loneliness. Mauss maintains that humans need to disperse in order to maintain sociality; and this very dispersal causes them to convene. The need to withdraw temporarily from society is a necessary evil that pulls people back into relatedness. Withdrawal and absence make people return.

2

Loneliness

“You know the old house down there?” Karla tilted and pointed her head in the direction of one of the oldest houses in the village. It was owned by the church sacristan (ajoqi), who used it as a spare house for his family when they visited. Most of the time it was empty due to its poor insulation, but now the house was inhabited by one of the sacristan’s sons and his wife and their children. Many years prior the house had been inhabited by a particular woman and her family. “Oh, she was good at playing cards,” Karla assured me. “She could smoke, play cards, and nurse her baby all at the same time. She was very fast. That’s what they say. I never met her, but I know she is still alive, and I think she lives in Ilulissat . . . or maybe she moved to Aasiat.” She had lived in the house with her husband and their seven or eight children for many years. Her husband had hunted and fished, whereas she had been a hunter’s wife (piniartup nulia), always busy preparing his catch for freezing, drying, sharing, scraping skins, keeping house, and raising a family. “But a witch (ilisiitsoq) cursed her and said that her entire family would die before she did,” Karla said. “She would live a life alone. It was after her husband suddenly died—­I think he drowned while he was hunting for seals—­that she brought all her children to Ilulissat.” With a large family to provide for, and without a skilled hunter in the family to provide for her, there were better opportunities in town, where she could get employment. “But one by one they all died. I heard that one of her daughters died of cancer last year, so she only has one daughter left—­or maybe she has died too. But she is still alive. And she is very old. She must be more than eighty years old now, and she is still alive. And alone, kiserliortoq.” To this day, this is the only story I have heard of a witch in such close proximity to the temporal and geographical present. Since witches tend to exist only in folklore, myths, and stories in Greenland, Karla’s recollection caught

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my attention. Who was the witch? And why would she curse the woman, seemingly out of the blue? Karla couldn’t answer my incessant questions. She merely shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t know why. It was just something she had done; just because. In time, I came to realize that the story wasn’t about the witch at all. Karla did not know the witch, just as she didn’t know the woman who was cursed. The story was, in fact, about a kiserliortoq: a person who lives in loneliness. The story depicts a woman whose relatives are slowly dying, one by one. We know where the story will end. We are only waiting for her last living daughter to die, and then she will live alone, in loneliness. This extreme form of loneliness, kiserliortoq-­ness, is the predicament of being without kin. It is a condition that Greenlanders generally both fear and (as I will argue) regard as a potential condition. What happened to the old woman was an extraordinary occurrence. A witch foresaw or willed a woman’s loneliness to happen. Her loneliness is random, as is her destined lonely death. What had she done to deserve this? What did she do to try to prevent it from happening? We do not know. I maintained my quest for a resolution to this story, but Karla evaded each of my questions. And perhaps this was the point of the story. The woman was random, the witch was random, and the entire story seems random because loneliness too is random and can strike anyone at any given point. We don’t know if loneliness will strike by curse, by chance, or by a freak accident where one might lose several relatives at the same time. This extreme form of loneliness is, in other words, a potential for everyone. However, for most people, in all likelihood, it will remain just that: a potential. In reality, no human person is ever really without kin. There are other kinds of loneliness that are less clear-­cut. The house I had rented from Karla and Nukaraq had once been one of the largest and best-­insulated houses in the entire village, with a living room that doubled as a sleeping area and even an upstairs. Now, however, it was one of the coldest houses in the village, due to its depleted insulation as well as its lack of children. Like many houses and buildings throughout the Disko Bay area today, my house had been carefully dismantled and moved from the closed-­down coal-­mining town of Qullissat, where it had been the palasi’s (pastor’s) house. In Illorsuit, it had belonged to the schoolteacher during the 1970s. She had been a single mother to a son, Tuma, and they had lived there together before she died of a stroke. Tuma would sometimes come and visit me, and when he did, he would reminisce about his childhood in that house. He would talk about waking up early in the mornings to the smell of toasted bread and coffee, which his mother would prepare on the stove. Once when he came in from the cold and warmed his hands on the stove, he got severe burns and blisters on his palms and had to wear bandages for several weeks.

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Tuma’s history went from one extreme to the other. It was his initiative, quick wit, and keen mind in finance and politics that had led to the masterminding of the acquisition of local fish production and the foundation of a private limited company. All this effort brought prosperity to Illorsuit after several years of economic decline and social depression. It was well known that Tuma sometimes drank too much and too frequently, and his drinking had eventually resulted in the board relieving him of his responsibilities as factory manager. This dismissal became a thorn in his side. He was a proud man and, according to many in the community, rightly so. He took after his uncle, who had been the reason behind Illorsuit still being inhabited today. If not for Tuma, there would have been nothing to do in Illorsuit. Life would have been boring (nuaniippoq) to the extent of being tiresome (qa­ sunarpoq). “If there’s nothing to do,” Sikkersoq often reminded me, “people have no money, and life is difficult and boring.” For this reason, he had not left his position of manager quietly. In time, the village had moved beyond the dispute without anyone ever being permanently ostracized, apart from Tuma himself and his wife, Louisa, who had somewhat ostracized themselves by drinking. By the time I arrived, they were notorious for their drinking and their inventive methods of acquiring money to buy alcohol. On more than one occasion their drinking became physically dangerous and caused prolonged hospital stays in the municipality capital, closely followed up by local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and other forms of recovery therapy. At some point Louisa had allegedly begun drinking methylated spirits, which people took to mean that they were low on cash but also, more worryingly, that her health was in severe decline. The only time she was seen was entering or exiting the shop to purchase cigarettes and bare necessities or, occasionally, entering or exiting someone’s house after a quick visit. I first met her on a Saturday morning, shortly before midday when the shop would close for the weekend. I had already met Tuma, who had been welcoming and had wanted to speak to me in Danish, English, and even a little German and French. He had told me a bit about the history of the village, not least his own involvement in turning the economic situation around in the 1990s. I immediately knew who Louisa was when she suddenly appeared in my kitchen and, because her husband had been kind to me, I wanted her to like me. I also knew about her drinking problem. I had been instructed by Karla and some other worried people to be cautious and not to give her any money if she ever asked. Autumn was about to set in and the temperature had dropped a couple of days before, yet little pearls of perspiration covered her face. I offered her coffee and a chair. She accepted both. When I brought through the coffee and sugar cubes from the kitchen, I found her standing by the window gazing

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outside. Her eyes had fallen on Tuma walking up the hill chatting and laughing with a young boy. Tuma was carrying a ten-­liter black container of fuel for the stove. She turned around and looked at me with eyes that would not quite meet mine. She was quite breathless. “Do you have any money?” she asked in Danish, again turning her head to look out at Tuma. She was impatient. I barely had a chance to think up a plausible excuse before she headed out the door, her coffee untouched. I was still holding the cup of sugar. Several days later, Sikkersoq found Louisa weakened and barely able to stand up. She was in physical agony and very ill from what appeared to be poisoning. They quickly organized a boat that could take her from the village to the hospital, where she remained for some months receiving treatment. Tuma, who initially did not intend to accompany his wife, eventually joined her for rehab, and they were both sober when they returned by Christmas. They looked healthy, happy, and energized. Their house had been tidied and refurnished by several people in Illorsuit, who knew that they were short of furniture, having sold their own during their last binge to get cash. Their sobriety lasted only a few months. At the time I had not realized that these events were part of a long string of similar episodes. Louisa and Tuma would go through drinking binges, interrupted by periods of sobriety, which invariably were disrupted by another binge. They would lose what temporary work they had—­minding children or painting someone’s house—­and slowly begin to sell their furniture and other valuables, borrow money, and ask for food, until there was nowhere left to turn for help. A few months later Karla told me that a young hunter had stumbled over Tuma asleep outside in the freezing winter darkness. If the hunter hadn’t found him, Tuma could have died. We were drinking tea, Karla and I, at her newly acquired marble coffee table. I was admiring it, and Karla revealed that they had bought it from Tuma. They had not been drunk, she assured me. Their house had been neat and tidy, and Louisa was crocheting while Tuma and Nukaraq had agreed on a price for the table. Earlier that same day Tuma had tried to convince me to buy Louisa’s Greenlandic national costume. It had been much too small for me, and although he and Louisa insisted, trying to find ways to extend its sleeves to fit my long arms, or making the size thirty-­six kamiit (boots) fit my size forty feet, I eventually declined. Telling Karla this story, we laughed as we imagined the scene: going to church at Christmas in a costume so small that I had to cover the torn seams with my hands and arms and walk sideways past people. Although happy with her new coffee table, Karla was clearly upset with the way Tuma had been drinking. “I don’t understand how he can keep doing it,” she wondered out loud. “It’s dangerous! It’s too much!” She repeated those last words a couple of times: “It’s too much!” Her worry was not just out

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of concern for his health but equally because Tuma, through his drinking, was isolating himself from the rest of the village. What I want to say about drinking in Illorsuit is that it is an isolating activity. When it comes to drinking, Illorsuit can be distinguished into two groups: a minority of people who drink and the vast majority of people who do not drink at all. Drinking ordinarily takes place behind closed doors and usually in households where there are no children. Only people who drink really partake in drinking parties ( festi, borrowed from the Danish word for “celebration,” fest), and, thus, drinking is a socially divisive activity. It is an activity in which the drinkers separate themselves from the majority of nondrinkers, not just visually or socially while the drinking takes place but also conceptually. Nondrinkers, whether they used to drink or not, tend to categorize themselves as nondrinkers, and in so doing, they ascribe drinking people’s problems—­ whether financial, personal, or social—­to drinking. Drinking, like suicide, is both a social and a public health concern in Greenland. Of course, there is worry about the damage it does to the drinkers themselves in terms of health, employment, finances, and being good social citizens. But there is an expressed concern about the way it affects children who grow up in families with alcohol. In Greenland there have been many developments in alcohol prevention strategies in recent years. Some villages have even taken their own initiative of banning the sale and consumption of alcohol completely, with beneficial social and economic results, which continues to inspire other villages to do the same. Trying to come up with a way to answer Karla’s worry about Tuma, I remembered a conversation about his mother that I once had with Tuma. He had come to my house the day after Louisa had left Illorsuit to go to the capital for rehabilitation. It was midafternoon. I made him some coffee while he reminisced about living in this house as a child with his mother. Lighting one of the candles on the windowsill as he spoke of her, he recounted how he used to wake up “over there”—­pointing to an empty space by the wall where his bed had once been—­to the smell of coffee and bread that she would toast on the stove; that same stove he had burned his hands on. I asked him if anyone had been named after his mother, knowing that she had been survived by three brothers who had children and grandchildren. His reply was, “Nobody.” After a short pause, he added, “So I am lonely.” His eyes fell to the floor, and we did not speak of it again. His claim for loneliness rang in my ears for a long time, and I mentioned this to Karla as a possible explanation of why he drank so much. If his mother had no namesake in the village, though she did have one in a town farther north, it did seem to me like a good enough explanation as to why he might say he was lonely. It might even be a plausible explanation as to why he would drink. Could it be that it was not the drinking alone that made him lonely but the

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fact that his mother had no namesake, and that he, in effect, had no one to call Mother? Karla’s reaction surprised me. I had expected her pity or sympathy. Instead she was offended. “That’s not true!” she asserted adamantly. “He is lying!” She stood up from the sofa, walked to the window, and gazed out at the village. “He has his uncles and his cousins, and we have all helped them both so many times,” she said, as she changed a tea light in the window that had gone out. I realized that my suggestion of Tuma being lonely was not just a blunt statement about his own life, his psychological state, or his social predicament. It was de facto a substantial statement—­an indictment—­about everyone in the village. Tuma’s family, his friends, and Illorsuarmiut in general had not done enough to act as relatives toward him. They had let him down, and I now deduced that he was disappointed. The loneliness he proclaimed and the loneliness others saw him claim through drinking might have had very different causes, but they spoke to the same thing: the fact that Tuma and his wife were, or felt, lonely and that no one seemed able to do anything about it. Like everyone else in the village, Karla continued to worry about his drinking. Degrees of Loneliness Like kinship and relatedness, loneliness cannot be one stable thing. It is as much a social process as everything else. There are multiple kinds and degrees of loneliness, just as there are of relatedness. Loneliness is both prior to and the end result of relatedness, just as it is part of relatedness itself. Generally, loneliness has not attracted as much attention in anthropology as its counterpart, relatedness. Why this is so is difficult to comprehend when in disciplines such as philosophy, loneliness is considered a human condition—­one of human beings’ universal and primordial struggles. One of our main objectives as anthropologists is to study the social or cultural stuff that makes us human and that binds us together as human persons into groupings. Whereas emotions that we have traditionally thought of as private or antisocial, such as anger, jealousy, revenge, sorrow, and mourning, have all become anthropological topics, our lack of attention to loneliness continues to be something a little abnormal and something that we consider outside and opposed to human relatedness, and outside the human experience. This chapter is an attempt to hone in on some sort of definition of what loneliness is in Illorsuit. Let it be said at this stage that I do not intend to present one single definition of loneliness, in the way that philosophers do. It is not for lack of trying. I have spent years attempting to understand what the people I know in Greenland mean when they say they feel or are lonely. But

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loneliness is never just one thing. It can never be experienced in exactly the same way. Some Illorsuarmiut would argue that loneliness is to be without kin. Others would say that it is to be among people with whom they don’t feel affinity or have relation. More would say that loneliness is to be unmarried, or to be childless; others, that loneliness can be most severe for people who are brokenhearted, or for the bereaved, or for the ones who are homesick. Greenlanders living in Denmark often argue that they feel loneliest at significant Christian holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, or when they haven’t eaten Greenlandic food or spoken Greenlandic for some time. Being bored and having nothing to do also causes loneliness. Some Greenlanders in Denmark say that they feel most lonely when they are not understood, or when they notice how people in Denmark don’t acknowledge people they pass in the streets, or when the spontaneity of visiting friends that they’re accustomed to in Greenland is destroyed by being planned to death in Denmark. Definitions of loneliness vary depending on contexts, trajectories, and individual circumstances. This is as true for Greenlanders as it is for anyone else. Loneliness is both a feeling and a predicament. It does not have to be both at the same time. One can, for instance, feel lonely but not actually be lonely, and, in theory, it should be possible to be lonely (or at least be considered lonely by others) without actually feeling lonely. However, this distinction is not always clear-­cut. What and who decides whether a person is lonely can seem quite elusive for a number of reasons. One might feel lonely while being surrounded by people, friends, and family, without any of the surrounding people having a clue about it. We might likewise expect someone to be lonely who has no immediate or extended family and who spends most of his or her time alone, while that person might never actually feel lonely at all. We could take our cue from Jean Briggs’s ethnography on the absence of anger among a group of Inuit in Arctic Canada. Here, she discusses her own experience of being ostracized following an incident wherein she lost her temper at some fishermen from the South (Briggs 1970). Thinking she had done the local community a favor by expressing her disapproval of the white men’s fishing methods to their face, she later discovered that her expression of anger had scared her Inuit hosts. After some time, Briggs came to realize that her hosts had distanced themselves from her as a result. We might say that Briggs’s experience of social isolation or some form of loneliness was the natural outcome (rather than a dogmatically forced punishment) to her anger. Whereas her own experience of isolation or loneliness could be said to be the result of a rare occurrence of an angry outburst or loss of temper, her ethnography, on the other hand, shows that loneliness, at least as a form of social control, has a place in the everyday lives of the Inuit. What is not

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accepted is anger. Having studied Inuit emotions, she argues that anger is not one of them. She goes on to discuss the term for an emotion hujuujaq, which refers to the feeling of discomfort, hurt, annoyance or displeasure because of the absence of something or from being in an undesirable predicament or situation. She translates hujuujaq as a general state of loneliness. Not only do Inuit have several ways and words for expressing distinct forms of loneliness, but the emotion term hujuujaq is also context dependent and has many meanings: lack of kin; longing for kin; a sense of isolation brought about by feeling awkward in a particular social situation; having one’s desires or agency thwarted; and even uncomfortable or bad weather conditions. Hujuujaq is so multidimensional that one cannot easily lump the multifarious meanings together under one heading or have one neat translation; namely, loneliness. In her later work (1998), Briggs shows how the experience of being temporarily ostracized is key to understanding the moral choices Inuit children are obliged to make in their upbringing. Parents expose their children to moral dilemmas, according to my reading, to harden children to life’s harsh realities of loss, longing, and disappointment, as well as to soften children regarding their relatives and to learn to act toward them with responsibility, care, and love. In some dramatic episodes, she details how children, when they are coerced to make choices independently, feel isolated. And it is this isolation that teaches children to learn to make responsible and independent choices. So rather than locating isolation, however temporarily outside sociality, a parent’s temporary disassociation from his or her child is actually part of the so­ cializing process that makes a child grow into a responsible adult. Elsewhere, among the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, loneliness is deliberately invoked in the Gisaro ritual, where guests from other longhouses dance and sing for their hosts (Schieffelin [1976] 2005). The ritual is intended to remind the hosts of their deceased relatives, and to this purpose, the guests employ various techniques to utter the names of specific places on the land where the hosts have deep-­seated memories of being with their dead relatives. Having these memories induced, the hosts are reminded of their own loss and sorrow. Initially they begin to cry for their loved ones whom they miss and for whom they feel lonely. Suddenly in a fit of anger, the hosts burn their guests, the dancers, on their shoulders and backs with fire torches, which brings the ceremony to its peak of singing, dancing, and sorrow. My understanding of Schieffelin’s discussion ([1976] 2005) is the idea that although loneliness is a powerful and ever-­present image in the Kaluli imagination, this image stems from the idea or the looming potential of being in a situation where they have no relatives. However, such a scenario is unlikely because for the Kaluli, as with the people of Illorsuit, a person with no kin is essentially

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a dead person. He or she would not be able to survive physically or psychologically. We might hastily conclude, then, that loneliness doesn’t really exist, neither among the Kaluli nor in Illorsuit. But we would be mistaken. Rather, I would suggest that it is precisely because loneliness is so dangerous—­that is, it can kill and torment—­that it is necessary for the Kaluli to bury it deep within and only allow exposure under the tightly controlled circumstances of a ceremony; or it is necessary for Greenlanders to project it onto a particular character, such as a witch or the qivittoq (whom we shall meet in the next chapter) who lives an undead and unhuman existence in the wilderness, yet who simultaneously could be one of us. Closer to Qeqertarsuup Tunua, in Kangersuatsiaq, a small village further north in West Greenland, the state of being kiserliorpoq is partly a condition in which the bereaved long for a relative who is deceased as well as being in the predicament of having no, or very little, family. Nuttall (1992, 127–­29) describes a middle-­aged man whose predicament echoes that of Tuma’s. This man celebrates his birthday alone despite having invited guests for kaffemik. Some of those guests are even from his extended family, but they are all celebrating a confirmation elsewhere in the village, to which the elderly man is not invited. An important distinction here is less about feeling lonely and more about the permanence of loneliness and the degree to which one is lonely. There are forms or degrees of loneliness that are so extreme that they become permanent, or what psychologists might call pathological. There are other degrees of loneliness that last a few moments or perhaps persist for a day and yet can come to be meaningful and productive. An example of this would be the birthday kaffemik described in chapter 1, where the absence of the birthday girl, Naja, produced a house full of visitors, not just as if she were there but also because she wasn’t there and because her mother was longing for her. Then, there are all the many forms of loneliness in between that people produce, recall, invoke, or revoke over a month, a year, or a lifetime. However, there is another distinction to be made, which is perhaps more useful. This distinction has partly to do with the temporality of loneliness, which also seems to reveal something of the particular extremity of loneliness. In the Greenlandic language, this distinction is made by replacing the letter p with t in the word kiserliorpoq. The noun form, for “loneliness,” is kiserlio­ rneq. The root, kiser-­, refers to aloneness. The word kisermaaq refers both to an “only child” or a “singleton”; kisermaapaa means “does it/something on his or her own”; and kisermaassineq translates roughly as the monopoly or exclusivity of a company or cooperation. The affix -­lior-­refers to making or producing, as in, kaffiliorpunga (I’m making coffee) or siniffiliorpoq (She

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is making her bed). The ending -­neq is the substantive noun ending. Kiser­ liorneq thus alludes to some sort of production of aloneness: loneliness. By replacing the substantive noun ending -­neq with the third person singular ending -­poq, the adjective transforms into a verb in the third person singular, kiserliorpoq; “he lives a lonely life” would be a more or less accurate translation. To develop this verb into a noun, “someone who is lonely” (emphasizing the “someone who”), we replace the p in -­poq with a t, and the word becomes kiserliortoq. The distinction as it appears on paper is so subtle, it is barely noticeable. A few other examples may elucidate this important distinction. This same replacement of p for t occurs in the verb for fishing (aalisarpoq) and the noun for fisherman (aalisartoq); reading (atuarpoq) and a student (atua­r­ toq); hunting (piniarpoq) and a hunter (piniartoq). We could say, “Nukaraq kiserliorpoq,” which means “Nukaraq lives a lonely life” (literally, “Nukaraq lonelinesses”), while “Ivalu kiserliortoq” means “Ivalu is lonely.” The difference alludes to that between doing and being: Nukaraq does loneliness; Ivalu is lonely. Loneliness as Potential The argument I want to pursue here is that the predicament of being someone who lives in loneliness, a kiserliortoq, is not as much an actuality as it is a potential. This argument stands in contrast to the existential philosophical claim that humans, universally, are more or less programmed for loneliness and that it is through the realization of our innate loneliness that we become human. I argue instead that, at least in the case of people in Illorsuit, it is their engagement of loneliness as a potential and, as we shall see as this book progresses, their placing of this potential as part of relatedness that creates a friction of sorts between relatedness and loneliness. In philosophy and in psychosocial studies, one common definition of loneliness is that it is a product of modernity and urbanization. The more we advance technologically, the more alienated and estranged we become from one another and, more important, ourselves. As technology takes over, our houses grow larger while our families grow smaller. Being autonomous individuals in extensive urban centers, we grow increasingly anonymous and isolated from one another. In the twenty-­first century, there is little social integration except, perhaps, on social media. This trend toward isolation echoes Durkheim’s notion of egotistic suicide as an expression of a society in peril. Mobility, itself a product and a necessary concomitant of modernization and urban life, is also seen by some as a major enemy of community life and of intimate friendships. In his discussion of lonely people in the United States, Keyes (1981) depicts

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American society in disrepair, brought about by excessive individualism, generation gaps, antisocial laws, and money. Mobility, geographical as well as social, drives people away from each other. People who are always on the move toward new opportunities or to greener pastures, and thus rarely settling for long in one place, prevent themselves from getting close to others. Or as Keyes suggests, it may indeed be that we are so afraid of getting close that we move. Although “modernity” has posed certain challenges to Greenlanders throughout their recent history, invariably because it has gone hand in hand with colonialism and therefore has become known as acculturation, it is not distance and mobility that produce the type of loneliness that Keyes discusses. Until missionaries and Danish colonizers made Greenlanders settle around trade stations, Greenlanders had always been geographically mobile. Living a seminomadic lifestyle has always implied leaving some people behind or letting some join other groups—­just as it also implied letting new people join. Returning annually to the same hunting grounds and settlements certainly implies a degree of continuity, not just in terms of seasonality but also of the relatedness people would (and still do) construct with each other through hunting. In Greenland today, the infrastructure largely tallies with that of Scandinavia, and travel, though still costly, is nevertheless accessible to most of the population. People travel. Sometimes they travel because they must: for work, for education, for medical treatment at a hospital in the nearest city or in Denmark. At other times people travel for fun: for family, for holidays, or simply to get away for a while. Distance and mobility necessarily create homesickness and longing, both of which are essential for relations to prevail and for the return to be meaningful. Going back to the onset of colonization and the implementation of centralization policies, however, one could argue the reverse to Keyes’s argument: that it would not be mobility that makes Greenlanders lonely or isolated—­rather, it would be being coerced into settlements, towns, and villages; being trapped and immobile; being constrained by financial means and work commitments; having life decisions made by colonizers. Urbanization, however, need not always create alienation or isolation. An interesting anthropological study by Coleman (2009), for instance, develops the concept of urban social solitude—­being alone together—­as a trope for understanding the city, urban life, and sexuality among urbanites in New Delhi. Coleman draws an important distinction between, on the one hand, the city as inhabited by a lonely crowd of anonymous individuals who live in isolation from one another—­which is how we usually tend to understand urban loneliness—­and, on the other, the city as a space for the copresence of

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other people in solitude who use the city as a place of retreat. Urbanization and modernity may therefore not necessarily be the cause of loneliness. In fact, urbanization may produce a kind of loneliness that is not actually negative but socially productive. Whether urbanization exacerbates the human experience of loneliness or provides the opportunity for us to experience togetherness in loneliness, loneliness predates urbanization. Mijuskovic would argue that our alienation from one another brought about by modern urbanization and technology is preceded by the fact that human beings have always suffered from feelings of acute loneliness (Mijuskovic 1979). Moreover, Moustakas (1961), whose oft-­ cited work made an important distinction between “existential loneliness” and “loneliness anxiety,” would argue that the loneliness experienced as a result of modernity is, in fact, loneliness anxiety. Moustakas holds, like many others after him (Mijuskovic 1979; Deutch 1998; Wildman 1998; Dumm 2008), that loneliness is intrinsic to the human existential condition and is intimately connected to many other human experiences, such as love, relatedness, longing, and individuality. For Moustakas, existential loneliness is a productive and creative process, whereas what he calls loneliness anxiety is a pathological, paralyzing condition. He draws on Thomas Wolfe’s famous essay “God’s Lonely Man” of an unknown date, in which Wolfe did not describe his loneliness to be curious or peculiar to him alone but universal and an inevitable fact of human existence.1 To Wolfe and Moustakas, loneliness is an inevitable part of what makes us human. It is not the experience of what we lack but rather a description of what we are. It is an essential condition for our human creativity. It is out of the dark depths of despair and the realization of utter loneliness that we as humans come to discover and find new ways of being, experiencing, and living. Loneliness anxiety, on the other hand, instead of being the true and inevitable form of loneliness from which humans (can) grow, is rather an insidious fear of loneliness, which Moustakas associates with modernity: “The fear of loneliness is an acute problem today because man has lost his world and he has lost his experience of neighbourliness and community life. He experiences a feeling of alienation from the human world about him and he suffers from a corroding feeling of estrangement” (Moustakas 1961, 25). He continues: “Modern man is plagued with the vague, diffuse fear of loneliness. He goes to endless measures, takes devious and circuitous pathways to avoid facing the experience of being lonely” (Moustakas 1961, 26–­27). People in “modern society” with “loneliness anxiety” are not actually lonely, argues Moustakas. They are the people who always yearn for relatedness to others but will never fully experience it, for their fear is paralyzing and they cannot form meaningful bonds with anyone.

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Just as they will never fully experience “existential loneliness”—­loneliness in its purest form—­and therefore neither will they experience themselves. They are paralyzed and estranged from one another and from themselves. In other words, they are dehumanized. Although Greenlanders obviously regard the concept of kiserliortoq as a terrifying and potential image, and although they indeed do refer to it frequently without perhaps ever actually experiencing it, my argument here is that—­conversely to Moustakas—­people’s fear of loneliness does not prevent them from experiencing relatedness. On the contrary, it is precisely because of people’s fear of a life in loneliness that they cherish making and living fundamentally meaningful kinship relations and allow these relations to be central to the way that people relate. The Illorsuarmiut approach to loneliness therefore shares some similarity with the Aristotelian claim that “the man who is isolated—­who is unable to share in the benefits of the political association or has no need to share because he is already self-­sufficient—­is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god” (Politics 1253a, quoted in Mijuskovic 1979). Aristotle’s claim seems to imply two things. The first is that humans are not capable of seeking out loneliness or living a life in loneliness or isolation on purpose. As humans we are social (political, communal) beings, and seeking loneliness and self-­sufficiency in this way would be, by Aristotle’s reckoning, unhuman. Therefore, a successful move toward loneliness could never be the act of a human person. The second thing Aristotle seems to imply by his claim is less obvious. It draws on the existential position that humans are universally and fundamentally lonely, and therefore it is through the experience and realization of our fundamental loneliness that our humanness is realized. We must therefore be able to feel loneliness. A human who has never felt loneliness, as Mijuskovic (1979) points out, could only be a beast or a god. To Mijuskovic, like other existential philosophers of loneliness, loneliness is not something humans choose or have chosen. It is rather something into which we are born and something we struggle against from the moment we are born until we die. Loneliness is a necessary evil, which we must experience and feel, because our experience of loneliness—­just like our experience of love, grief, longing, and life—­is part of making us human. This is what is meant by the idea of loneliness as a human condition. It is our recognition of our own existential loneliness that activates us as social humans and drives us to seek companionship and togetherness with one another. In this way, we always seek to escape our inherent loneliness but, crucially, we must constantly see ourselves as existentially lonely for our social relations and human nature to be genuine and meaningful.

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To some extent, people in Illorsuit might agree with the first part of the postulation: that anyone who seeks solitude, with the intent of existing outside society, must be either a god or a beast. Indeed, people who live alone or have very few kin (such as an anthropologist on fieldwork), as we saw in the previous chapter, are to be pitied and are encouraged to visit. Moreover, as we shall see in the next chapter, seeking solitude in this manner is not the doing of a beast (or a god) but in fact, the making of a beast: a qivittoq. Seeking solitude in this extreme and transformative way is entirely possible for a human person, but he or she would not remain human. Loneliness of this extremity and permanence changes humans to unhumans.2 To Mijuskovic, it is futile to distinguish among solitude, loneliness, aloneness, and other associated kinds of loneliness. None of these states will be better or worse, more or less productive than the other. He argues that making distinctions in loneliness is really a distraction from the fact that, regardless of the nomenclature, these distinctions merely reflect our own fears and our blindness to the fact that being human, we are all existentially lonely, and that it is ultimately the same primordial loneliness we are attempting to position in relation to itself. I would contend, however, that for Greenlanders, loneliness can be classified into degrees and types. Some kinds of loneliness are dangerous and destructive; others are positive and productive; and some are even necessary for relatedness, as we shall see. There are permanent and personhood-­altering types of loneliness, and there are ones that are temporary and fleeting. There are the types of loneliness that are necessary for the development of what it means to be a human person. And there are the kinds of loneliness that should be avoided but nevertheless demonstrate what can become of anyone who expects too much, becomes disappointed, and ultimately ends up becoming irrevocably lonely. In Greenlandic terms, it would make little sense to argue that what makes us human, above all else, is the recognition of our own inherent loneliness. In fact, what separates humans, not from nonhumans but from unhuman beings such as the qivittoq, is precisely this loneliness. For humans, loneliness is potential, and for unhumans, it is inherent and existential. Moreover, we could also argue that the inherent loneliness that makes for the human condition is only really possible once we acknowledge, feel, long, or pine for relatedness. Would loneliness really be anything at all if there were no such thing as relatedness? Might we not just as well argue, then, that it is relatedness that is inherent to us as human persons and that it is the temporary collapse or disappointment of relatedness that makes us feel and experience loneliness rather than inherent loneliness itself? Let us return to the question of potentiality. In his work on potentiality,

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Agamben (1999) argues that the concept of potentiality is conventionally understood as that which is opposed to the actual. Whatever is potential will or may eventually be actualized. That which is potential is not yet actual, but it is bound to become actual through a principle of development. This supposition is an Aristotelian hangover, argues Agamben. The pairing of the potential and the actual is not merely a pairing but also a conflation, which inevitably will make the potential cease to be. In this sense, nothing could ever really remain as potential since potentiality would inevitably be actualized. If I argue, for instance, that loneliness for most people is potential, this would also imply that loneliness will be actualized, or realized, for humans. I have already shown how loneliness for Illorsuarmiut is as intangible and contested, as it is something to be addressed and claimed in various ways. However, this opposition between the potential and the actual, and the trajectory from potential to actual, would reduce loneliness to something that is inescapable. Humans would be programmed for loneliness, similar to what Mijuskovic and Moustakas have argued: that it is our true realization and experience of our own loneliness that makes us human; as though loneliness is both prior, primordial, subsequent, and also the ultimate destiny of human relatedness. Although Greenlanders often talk about loneliness and address the subject in various ways and contexts, they are not lonely people. On the contrary, living in loneliness, as we have already seen, is rare in Greenland. It usually occurs under extreme or highly unusual circumstances: for example, a wife and mother is suddenly cursed for no particular reason and endures a long, protracted progression into living a life in loneliness. Nevertheless, people find different ways of addressing loneliness, and there is a sense of magnetic tension between loneliness as potential and as relatedness, each suspended in time and space. That tension, to live in loneliness, remains potential and for most Greenlanders is never actualized. Agamben (1999) distances himself from the Aristotelian definition of the potential as a precursor for actuality. The potential can be either “existing potentiality” (178), which emphasizes the capacity of, for example, a poet who has potential to write a poem or a carpenter who has potential to build a bookcase. Or it can be “generic potentiality” (178), which refers to the way a child or pupil learns and, in the process, becomes something or someone else. It is the former kind of potentiality that interests Agamben, since both the writer and the carpenter have the choice to not write the poem or not build the bookcase: they each have the potential to not actualize their potential. For something to be truly potential, it must exist as potential and persevere as potential, and it does so through its power to not be. At the heart of potentiality

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lies impotentiality, and it is this that makes potentiality persevere and thus makes whatever is potential become its own actuality. Following this line of thinking, I regard the predicament of being a kiserlior­ toq as a kind of existential potentiality. What makes loneliness a potent image is not the fact that it actualizes all the time. Rather, it is the fact that it actualizes only rarely—­for instance, under obscure circumstances, as in suicides, in grief, or when someone encounters a qivittoq in the landscape. Anyone has the potential to be or become lonely, and what manifests it as a persevering potential is people’s choice to not be or not become lonely. It is the impotentiality of a life in loneliness that suspends loneliness and actualizes it as potential. Seeking Loneliness on the Land The Greenlandic landscape or land (nuna) stands in sharp contrast to the built areas of the villages, towns, and cities. The land is everywhere, and one does not have to go far away from the built areas to reach it. There are no fields or woods or any other visible human-­made structures such as roads, paths, or railways to guide a person from one inhabited place to the next. To get to places and to other humans, one must take a plane or helicopter, boat, or ship, and in winter, a snowmobile or dogsled. To Southerners, the land usually appears untouched, wild, and pure—­and, indeed, there is a long tradition in the history of exploration, and now in modern media, of portraying the Arctic as such. For the people who live there, however, the land is not a wilderness; it is a home. In this vast land that, in a traveler’s eyes, is filled with prehistoric as well as historic events, lives were and are still being lived. If we were to really follow through with Mauss’s location of the land on the outside and therefore also the geographical setting of profane detachment, arguably then Greenlanders would never get anything done, nor would the land be a workplace, nor a natural larder. However, in many ways his argument is not so different from the philosophers’ postulate, which is that there seems to be a natural movement or drive between loneliness and relatedness. But whereas the philosophers’ approach is primarily a move toward loneliness and not away from it, Mauss’s approach is back and forth—­always driving people back into heightened and absent forms of sociality. Mauss never actually went to the Arctic, however, so he therefore made the common mistake of assuming that the Greenlandic landscape would be a barren wilderness and thus confused the forms of sociality Inuit might experience there through loneliness, detachment, or a “profane existence.” I have not seen anywhere in Greenland where the land readily denotes a place of

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detachment, at least not in Mauss’s sense, where being on the land, even for a summer, is equated with a dangerous or profane kind of loneliness. Rather, it is true that for most people, the land is a place where people experience personal freedom. In Greenland, in particular, the sea (imaq) is as much a part of the world outside the confines of the built area as the land. The sea is the bridge between the mainland and other islands, and in Illorsuit, it is the only way off the island; by boat in summer and by dogsled or snowmobile in winter. It is a site of activity, an infrastructure, and a medium through which a number of other activities and goals are made possible. “Seeking loneliness on the land,” or inuillivoq, is a form of loneliness that is usually thought of as healthy and necessary for a person’s mental health. It allows people to experience a freedom not available in villages and cities and to gather strength (nakussatsipoq) from being active on the land and accessing the “power that resides in nature” (pinngortitarsuap nukungi). In Illorsuit, people with personal problems, or people like Tuma who sometimes drink excessively, sought resolution sometimes by taking trips (angalaarpoq) away to fish or hunt and at other times by seeking freedom or solitude. One woman from a nearby city once told me about how she recovered from her own suicide attempt and how she rid herself of her wish to die. Taking long walks close to a glacier, pondering and contrasting its strength against her own weakened state, was how she eventually regained her vigor and happiness. Karla rationalized that rather than spending most of one’s time in the settlement, it upholds one’s strength to go on trips, to go boating, to spend time on the land, and it also keeps you warm; just as eating Greenlandic food (kalaalimerngit) does or, indeed, having visitors, especially children, is said to keep you warm. “You see Tuma,” Karla said, “he doesn’t have a boat anymore. He sold that a long time ago.” As for his rifle, that too had been sold, or it had broken; in any case, he no longer had one—­not one for large game or seals or even one intended for birds and small game. The fact that Tuma did not have a boat meant that he was isolated within the village and overly depen­ dent on others in a number of ways. Not being able to get off the island on which Illorsuit was located also meant not being able to go hunting when he needed or wanted to. He would always have to ask to join others or wait to be invited. Not having a rifle, more important, meant not being able to provide food for himself and his wife. He would either have to wait for a share from his extended family—­his cousins and uncles—­or he would have to buy in the shop some imported Danish food, which was tasteless and lacked the power (pikkunaappoq) to sustain one physically or psychologically. Equally as important was the fact that he would have nothing to share with others, which meant that the shares he would receive were essentially handouts. In addition,

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buying imported food is expensive. Being unemployed and unable to catch and trade halibut and spending most of one’s income on beer and imported food renders daily life difficult. Relations become strained, as one becomes overdependent on others while remaining separated from them because of the drinking. During the winter months, darkness sets in and closes in around the village. It is not until after Christmas when the sun returns and the sea ice (siku) freezes that people can get off the island without a boat. However, due to global climate change, the sea ice is becoming more and more unpredictable, and it does not set as thickly as before. Furthermore, it no longer sets like it used to on the side of the island that opens out onto the strait and open waters. This means that someone like Tuma is still restricted in getting off the island, where he can go, and what sort of hunting or fishing he can do. One winter after he and his wife returned from alcohol rehab, he quickly saved up enough money to buy a low-­caliber rifle to hunt birds and small game. Although he didn’t have a boat, or dogs and sled, the sea ice to the north of the island meant that he was still able to go hunting for ptarmigan and snow hare, and he could do a bit of ice fishing for uuaq (Greenlandic cod).3 His strength and confidence grew and continued to do so until he and his wife again began drinking and yet again started selling off their belongings. We would expect a village to stand for sociality, warmth, closeness, and good. Conversely, we would expect the land and what appears to the armchair traveler from the South as vast, pure, untouched, and pristine nature to stand for harshness, cold, and loneliness. We would also imagine or locate loneliness to be outside the village on the land (nuna) or nature (pinngorti­ tarsuaq), where there is nothing but stillness, animals, and qivittut (plural of qivittoq). Certainly, this is what Mauss did in Seasonal Variations (discussed in chapter 1), where he argued that to cope with the closeness of one another during winter, Inuit had to disperse during summer and seek isolation. Being on the land, for the purpose of social dispersal—­referred to as a “profane existence”—­was, in other words, a necessary evil. And although some people do describe being on the land as liberating and do experience a freedom or independence (kifaanngisuseq) not found elsewhere, there is an element of lonely desolation to it, as we shall explore in the next chapter.

3

Persons Apart

People in Illorsuit turn away from one another in many ways and for many reasons. Most of these turns away are harmless and are inevitable in everyday life. Hunters go away hunting or fishing for days or weeks at a time; teenagers go to school in the city after the age of confirmation at fourteen or fifteen years old; and before that, when ten or eleven years old, many of them will have already spent three months in Denmark on an exchange program, attending school and living with Danish host families. People who have violated the law will usually spend some time in an open detention center in one of the cities. Some people will undertake treatment in a hospital in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Others will have to go as far away as the university hospital in Copenhagen for treatments that are unavailable in Greenland. Then there are the small turns away that people do all the time in arguments and disputes. They may stop talking to each other for a while or stop visiting each other as a result of a disagreement. They may even stop addressing or talking about each other as kin. Or relations may simply fizzle out naturally. In general, the people of Illorsuit move in and out of one another’s circles and households all the time, and so relations and relatives are sometimes more relevant than others. This chapter focuses on some of the regularized, yet quite extreme, ways that people turn away or cross a threshold into a liminal state of magnified and obscured loneliness: for example, via the annual custom of mitaartut, which will be described in the next section, or as personified by an angakkoq (shaman). Although they don’t do so often, people may also cross this threshold into loneliness proper by permanently walking into the landscape and becoming what is known as a qivittoq—­someone who has turned away. The anthropology of thresholds usually characterizes a threshold as a liminal space of obscurity and disorientation. Victor Turner’s (1974) work on ritual, for instance, initiates

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how a state of being betwixt and between is defined as being on the threshold. Thresholds are neither here nor there. Thresholds collapse time and space with identity and ordinary social order. But thresholds are usually temporary states, offering resolution at the end or enabling society to be renewed and then to proceed as before. Sometimes liminality is not merely temporary; rather, it is a permanent state that tends to be associated with people who live spatially or socially on the edge of society: hermits, monks, pastors, or shamans. The threshold, which we might understand as the site of liminality, invites an investigation both of what lies on the other side of it and of what happens to people who move across it. For ritual liminars, the liminal period is temporary and will nearly always offer reintegration back into society as before or, as in the case of initiates in a rite of passage, offer a new state—­adulthood. Yet the threshold, I venture, can also mark a divide, which, if crossed, will result in no return or reintegration. As we shall see, this is the case for the qivittoq. The qivittoq comes into being when an ordinary human person crosses the threshold into loneliness and roams the wilderness in the kind of loneliness from which there is no return, neither to society nor to humanity. Mitaartut During the days after Christmas, usually from the second of January until and especially on the eve of Epiphany on the sixth of January, Greenlanders celebrate the holiday of Mitaartut. Mitaarneq means to be disguised; and mitaartut is the plural form of the word for a person who is disguised, mitaartoq. During Mitaartut, people dress up and completely cover their faces with masks, face paint, long wigs, or pieces of cloth. Everyone should be entirely unrecognizable and appear grotesque and frightening. The main celebration of Mitaartut falls on the last evening of the Christmas period and, as such, marks the threshold between a period of heightened sociality, closeness, and light and the darkness of quotidian life above the Arctic Circle in January. After the sun sets for the last time in November, a heavy blanket of darkness smothers almost all light. The moon and stars reflecting onto the slowly setting sea ice and the vast pillows of snow may turn the dark to a navy-­blue dusk. On the many cloudy days in winter, feeble electric light from a few lampposts dispersed throughout the village combines with dim rays streaming from the windows of the houses and casts some light onto the snow-­covered ground. On the first Sunday in Advent, however, the village suddenly becomes engulfed in light and warmth. People decorate their houses with electric lights, inside and out. They dig out little caves in the snow and place candles there. They invest in large glowing plastic Santa Clauses and snowmen waving their arms from

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rooftops. An immense Christmas tree, donated and shipped in by a friendship city in Denmark, is lit immediately after the Advent service. Schoolchildren sing a carol they have rehearsed at school, and the village choir sings one or two religious hymns before everyone stomps over to the cemetery to sing Advent hymns there too. Households hang star-­shaped lamps in their windows, which shine out into the winter darkness for the entire Christmas month, right up until midnight of the sixth of January, when all lights are switched off. The next day, all Christmas decorations, sparkly garlands, candles, and Christmas wreaths are quickly removed and packed away. Darkness again engulfs the settlement. Everything suddenly looks and feels empty, dark, and cold. The warmth of Christmas has gone. It is on this evening that most people dress up and the Mitaartut activity intensifies. Some of the mitaartut will be lurking in the shadows around the houses. Sometimes loud screams, echoed by howling dogs, pierce the stillness as groups of children and young adults are chased down a path by a mitaartoq (who as the real person underneath may be male or female but in this persona is considered truly disguised, genderless; an “it”). Suddenly the mitaartoq stops in its tracks and disappears into the shadows behind a house, where it then proceeds to lurk by the window. It might tap on the windowpane ever so gently, yet loud enough for the family inside to turn down the television or radio, to hush and listen for another tap. The young people outside now realize that they are no longer being chased and disperse into groups to try to find and surround the mitaartoq. Another mitaartoq appears. And another. This one creeps along the ground, with a pillow stuffed under its clothes so that it resembles a hunchback. It is dragging one of its legs on the ground, and likewise its whip. It appears to be a grotesque hunter. We can’t make out its face. It is painted black and has what looks like a nylon stocking pulled over the head. Over the stocking, the mitaartoq wears a fur-­trimmed hood with the strings drawn tight around the face. A girl from a group of the teenagers notices the mitaartoq. At first she screams, but then she grows daring and yells mockingly, “Smelly mitaartoq! Ugly mitaartoq!” The group cheers and applauds her by laughing loudly. They laugh until the other mitaartoq emerges from the shadows. This mitaartoq is silent and never utters a word, whereas the one who is dragging its leg and whip on the ground suddenly screams. The group shrieks and the silent mitaartoq sets off through the village. The chase resumes through the settlement; first the mitaartoq chases the group; then the group chases the mitaartoq. Meanwhile the hunchback mitaartoq knocks on a door. The door opens and the mitaartoq goes inside. The chase continues outside with new mitaartut joining in. Old

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people, including Therecia and Mikaali (the couple whom I introduced in chapter 1), know better than to linger outside too long this evening. They hurriedly walk through the darkness on their way home from visiting because, after all, one can’t help sneaking a peek to see how many mitaartut are about. Those who are indoors this evening will receive visits from mitaartut, who may have spied through the windows before knocking loudly with a stick on the door until someone opens. Unlike the mocking and frightened groups of youths outside, the host acts with bemusement and surprise at this unrecognized visitor. The disguised visitor is never invited inside like other ordinary visitors, nor is he offered coffee or a chair. There is reason for caution, and to diffuse any tension there might be with strangers, the host offers the mitaartoq guarded hospitality. A stranger is also an outsider and should therefore be treated with care to prevent any tension or hostility escalating. The mitaartoq stands in the hallway or the kitchen. Without uttering a single comprehensible word, it groans, moans, and stomps loudly into the floor with its feet or its cane while the host wonders aloud and searches for something edible or drinkable to offer the mitaartoq: “Who are you, mitaartoq?” or “Have I seen you somewhere before? Yes, I think I recognize you, you look very familiar,” or “I don’t think I have ever met you before, mitaartoq.” All while, the stomping, groaning, swaying of the body, and banging of the stick continue. The mitaartoq extends a plastic bag, signaling to the host to hurry up and fetch something. Some hosts are prepared for the visit. They offer a generous tray of sweets, in the style of the North American tradition of Halloween trick or treat. Most hosts act surprised and rummage through the fridge and kitchen cupboards for something consumable: a soda, a beer, some frozen meat, leftovers, sweets, cake, cigarettes, or whale skin (mattak). Virtually anything consumable can be placed in the mitaartoq’s bag, while the mitaartoq continues to sway and stomp. Suddenly it turns on its heels and promptly exits. Kleivan (1960) traces the historical roots of the ritual Mitaartut and locates it as part of a wider Inuit tradition related to the Sea Woman, or Sedna, cult. As such, mitaartut today may be a remnant of pre-­Christian wife exchanges, mask dances, and ritual imitation of sexual and erotic acts. During times of famine, these rituals were performed to appease Sedna, the Sea Woman, and persuade her to release the seals (Birket-­Smith 1924, 402). It is plausible, therefore, that these old mask dance traditions have been assimilated into eighteenth-­century Danish Epiphany customs where young men on Twelfth Night wear masks, go caroling, and beg for (and receive) food and money. The old Inuit tradition may also have morphed into the modern Christmas Eve ritual when a group of people walk from door to door throughout the night

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singing two Greenlandic Christmas hymns and reading parts of the Christmas story from the Gospel according to Luke, after which they are invited inside for refreshments. Nuttall (1992, 112–­14) argues that our understanding of the figure of the mitaartoq should be located not so much in the context of cultural history but rather within the broader framework of belonging and community—­as a model of the nonideal (or even anti-­ideal) to everyday visiting patterns. In sharp contrast to the warmth and closeness at Christmas—­when all households have visited and been visited; have shared, sung, and laughed—­mitaartut represents the outside, the stranger, hesitant forms of sharing and visiting and creating temporary social bonds. Hosts and mitaartut gingerly attempt to establish bonds of familiarity with each other, thus partly underscoring the importance of relatedness, while acknowledging that both strangers and loneliness are dangerous. Mitaartut marks the end of Christmas. When Christmas is over, all Christmas lights are removed. The electric Advent stars that glow in most windows throughout the Christmas month are removed with almost choreographed precision at midnight on the fifth of January. Winter darkness suddenly engulfs the village again. Illorsuit reverts to being a regular place where strangers, separation, and loneliness may yet again enter the everyday realm of each person. Mitaartut marks this threshold and exemplifies this pattern, or move, in a regularized way. It is a safe and temporary way for people to play with the concepts of loneliness for one night by becoming, or being faced with, a stranger and outsider. Simultaneously it is a lesson in hesitant hospitality, even toward people one does not and cannot recognize. This hospitality is not concerned with making the stranger known or the unknowable known. A mitaartoq is never invited inside or offered a chair or coffee or conversation in order to establish recognizability and relatedness, such as with ordinary strangers, whose faces are visible and who almost certainly will be invited inside. The mitaartoq remains disguised and unrecognizable, and except for the gifts of food, the awkward visit offers no resolution other than appeasement. Moreover, no resolution is required because, in essence, the crossing that the mitaartoq makes is only a game. It is a time in which not only the mitaartut but also the whole village is in a liminal state between awkward relatedness and not quite loneliness. The Angakkoq Since the official religion of Greenland today is Lutheran Christianity, the angakkoq (shaman) has ceased to hold the significant position he or she used to. Early missionaries, whose main objective it was to spread the Lutheran gospel, slowly but surely exterminated the importance of the angakkoq, not

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merely by introducing the Christian rite of baptism in the community but, more important, by removing the need or use for the angakkoq among the Greenlanders at large. Convincing people to denounce their belief system and replace it with another, and to do so with such conviction, is not something that happened overnight. This conversion meant changing a whole worldview: making some spirits redundant, introducing such characters as God, Jesus, Moses, Adam, and Eve, and thus banishing and replacing many of the existing Greenlandic religious beings and practitioners. It also involved convincing entire populations of villages to denounce their beliefs, which missionaries likened to devil worship, and in the case of the angakkut (plural of angakkoq), it meant convincing them to cease their practice as well. The angakkoq’s existence can be characterized as a life spent partly in the spirit world and partly in the human world, and it is for this reason that he or she has been described as a person who is liminal, or half hidden (Merkur 1992). Unlike other humans, the angakkoq would have performed the extraor­ dinary task of crossing the threshold between the two worlds, and thus was able to see, hear, and do things that other humans could not. By entering a trance, the angakkoq had access to the spirit world. An angakkoq’s success depended on his or her ability to diagnose and heal illness, repel (and cast) spells and curses, counteract famine and bad hunting, and address other forms of ill fate in the human world. Usually such tasks would be achieved by entering the spirit world through a trance to negotiate or battle with the spirits. During times of prolonged bad hunting, powerful angakkut would be able to enter a trance and travel to the bottom of the sea to appease Sassuma Arnaa, or Arnaqquassaaq, the Mother of the Sea (the same being described in the previous section as Sedna, the Sea Woman, as she is known in Artic Canada1), whose hair had become entangled with all the animals of the sea. Since she had neither comb nor fingers to tidy her hair, which would release the animals from it, she would toss and turn her body from side to side in frustration, causing immense waves and storms in the sea surface. She had lost her fingers as a result of her father’s disappointment that she had refused all the men he had found for her. Instead, she married a dog, became pregnant, and gave birth to a large litter: some human, others canine in appearance.2 Frustrated that her husband was a dog and therefore was unable to feed her and her kin group, her father threw her overboard one day while they were paddling a boat across the water. She grabbed onto the railing of the boat and endeavored to pull herself back in to safety, but her father grabbed his knife and cut off her fingers, and she sank down to the bottom of the sea. Her fingers became sea animals—­seals, whales, and walruses—­while she herself came to live on as probably the most important deity in Inuit religion

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and lore. It was the task of the angakkoq to comb Arnaqquassaaq’s hair and untangle and cleanse it from all the taboos that had been broken by humans and gotten stuck in her hair, along with all the animals. Inuit society was traditionally egalitarian and usually did not have leaders or chiefs. The angakkoq, however, was often as important in political matters as he or she was for ritual practices. For instance, if someone had broken certain taboos, it would be the angakkoq’s job to appease the spirits and to try to prevent them being broken again. He or she could also serve as a mediator or broker between disputing parties. The angakkoq might concoct amulets to give to people as protection against spirit attacks or curses; or he or she might carve a tupilak out of bone—­a grotesque little figurine, which today is mainly a tourist artifact, but once would have contained the soul or spirit of a dead ancestor—­and direct it toward an enemy. The angakkoq would cast the tupilak into the sea, and then it would seek out the enemy it was intended for and kill that person. The angakkoq was knowledgeable in areas that ordinary humans were not and had the skills to manipulate situations in this world, by reaching into another world that was out of bounds to other humans. Although generally respected, people were also apprehensive about angakkut because they could (and some did) use their powers for evil and self-­interest at the expense of others (Jakobsen 1999, 49, 72; 2001, 60). However, this is not what set an angakkoq apart from other humans. The very process by which he or she became an angakkoq was one of complete separation from human society and from life itself. It is impossible to be specific here because the transformation of an ordinary human person into an angakkoq involved a number of processes that varied widely according to time and region. Nevertheless, a period of separation and loneliness by going out in the land, away from other humans, which is almost universal in the Arctic, was essential for the angakkoq to acquire the necessary helping spirits (Merkur 1992 188; Jakobsen 2001, 48). These ventures involved periodic loneliness and a marked separation from the human world and from the world of the living. As is broadly true for shamanism throughout the world, an angakkoq did not ordinarily “choose” to become an angakkoq; rather, the spirits chose him or her. For example, a young man coming of age might unexpectedly experience a series of vivid dreams in which his helping spirit (toornaq) would call him forth (Birket-­Smith 1927, 187). He could then choose whether to act on this call or not—­although ignoring this call would usually have negative repercussions. In this sense, then, an angakkoq wouldn’t really have much choice in becoming an angakkoq or not. A good angakkoq would have many helping spirits, and acquiring them would involve his or her own death and resurrection. He or she would seek out his toornaq (helping spirit) in a place located

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near a toornaq rock, or close to the shore between land and a body of water: lake, stream, or sea. After some time, the angakkoq apprentice’s toornaq—­a being that Lutheran missionaries soon correlated with the devil—­would appear and the angakkoq apprentice would experience a violent battering. Some apprentices would experience being repeatedly thrown up in the air and then crashing to the ground, each time being injured a little bit more. Others would feel that they were held down under the water by the toornaq and drowned. Still others would experience being eaten by the toornaq and having their bones spat out onto the ground. After these ordeals, the apprentice would lie naked and dead—­sometimes for days—­until his or her toornaq eventually brought him or her back to life, not as an ordinary human person but as an angakkoq (Boas [1888] 1964, 1983–­86; Kleivan and Sonne 1985, 25; Merkur 1992, 10–­11; Jakobsen 1999, ch. 3; 2001, 47–­48). Today, even the smallest village has a church and, if not a minister or sacristan, then someone partially ordained who can undertake Sunday services and other tasks necessary for the everyday running of the church. Prior to the eradication of shamanism, the angakkoq had a multitude of roles: solving interpersonal disputes, treating illnesses, circumventing curses and spirit possession, and preventing periods of famine. Most of these areas of practice have now been taken over by the state and its official professions. The police and judicial system solve disputes; doctors, hospitals, and Western medicine treat illnesses; mental health practitioners deal with psychological issues; welfare policies and an infrastructure of food imports ensure that people don’t go without food. Besides, the hunting quotas enforced by politicians on the advice of biologists ensure, at least in theory, that animal stocks remain sizable and access to hunting them reasonable. Lutheran churches provide pastoral care and religious purpose within the communities, aiding, Aqqalu revealed one afternoon, that the soul (tarneq) to become less heavy and less gray. People do not deny their past per se, but since the practice of an angakkoq was so different from the work of a Lutheran minister or a sacristan, and their modus operandi in such contrasting realms, the figure of the angakkoq and everything he or she would have represented, including his or her loneliness, has been engulfed by a great deal of stigma and taboo. This is not to suggest however, that the angakkoq or the world he or she mediated have no bearing on the way that people today approach life and the world around them. The notion of the return is one that predates Christianity and one that continues to be relevant in the everyday life of many Illorsuarmiut. In recent years, particularly since the self-­government process came into effect, curiosity and public conversations about the spiritual world and the shamanic past have become more pronounced. There has also been an upsurge in neo-­angakkut,

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spiritual healers, and dream analysts, who do not occupy the same central position that their predecessors did but are nevertheless frequented by people with questions and physical, social and psychological ailments. The Qivittoq The most extreme form of loneliness that a human person can experience is to wander into the land alone, intending never to return to society. Far from settling there to live a hermit’s life in silence and empowering solitude, the wanderer eventually returns—­some say in less than a week—­and is transformed into what is known as a qivittoq. As a qivittoq, he (or occasionally she3) possesses extraordinary powers, such as flight, invisibility, the ability to speak to animals, and an unnaturally long life. Some qivittoq even achieve immortality. Above all, what defines a qivittoq is his loneliness, his anger, and his hunger for vengeance on ordinary humans who had disappointed him in one way or another, causing him to flee human society. This chapter locates the state of being truly kiserliortoq (someone who is lonely or lives in loneliness) and without kin in the figure of the qivittoq rather than in any ordinary human. And yet, the qivittoq is a form of being that any human can become or a kind of personhood that any human person can acquire. It was not uncommon in earlier times for young men to turn their backs on the human world and go off to live on the land, never to return (Parbøl 1955; Kleivan and Sonne 1985, 21; Mikkelsen 1998), especially those who were angry, irrevocably embarrassed, or disappointed in love or in other relationships. Those who did, people believed, became qivittut (plural of qivittoq). Sikkersoq explained to me that the disappointment of the qivittoq usually stems from his not being allowed to marry the girl with whom he had fallen in love. He might well have been involved in irresolvable disputes or exchanges of harsh words that could not be taken back. He may have been insulted unforgivably or, indeed, he himself may have said unforgivable things. Such explanations are reflected in the ethnographic records of Hinrich Rink in the late nineteenth century (Rink [1875] 1997) and in the earliest missionary accounts, such as the 1735 diaries of Hans Egede’s two sons, in which the qivittoq is mentioned briefly in a case of marital disappointment (Ostermann and Egede 1939, 171). Another case concerns a young woman who pressurized one of the Egede brothers, saying that if he did not bring her along on his travels to Copenhagen, she would leave and become a qivittoq (Ostermann and Egede 1939, 206). Filled with disappointment (Mikkelsen 1998, 108), either from being spoken to harshly or from being turned down in marriage and the sudden conviction that he has become a public laughingstock, a young man may leave the settlement.

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Because of his disappointment, feelings of anger and resentment toward family members and the community become so intense and entrenched that the only solution for him is to depart to roam the mountains in loneliness and become a qivittoq. This practice of turning away permanently (qivippoq) is known throughout the Arctic in numerous variations. According to Robert Petersen (2006), Greenland is the only place where this practice becomes the beginning of another form of life (as a qivittoq) rather than being the definitive end of life. During an initial “trial period” of five days when the young man is unable to eat or drink—­all prey escapes him, and every stream dries out (Parbøl 1955, 457–­458)—­he is free to return to the settlement at any point. Others have told me that during these initial five days, people search the land for the fugitive to capture him and attempt to bring him back. After this five-­day period, he crosses the irrevocable threshold whereby he loses his names and thereby loses an essential part of his human personhood. Whereas the names of other dead people return to society when bestowed on newborn infants, the name of a qivittoq does not usually return because it is contaminated. Now the young man is able to drink and hunt again, and he must become completely self-­reliant since he is self-­condemned to a life in loneliness as a qivittoq. Although he remains in his human body form, the qivittoq can transform into a ghostlike being with a macabre physical appearance. He gains the aforementioned extraordinary powers and abilities: invisibility, flight, the ability to talk to animals, and an unnaturally long life. The qivittoq always seeks to avenge his disappointment, sometimes on individuals in the community from which he has fled but usually on all humankind. The word qivittoq translates into Danish as fjeldgænger, which in English loosely means “mountain wanderer.” This is what a qivittoq does: he wanders over the mountains—­or, more precisely, over the land—­in loneliness and can never return to human society or to genuine human form. In Greenlandic, however, the root of the word qivittoq is taken from its opposite word, qiviarpoq, which translates as “someone who faces people” or “someone who turns one’s gaze toward other people.” A qivittoq has turned his gaze away. He does not face people as ordinary humans do, and through this turning away, he achieves the archetypical loneliness, which characterizes him as an antihuman person. Elsewhere in the Arctic, the similar word qiviktuk can mean “disappointed” (according to Jean Briggs, cited in I. Lynge 1985). Being disappointed, lonely, angered, offended, detached, and rejected are all states of being we might easily ascribe to the qivittoq and which say much more about the character than the Danish translation. On Baffin Island in the 1960s, the word qivituk denoted

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the self-­detachment of a person who is not powerful enough to face a particular problem and who thus turns his back on his community (Graburn 1969, 48). This self-­imposed exile sometimes lasted for a short period, after which he would return to his home. Other times, it could last forever, as when he went off to live with another group of people or into the wilderness to die. For some Baffin Islanders, the word qivituk had become synonymous with suicide, since walking into the wilderness alone surely implied death. Although the acts of walking into the land with the intent of becoming a qivittoq and the act of suicide have certain similarities, not least in terms of causality, people in Illorsuit and Greenlanders in general treat these as distinct categories and practices. As far back as the early the eighteenth century, the practice of walking into the wilderness presented a delicate problem to the Christian missionaries. For one thing, it meant that there were “heathens” unaccounted for on the land. In addition, from the missionaries’ point of view, allowing people to leave in this way would be tantamount to condoning suicide. Alongside outlawing the shamanic practices, which resulted in the slow decline of the role of the angakkoq, the missionaries also made the practice of walking into the wilderness illegal. Today, these practices have been all but abandoned. The most recent case I heard of was of a local young man from a neighboring village some sixty kilometers away from Illorsuit who walked away in the 1970s. He left his village peers with the words, “I will always be angry with you here, but not with people in Illorsuit, because the Illorsuarmiut have always treated me kindly.” This qivittoq still returns to his village, concealed by the thick polar winter darkness, to steal food, dogs, and clothes. His mother, who is still alive, allegedly leaves food and clothes out for him at the outskirts of the village. While the practice of walking into the land may have ceased, people still encounter, see, hear, and not least talk about qivittut on a regular basis. It would therefore be incorrect to say that the practice of qivittut no longer exists. Qivittut are the topic of many stories people tell as they huddle together in the village during winter or in a summer campsite as the children fall asleep at night. These stories act as a means of socialization for children who need to learn about the values, limits, and dangers of relatedness, the land, and loneliness. Strange and mysterious occurrences are usually explained by blaming the malicious figure of the qivittoq. Karla, Nukaraq, and I were listening to a radio program one evening. A man from the southern part of the region telephoned in to tell his story. He reported that he and two other hunters had gone by boat into the fjords around Aasiat on a caribou hunt. They had moored their three boats securely, as they always did, and proceeded to walk inland to find a good campsite to pitch their tents. They returned to their boats a few days later and prepared to leave with their catch and belongings.

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As they each started their outboard motors, they realized that something was amiss. Despite pushing the accelerator handles, none of the boats moved. One by one the hunters turned off their motors and tipped them up to see what was wrong. All the motors were missing their propellers. Had they all fallen off? Or more likely, had someone taken them deliberately? As the hunter neared the end of his story, it took only a few seconds for Nukaraq to rationalize what had happened. “Qivittoq!” he said suddenly. I looked at him in surprise. He turned to Karla and asked, “Don’t you think so, Mom?” “It was a qivittoq!” Karla confirmed. Nukaraq was not addressing his wife as “Mom” by mistake. It was a word he often used, especially if Nivikannguaq or I were present, to emphasize our kinship relation. In this instance, by calling Karla “Mom,” Nukaraq’s deduction and Karla’s confirmation of the event being caused by a qivittoq were for my benefit. Although there are no qivittut on the small island of Illorsuit itself—­at least not permanently—­they do penetrate the polar winter darkness surrounding the settlement and enter the human realm. They come to steal dogs, food, and clothes. Some say that they even come to steal women and children because they cannot stand the loneliness. During summer, when people spend more time on the land, the qivittut withdraw from the area surrounding the settlements and sneak into the campsites on land to steal from there instead. In this sense the qivittut “seasonal” pattern very much follows that of the people described by Mauss ([1906] 1979). They follow the movement of humans because they need food, tools, and clothing, but also because they are drawn toward humans in a self-­tormenting quest for vengeance. Their long­ing, their anger, their hunger for vengeance, and their permanent state of loneliness draw them close to the humans’ world. I had barely arrived to Illorsuit before I learned of a young local couple that had come back from a caribou hunt. Not only had they returned early, but they had also returned empty-­handed, despite having caught a sizable caribou. One night while sleeping in the tent, they had been woken by strange noises. They thought nothing of it, knowing that their meat was covered and securely fastened from scavenging foxes or birds. When they awoke next morning, they saw straightaway that some of their meat had been eaten and the remains moved to another spot. They could tell that the meat had been lifted, not dragged, and there were no visible marks from teeth or claws. They were convinced that the interloper was a qivittoq who had stolen the rump of the caribou and left the front torso. They debated briefly whether to take the remainder home but quickly decided that the meat could be cursed. They packed up in a hurry, jettisoned the meat, and returned to Illorsuit, leaving some of their belongings behind in their haste to get away.

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A qivittoq wears old, dirty, and ragged clothing, made of furs since he most likely would have walked away before European clothing became accessible and common. The hair and beard of a qivittoq are long, gray, and filthy. Having been granted an unnaturally long life, qivittut look old, ill, and exhausted. Their unkempt and frightening physical appearance is ascribed to the fact that they are not “real humans,” neither dead nor really alive. Although they usually roam alone, some hunters have encountered groups and even families of qivittut. Presumably, these qivittut sought refuge from their loneliness by banding together or—­as rumor has it—­by kidnapping humans. Qivittut are not friendly creatures; they are hostile, vengeful, and evil, and an encounter with a qivittoq can prove dangerous or sometimes even fatal. Some years after my initial fieldwork, the Greenlandic newspapers reported that the aforementioned qivittoq from a neighboring village went back on his word. He allegedly attacked a woman from Illorsuit during the late summer of 2010. She and her husband had been out on the land hunting for caribou and she had fallen behind. Suddenly she felt a hard push on her back, knocking her to the ground. Someone was trying to wrestle off her backpack. Next, a hand covered her mouth when she tried to scream for help: a smelly, filthy hand. She managed to wriggle free from her attacker’s grip and get a good look. There was no doubt in her mind that it was a qivittoq. He wore a mask fashioned from sealskin and a soiled fabric anorak (of a well-­known and modern make) onto which white feathers were sewn. His boots were also made of sealskin—­the old-­fashioned sort that people used to wear a generation ago. A struggle ensued during which she was badly beaten and punched in the stomach, which knocked the wind out of her. At one point she managed to scream so loudly for help that her husband came running, and it was only then that the qivittoq moved off, in strides so long only a qivittoq could make them. The event was reported to the police, which is why newspapers covered it. In a further article, in which the police revealed they still had not captured her attacker, it was speculated that the qivittoq could be the same one who left the neighboring village half a century ago. The victim was considered lucky, for qivittut possess magical powers that can cause death to living humans, often merely by looking them directly in the eye. Although the hunter moving through the land may not spot any qivittut, there is a good chance that a qivittoq is observing the hunter. One summer afternoon a large group of us were at Alianaatunnguaq.4 We had been boiling eider ducks in a large pan over a small fire, and they were nearly ready to eat. I realized that Therecia was not present, cast my eyes over the immediate area, and spotted her picking flowers farther up the hill, although still within hearing range. I called to her, “The food is ready. Come and eat. Qalerpoq!

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Qaaniarit, neriniarit!” As she approached, she started telling a story triggered by my call: You gave me a fright. It was like the time when a man had been out catching seals in his qajaq [kayak]. He had not caught anything, and he was very hungry and tired, so he decided to give up and go back to Illorsuit. When he passed this place [Alianaatunnguaq], he could smell food, and he saw some people on land who were cooking. They called to him, “Qaaniarit, Neriniarit” [“Come and eat with us”]. He had never met the people before, so he did not know who they were. But he ate the food and it tasted nice. When he was full and had gathered his strength, he went home. He came home and told his family what had happened. He died during his sleep.

“Tupinnaqaaq” (“That’s amazing”), Sikkersoq responded, filling in the parts of the story I had not understood, emphasizing the fact that he had eaten food with a group of qivittut. Spring proper arrives as suddenly as winter. In Illorsuit we heard tales of qivittut who had drawn too close to the inhabited areas during the cold winter. For a brief period in April and May when daylight returned and the sea ice (siku) was breaking up, stories abounded of qivittut who had been found and taken in by the police. Most notably, a French qivittoq had been spotted around Saqqaq. Some years ago, people said, a French tourist had set out from the village of Saqqaq to hike to the northern side of the peninsula. He had been due to return a couple of weeks later but never did. The locals had thought little of it, until now, years later when he had been spotted and needed to be captured. The only people powerful enough to capture qivittut are the police. The French qivittoq was captured and sent to Denmark, where qivittut are said to be kept locked up in the cellars of the University Hospital in Copenhagen, the largest research hospital in Denmark.5 Considering that most people in Illorsuit believe that the qivittoq has entered a pact with the devil, a belief most likely introduced by the eighteenth-­ century missionaries and reinforced by the Church of Greenland (Mikkelsen 1998, 108–­9), I found it interesting that it is law enforcement officers rather than Christian clergy who invariably capture the qivittut. Only the police, Karla clarified, are strong enough in numbers, equipment, and weapons to cap­ ture a qivittoq and send him to Denmark. After a qivittoq becomes a qivittoq, there is no return to either human form or human society. Besides, even if there were a way of returning, how on earth would anyone deal with a returned qivittoq? The way that the authorities are said to deal with a qivittoq is by capturing him and sending him to Denmark to be confined in a hospital basement. Thus, the qivittoq becomes even more

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of a stranger. Nuttall (1992, 114) likens the qivittoq to a stranger (takornartoq; literally, “someone who has not been seen before”) because he, as an outsider, is someone of whom people usually have no living memory. As a stranger with no relations, he is in a predicament of detachment and loneliness. Strangers and outsiders in Greenland invariably represent ambivalence, conspicuousness, and even danger. People cannot make sense of them because they belong somehow to the group of regularized “others” or “strangers”: mitaartut, Danes, tourists, or biologists. Yet at the same time, like mitaartut, the qivittoq doesn’t belong because people usually have no prior knowledge of him and no desire to acquire such knowledge. However, human strangers do not usually remain strangers. Depending on the length of their stay, they sometimes become familiar with others and, in some cases, like family (ilaqutariit). Contrarily, the qivittoq, who used to be human, will always remain not just a stranger but unhuman and therefore incapable of human relatedness and human life. He is the archetype of kiserliortoqness and represents this state in ways that humans cannot, unless they choose, like him, to become qivittut. Despite their frightfulness and their power to kill with a glance, the qivittut, because of their loneliness, are the real losers. Despite people’s fear of them, some admit to feeling pity toward them. What the qivittoq wants is re­ latedness and not to be disappointed. A young woman explained to me that she felt particularly sorry for the qivittut because people had failed to find them within the requisite few days, before they permanently transformed into qivittut. Maybe, she reasoned, they actually wanted to be found and perhaps their relatives didn’t care enough to do so? A hunter from a nearby settlement in the Ilulissat region told me that he had actually befriended a qivittoq. They had never been in close proximity, but the hunter would sometimes bring the qivittoq clothes, food, and ammunition. They had never spoken a word to each other because qivittut (he reminded me) forget how to speak like humans when they acquire the language of animals. He pitied it (nalligaa)—­the qivittoq. Some say that the blackened leathery skin around the qivittut’s eyes was caused by the many tears they cried when they first turned away. Now, they can still be heard crying and almost wailing in anguish, through the night. And yet, they have no tears. Ordinary people, living people, don’t usually have any memory of the qivittut from the time when they were humans. No one longs for the qivittoq nor wishes for him to return. Although once there was a time when someone remembered him (like the mother who still puts food and tools out for her qivittoq son) and perhaps pined for some time after he departed, today those people have long since died and returned. A qivittoq can never return. He is forever trapped somewhere between the past and present; between the living

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and the dead; between the human and the nonhuman, and even the antihuman. Just as they have lost their human tears, the qivittut have also lost their human language; now they speak with animals instead. Like any other dead people, the qivittut have lost their names, but their names never return. In the rare event that someone was named after a qivittoq, perhaps because people were longing for him to return, it usually has not been without repercussions. One of the old houses in Illorsuit is haunted by a spirit or ghost (anersaaq). Inside, the fire will periodically turn itself off, doors and windows suddenly open or slam shut. People talk about it with a shudder: “They have felt it touching them. It’s freezing cold.” One summer when the father of the family was painting the outside of the house—­an obligatory task every few years to protect the wood from the driving winds and bitter frost—­he saw an inscription scratched into the woodwork. It read, Qivittup atsiaa (Qivittoq’s namesake). Like many of the old houses in the region, including the one I lived in, the house had been carefully dismantled in the former coal mining town, Qullisat, on the northern side of Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island), and reerected in Illorsuit. On hearing about the inscription, people in Illorsuit reasoned that a former, now deceased resident of the house must have had the misfortune to be named after a qivittoq. Accordingly, he had never found peace upon his death, and it is his ghost that haunts the house today. Potentiality In his article on enmity, Højer warns us of our tendency as anthropologists to perform what he calls an “anthropological trick” (2004, 43) by finding or inventing relations here, there and everywhere; even in places where they don’t exist. In doing so, he argues, we also run the risk of making light of the anxiety and uncertainty that renders the enemy the enemy in the first place. Højer’s concern is to take the exterior seriously and to show how people, or beings, who occupy an exterior position are kept in an exterior position and not integrated or made friend or kin. For, as he argues, a negative relation is also a relation, and there is in this sense no reason to make friend out of foe. When it is necessary to keep people or beings in an exterior position, it almost goes without saying that they attempt to penetrate, move toward, or make effort to become part of the interior. The interior, as in Højer’s case of a Mongolian witch who spreads curses, lies, and malign influence, then responds by keeping the witch at bay, never letting her in, and always keeping her at a distance in an exterior position, as an enemy. I would like to make a similar point about the qivittoq, the angakkoq, and the mitaartoq. As we saw earlier, the former two are permanent states of being,

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while the latter is a temporary state with its own controllable time and place. The mitaartoq resembles the movement of Højer’s Mongolian witch, in that people participating in this ritual resemble potentially malign and unrecognizable strangers who arrive from the so-­called exterior seeking to enter the interior. And like the Mongolian witch, the mitaartut never quite succeed in becoming part of the interior. Indeed, this is the whole point. Although everyone knows that underneath the mask there is someone recognizable, very likely a close relative, his disguise makes him exterior and keeps him in an exterior position—­as hostile perpetrator, and as someone who is hounded. Similarly, the qivittoq and, to some extent, the angakkoq are exterior character types, which is to say that they live either outside or at the margins of human society. Not only do they acquire their extraordinary personhood by an extraordinary move across a threshold, but their changed personhood also prevents them from ever returning to their previous state as human persons. Moreover, the qivittoq is greatly feared, and the angakkoq was often treated with suspicion and caution. Whereas the mitaartoq plays with a kind of loneliness, both the angakkoq and the qivittoq have both actually crossed the threshold into a realm of loneliness. Subsequently they have achieved something—­they have become different kinds of persons—­through their experience of loneliness. The angakkoq returns to society, occupying a liminal position on the inside but able to manipulate the outside; whereas the qivittoq has crossed the threshold and is firmly outside, not as a liminal character but as a not-­even-­human outsider. This appears to be the opposite of Højer’s concern. In Illorsuit, the concern is not about mitaartut, the angakkoq, or the qivittut suddenly becoming Illorsuarmiut. Rather, it is about avoiding becoming a mitaartoq, an angakkoq, or, worst of all, a qivittoq. Herein lies the problem: the potential for this to happen is always present. Both the angakkoq and the qivittoq are imagined characters. I don’t mean to imply by this that they do not exist or that the powers they possess are fictional. Rather, I mean that no one can really know what it is like to be a qivittoq or an angakkoq without actually becoming one. And after one becomes a qivittoq or an angakkoq, one can never return to ordinary human form. Unlike the angakkoq, who is chosen by the spirits, anyone can become a qivittoq. All it would take is an extreme situation wherein someone has disappointed or hurt someone else excessively or, conversely, a situation where someone may have expected too much or the wrong things. The qivittoq is an example of what can happen when things go wrong: an archetype of permanent loneliness from which there is no return. A qivittoq is also a positive archetype that moralizes on the social responsibility humans have to treat one another with care and respect, allowing for one another always to return in one way

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or another. A qivittoq cannot return, neither to human society nor to human form. In other words, no one knows what it is like to be a qivittoq. Perhaps, for this reason, stories and sightings of them continue to outlive any memory of who they were when they were human. In Greenland today, people do not walk off into the wilderness with the same intent as a qivittoq would have done, and so resolutions to disputes find new ways of turning away. Even in the most isolated settlements, the internet, cell phones, fast boats, more available cash, education, and travel are all part of everyday life now, and people and families can communicate to each other across great distances instantly. Why would anyone walk off into the wilderness, when one can relatively easily travel to another town or village for a while, until the dust settles? We could think of this as a mini-­qivittoq—­a temporary and less aggressive way of seeking appeasement in a dispute. Sometimes, turning away is not just the best way but is also the only way to resolve a dispute; it diffuses the tension and allows everybody to carry on with their lives without being faced with confrontation. This is what happened, for example, at one late-­night drinking party in the aftermath of a christening party. In consideration of children and of nondrinkers (of which there are many), drinking parties such as this one usually develop late in the evening and in a secluded household. In the days leading up to the christening, a disagreement had been brewing between Joorut, a middle-­aged man who had been born in Illorsuit, and a younger man, Suulut, one of the child’s uncles. Suulut had arrived at the Island from the city where he had lived since he was a toddler, after his father had drowned in an accident; he regularly came to visit his father’s parents, who were still alive. The child—­his brother’s—­was to be given their father’s name. The allegation, which was based on hearsay, was that Suulut had brought some cannabis to the Island, not just for his own consumption but allegedly with the intent to sell. In the grand scheme of things, where cities and entire nation-­states around the world today are legalizing marijuana in some contexts, this particular incident may appear insignificant. However, like alcohol, cannabis remains a much-­ debated issue in Greenland and is surrounded by a great sense of taboo. The disagreement at the party escalated into a confrontation, with Joorut maintaining his allegation and Suulut his innocence, and by the time the extended families had been dragged into the conflict, Joorut, who was decades older than Suulut, grew angry and left. He brought his relatives back with him to his own house, where they proceeded to enjoy their own party. Suulut resumed his party with his own family, and everything seemed to have calmed down. At some point toward early morning, one of them telephoned the other, and, fueled by the alcohol they had enjoyed after the children had been put to bed

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and the nondrinkers had left the party, their conversation grew hostile. It escalated into a public argument in the early morning wherein they threatened each other. Before they could make good on their threats, the local police assistant separated the men and issued both of the quarreling parties a verbal warning. They all parted ways. The next morning, Joorut’s wife was standing on the steps outside the shop. I noted she was getting ready to leave, as she was carrying some winter clothes over her arm, even though it was summer. She wouldn’t need them unless she was going out on a boat. She stood alone, looking around. Her son was playing with some other kids nearby, throwing small pebbles at an old can—­target practice for some fateful day in the future when a precise aim at a bird or a hare could save their lives. She caught my eye, and I smiled at her. It was obvious she felt uncomfortable, and the first thing she said was that she wanted to leave Illorsuit and go back to the city from which she had originally come before marrying her husband, who was from the Island. “There’s too much gossip here. People talk all the time,” she said. I told her that I hadn’t heard people talk but that I had only just gotten up and needed to buy fuel for my stove. At that point, I had not yet heard of the night’s events, which everyone was talking about. “Do you want to come with us?” she asked. “We’re going to Qooroorsuaq to pick some berries, and maybe see if we can smoke some char.” I had wanted to smoke char with them for some time, because they were particularly skilled at this, but since I had already made arrangements to go boating with Sikkersoq and her family, I declined. She quickly called her son away from his game and they ran for their boat, which had now emerged from around the bend. They left and didn’t return until six or seven weeks later without embarrassment. They were greeted at the pier by the parents of the young man with whom they had quarreled. The episode was resolved and not spoken about again. The distance, the silence, and the temporarily severed close relations between Joorut’s family and Suulut’s grandparents could be restored. Turning away in anger is not usually condoned as a good thing. One sunny morning in February after the sun had returned, Nukaraq had invited Karla, Nivikannguaq, and me out onto the sea ice, where he had placed a longline for halibut the day before. This would be our first time away from the village for several months, and we were all rearing to go. Almost immediately after we arrived on the ice, Nukaraq began working on reopening the frozen hole through which he had lowered his longline. Nivikannguaq was busy making new tracks in the snow, while Karla and I were observing Nukaraq, as he hauled in one halibut after another on his line. He cut some of the smaller fish into little pieces to use for bait. The rest he piled neatly to one side. Karla cut

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the cheeks of a few of the halibut and offered them to Nivikannguaq and me, and we pondered the possibility of selling the delicacies as sushi. At the time, the local factory had no facilities to produce these separately, and they would usually be sold, still attached to the fish heads, as dog food to the local hunters. It was a quiet morning; the air was bright and radiating with purple-­blue colors as the sunlight reflected off the ice. Our movements cast long shadows across the ice, from a sun that still only rose as far as the top of the mountain. It lay there, like a cherry on top of a cream-­frosted cake. We drank tea. Nivikannguaq grew cold and impatient with running back and forth in her own footprints in the snow, and eventually she began running farther and farther away, testing her parents’ patience with her. Each time she was called back, she grew a little more insistent on wanting to leave, and before long, her playful mood had turned into a sour one. Yelling at her parents, who had tried to reason with her and explain that the sea ice is not a playground and that it can be a dangerous place, she turned around on her heels and walked off, back to Illorsuit. Calmly, Nukaraq finished what he was doing. Karla made more tea on the primus. I watched as Nivikannguaq grew so small I could no longer tell the color of her red ski suit. Nukaraq, who had finished hauling up all the fish and placed bait on the hundreds of hooks and laid them neatly in a circle around the hole, stood up straight and looked in the direction Nivikannguaq had walked off. Silence. We could still see her, a black dot walking along the tracks the snowmobile had made on the journey out. At least she hadn’t strayed off the track, but walking alone on the sea ice was not something anyone did unless you were a skilled hunter and knew how to read the ice. Even experienced hunters sometimes fell through the ice. In one incident, one hunter luckily was saved; another was not so lucky. He died, and his name was returned the following year to Sikkersoq’s newborn grandson. Nukaraq walked calmly to the snowmobile. He took determined steps, but not one of them seemed rushed or panicked. He started the engine and set off in the same direction as Nivikannguaq. Karla poured tea. I offered her a cookie as I gazed toward the horizon to see what was going on. Would Nukaraq grant Nivikannguaq’s wish and drive her safely back to the Island? Or would he bring her back to the longline? He did the latter. The faint noise from the engine grew louder as they came closer and closer. They arrived; the engine silenced. Karla said nothing. Nukaraq said nothing. Nivikannguaq said nothing but quietly seated herself on the sled. “He was so angry,” Karla said later that evening after we had returned to the Island, which surprised me, because to me they had both appeared so calm and handled the situation with such care and precise intent. She continued, “because she walked away.”

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Walking away like Nivikannguaq did was not only dangerous for her own safety, but it was also, in some sense, an escalation of a conflict she herself had initiated. Had they allowed her to continue walking, Karla and Nukaraq would also have condoned her behavior. Instead, they let her experience a short-­lived sense of solitude (just as they experienced their own) just long enough for her to realize what she had done and wonder what would happen when she would get back to the Island, and indeed, what would happen when her parents would return to the Island. Quietly but adamantly, Nukaraq made Nivikannguaq return. By the time we returned to the Island, everyone had made up. Walking away should be a last resort, not a quick-­fix solution. A qivittoq has crossed a threshold that most people will never want to cross, and even fewer will actually cross. People’s fear of the character does not begin or end with the ambivalence of the character itself. It has much more to do with people’s own potential to be disappointed and maybe one day, in a fit of irreversible despair or grief, being left no choice but to walk away and become a qivittoq. The qivittoq is not a liminal being, in Turner’s sense. It may be that that he or she is trapped between life and death; with a desire to return to human society but not being able to; still with human appearance but without human personhood; but the crucial point is that the qivittoq is no longer human. The qivittoq does not inhabit the threshold, like other liminars, but has come into being by a human person’s crossing of it. The disappointment, grief, or anger—­which all, in one way or another, stem from expecting “too much” (-­qaaq) or the wrong things or reciprocity from relatives—­is something anyone has the potential to experience. Encounters, stories, news, and recountings of recent sightings of qivittut told as entertainment as families huddle together in tents in summer camps, or as socializing stories for children who misbehave, also speak to another dimension about the limits of sociality. They feed into a more general anxiety about disappointment and a life in loneliness, which affects all humans, but here it is realized through the qivittoq.

4

Nobody Wants to Be a Qivittoq

Disappointment, usually in romantic love relationships, is often said to be a possible trigger to suicide (Leineweber et al. 2001; I. Lynge 1985, 1994; Thorslund 1991, 224). Some observers identify a causal similarity between what motivates a person to become a qivittoq (someone who has turned away) and what might motivate a person to carry out suicide. “Those who commit suicide are like qivittut,” Nukaraq observed one day when he was talking to some men at the dining table. Karla was boiling water for tea, and knowing that I was interested in the subject, she caught my eye from across the room to make sure that I was listening. After a pause, Nukaraq continued and explained that the reason that both types of people want to leave is that they are both disappointed. Sikkersoq, who was sitting next to me on the sofa, voiced her agreement and explained that sometimes, particularly in the past, young men would walk away and become qivittut (plural of qivittoq) if they hadn’t been allowed to marry the girl they loved. She suggested the same reason for suicide: disappointment because the person they loved didn’t feel the same way or because parents opposed the marriage. A generation or two ago, it was common for marriage unions to require the approval of the couple’s parents. Sometimes one set of parents would disapprove because they would desire for their offspring a spouse from a different, larger, or stronger family. Sikkersoq herself did not marry until relatively late in life. Each time she was in a relationship where marriage was the natural next step, her father had opposed it. Having heeded his wishes, she waited until after he had died to marry Aqqalu. That was when she began to understand why her father had been so against her marrying anyone. Sikkersoq was named after her father’s mother and was thus her grandmother’s atsiaq (someone named after a deceased person). It might have been for this

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reason, she contemplated, that her father had wanted her to stay at home, unmarried. He might have found it difficult to accept the thought of his mother, his returned mother, leaving him again. She never asked him about it when he was alive. It was not her place, as a daughter, to question or argue against her father’s wishes. Though she remained quietly unhappy about her situation, she nevertheless accepted it. Sikkersoq’s younger brother had taken his own life in the early 1980s. He had shot himself in the family’s shed. Sikkersoq had found him and, following the removal of the corpse by the authorities, she was alone in cleaning up. Sikkersoq told me that she could never figure out why he had killed himself. She recollected that he had been “exhausted” (qasoqqavoq) and “gray” (qasertoq). She did not say if she thought that he too had been disappointed in love. Her daughter, Petrine, had been given the female variant of his name, Peter, to become his atsiaq. During the initial years that I did fieldwork in Illorsuit, there were no suicides. The last one to occur was during the mid-­1990s, by a young man who had moved to Illorsuit from a village further north to be with his girlfriend. They had been together for some time and were engaged to be married. One day the young woman ended their relationship on account of having fallen in love with another man. Finding this difficult to accept, the young man had run out on to the rotting springtime sea ice, where he had quickly fallen through, not far from the shore. By the time people could reach him without risking their own lives, he had drowned. They managed to find his body and pull it out of the water. He received a funeral and was buried in Illorsuit. In a small Greenlandic village like Illorsuit, several years can pass between momentous life events, such as births, marriages, and deaths. Apart from an old woman who had died suddenly from a stroke a year before I first arrived, the suicidal young man’s grave stood as one of the most recent ones. The grave was surrounded by a white fence—­a recent popular solution to the problem of strong winds blowing away the flowers. On a large wooden cross was a brass plaque with his name and the dates of his birth and death, indicating that he had been in his early twenties. The grave looked well maintained: the colorful plastic flowers and wreaths looked fresh, the white paint of the cross unfaded, despite a thick blanket of snow covering them in winter. Some interesting observations about suicide have been made by the anthropologist Jean Briggs (1985) and the clinical psychiatrist Inge Lynge (1985). Despite situating their argument within an overall discourse of culture change, they nevertheless both point toward notions and values of relatedness, individuality, and feelings of loneliness. Lynge, whose argument is based on her vast experience of working with suicidal youth in Greenland, argues that it is not

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only youth from neglected or broken homes who carry out suicide. It is also youth who are considered “favorites”—­children who are loved a little more than their siblings, spoiled a little more, given a little more attention—­who are just as likely to take their own lives. She draws on Briggs’s Inuit child-­rearing observations from the Canadian Arctic, where the shaping of the individual is a game of morality emphasizing both individuality and noninterference, as well as incorporating a strong sense of social responsibility and relatedness. Her argument seems to suggest that for some youth there is a problem dealing with disappointments: “A yearning for love, feelings of abandonment, anger and/or hopelessness, with a profound loneliness and no ways of seeking help, in other words there was no real autonomy and no real attachment” (I. Lynge 1985, 58). Briggs echoes her thoughts and argues that suicides in Greenland “seem consonant with the attitudes toward loving and being loved  .  .  . that many suicides and attempted suicides among Greenlanders are the result of bonding problems” (Briggs 1985, 45). What I wish to take from Briggs’s and Lynge’s arguments is the role of a yearning for love and the feeling of loneliness in suicidal youth and the importance of relatives, not only in acknowledgment and prevention of these feelings but also in the formation of what Lynge refers to as a personal role or strong identity (1985, 59). I have never heard anyone associate suicide and the qivittoq with disappointment as lucidly as Nukaraq did that afternoon, and even though the two kinds of self-­detachment may have their disappointment in common, their outcomes and the kinds of loneliness and death they experience are vastly different. Disappointment has to do with expectations not being met. Either a person’s expectations had been reasonable within the given context, or they may have been unrealistic and unreasonable. It is not always an easy matter to ascertain where exactly the balance lies between the two extremes. Disappointment begs the questions: Disappointed in what? Disappointed in whom? If it is the bereaved who are asking these questions of someone who has turned away from them by choosing his or her own death, the presumed disappointment is incredibly difficult to place anywhere else than with themselves. It invariably places blame and responsibility on the shoulders of the bereaved. Qivittoq and Suicide From a historical perspective, we know that the qivittoq and suicide as types of turning away coexisted in Greenland when the early missionaries arrived. During his travels in the 1760s, Glahn noted that he encountered both practices of suicide and qivittoq (Glahn 1921, 41, 60, 153). However, it was not until

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more than a hundred years later, in 1883, that Hammer made a typological connection of sorts between the two and suggested that qivittoq is a kind of suicide (Hammer 1889, 22).1 Although he did not encounter any instances of suicide in his travels and thus wrote that suicide was completely unknown to Greenlanders, he remarked that, instead of carrying out suicide, they had the phenomenon of qivittoq, which he saw as an equivalent form of suicide.2 The argument could be made that today’s high rate of suicide is the historical result of abandoning qivittoq practices and has become a modern equivalent or some kind of extension of qivittoq, which is to say that one practice of extreme self-­detachment has simply replaced another. When the suicide rate in Greenland exploded in the 1970s, Greenlandic poets and writers at the time located suicide within a combined discourse of modernization, colonialism, and Danish political supremacy, on the one hand, and qivittoq, on the other. Suicide came to be seen as motivated by the same sort of problem facing the young man who would have chosen to become a qivittoq—­namely, that there was no room for him in society—­and since the practice had been abandoned, the only solution for him would be to reenact the qivittoq, not by walking away and being considered dead but by attaining a literal death through suicide. Viewing suicide as a modern equivalent form of qivittoq, however, also implied a reevaluation of the qivittoq, who instead of turning his aggression toward his family and loved ones turns his anger toward modern society and the political status quo of which he had become a colonial victim (Thisted 1992, 147). I suggest that qivittoq and suicide are two different kinds of deaths. They may be driven by similar forces or motivations, as we saw Nukaraq suggest, but their outcomes differ drastically from each other. They differ in the sense that one can be considered a symbolic form of death, and the other very real, but they also differ when we ask what it is they each turn toward in their action of turning away. Although a qivittoq may have hinted at his intentions several times before walking away, he would usually have left quietly and vanished secretly into the wilderness. His relatives would search for him, hoping to bring him back, perhaps out of their own feelings of guilt, longing, or pity—­but also because of their fear of the qivittoq’s inevitable vengeance. Contrarily, the domain of suicide is not located in the wild but tends to be much closer to home. I have never heard of anyone who left society and walked into the wilderness to carry out suicide. Suicides often occur either in the family home or in close proximity to it. Some suicide attempts happen immediately in front of friends or relatives, sometimes with the protagonist holding a rifle to his or her own head. Some suicides happen when someone runs out onto the rotting spring

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sea ice with the intent of drowning, or when someone throws himself or herself into the waters close to the harbor. It is almost as if the suicidal person wants to be found, and the qivittoq does not. When I asked my friends in Illorsuit about this distinction, they were quick to point out that if suicidal people did not die in close proximity to inhabited areas, they would risk never being found and thus would never receive a proper funeral. In cases of suicide, then, a Christian funeral continues the pre-­Christian principle that it allows the name to return. Both qivittoq and suicide represent extraordinary, self-­inflicted forms of death. They are similar in that they are self-­inflicted and different in that they die differently. These distinctions are highlighted when we examine what each character turns toward as they turn away. We could say that the qivittoq is a social or symbolic form of death for, as we have seen, the qivittoq does not die physically. He transforms himself and achieves an indefinitely long ghostlike existence in loneliness, anger, and suffering. By virtue of losing his name, which wouldn’t usually be returned, the qivittoq comes to represent the ultimate form of discontinuity from humanity—­a permanence based in loneliness, hatred, and vengeance. With suicide and other forms of death, discontinuity is ascribed to the human body that decays, whereas the name represents a kind of continuity through its return and bestowal onto a new human person, which in turn reinvokes the human relations associated with the name. However, in the case of the qivittoq, we see the reverse; namely, the discontinuity of the person through the discontinuity and nonreturn of the name but the continuity of the body. Cast strictly in these terms, suicide is a kind of death that does not appear so different from any other kind of death. The person who died by his or her own hand receives a Christian funeral and burial in the cemetery just as would any other deceased community member. The person who died by suicide is mourned, perhaps with more intensity, bewilderment, longing, and bereavement, as would happen with other forms of untimely death. And, unlike the qivittoq, the person who died by suicide returns through the passing of his or her name to a newborn child. Transitional and Linking Objects In his study of infant separation from the mother’s breast, Winnicott (1971) was particularly interested in the ways that so-­called transitional objects were important in weaning. A transitional object is usually an inanimate object such as a blanket, a doll or teddy bear, or a piece of cloth carrying the infant’s mother’s scent. According to Winnicott, the infant experiences the loss of the mother’s breast as a kind of death of the mother. Transitional objects stand

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as reminders or remnants of the mother’s breast, and they are important in that they allow for the infants to remain attached to the mother’s breast (and therefore also the mother), while transferring their attachment onto the transitional objects instead. The point is that the transitional object transfers the internal object (the mother or the mother’s breast) to the external object (the illusion and image of the mother’s breast or the mother) and lets the infant feel connected to the mother even after it has been weaned. Winnicot’s suggestion places a particular and potentially traumatic significance on early childhood separation and therefore also onto the inanimate transitional object. Transitional objects belong to the field of illusion, since it is not the objects in themselves that are meaningful but the value that we as infants and adults ascribe to them and the way that we realize this value through our continued interaction with the objects. The inanimate object allows the infant to imagine that the illusion it creates through its engagement with the object is absolute reality. Gradually as the world opens up to infants, as their senses and outside interests develop, infants will grow increasingly detached from their transitional objects. The pacifier, the teddy, and the cloth will slowly become less significant. It is therefore not only the inanimate object itself that is transitional; rather, it is also the infant who ascribes meaning to it. The inanimate object merely aids the infant’s separation from the mother—­the transition—­ and prevents a sudden rupture from close attachment to sudden detachment. Transitional objects assist the infant through his or her mourning of the mother’s breast toward the state of individuation. Volkan (1981) expands on this idea and argues that bereavement and mourning in later life are similar sorts of struggles to the processes of separation and individuation we experienced in early infancy. In mourning we make use of inanimate transitional objects, which often are directly linked to the deceased. The object may be a lock of hair, a photograph, a piece of jewelry, or an item of clothing, something which helps the mourner through his or her grief. Volkan terms them “linking objects” (1981, 20), and they carry a similar double meaning to Winnicott’s transitional objects; namely, that they help the mourner through the transition of grief after the loss of a loved one, by staying connected with the deceased until the time arrives to gradually begin a healthy separation. Perhaps the most uncomplicated way of thinking about linking objects is by seeing them as tangible inanimate objects that literally link the mourner to the deceased and help the mourner remember and in (his or her own) time eventually detach from the deceased and from the grief. As is the case for Winnicott’s infants, it is actually the mourners who are

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transitional, not the objects. The objects merely help the suddenly bereaved through their separation and sense of loss. In psychoanalytic language, humans are linking objects too, and Winni­ cott’s word transition highlights this idea; it is not so much the inanimate object itself that is in transition, it is the human subject. So linking refers to the quality of the inanimate objects realized through the human action of linking, engaging and inscribing meaning to those inanimate objects. Humans also link with and through more animate or less tangible phenomena such as memories, feelings, and desires. Volkan refers to a wider range of such nonphysical linking objects as “linking phenomena” (1981, 106). The crucial thing about linking objects and linking phenomena, regardless of whether they are animate or inanimate, is that they are not things that just “are.” They come into being by having something “done through” them, by being acted on and acted through, and by having particular meanings ascribed to them. Thus, humans become linking phenomena through their actions of linking objects and phenomena to each other and to the deceased. Most homes in Illorsuit display photographs of kin and relatives on their walls. Many homes also display photographs taken at the occasion of a christening in which the parents and godparents hold the named and christened infant beside the grave of the named child’s namesake: the atsiaq and the grave of the aqqa (deceased person whose name has been bestowed on a newborn) in the same photograph. Such photographs are sometimes displayed in the home where the child grows up, but crucially, they are also displayed in the homes of the deceased person’s biological family. These are the people who have been most affected by the death of their relative, and, it could be argued, they have the principal interest in the return of their relative through the bestowal of his or her name on the infant. Photographs are constant visual representations of individuals who are living in the present or who used to live, recently or long ago. They are also visual representations of family relationships and their continued potential for reinvocation of relations. We might say that photographs such as these serve as linking objects, or as reminders of the relationships that have the potential to return. Perhaps the strongest and most overt linking object, however, is the name. Its return signifies at least a partial return of a person and the returned continuation of relatedness in abstract terms, as well as concretely in relationships between the deceased, the returned, and the bereaved. Naming is a way of invoking otherwise absent persons and absent relationships, in ways that a photograph of a deceased person or a birthday celebration of an absent teenager who has gone away to school cannot. The practice of returning names and Volkan’s

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description of linking objects are two models that aim at the same thing, which is for mourners to come to terms with grief and loss through harnessing a linking object and in so doing stay connected somehow to the ones they have lost. A name is not an inanimate object or even a tangible physical object in the same way that a locket, a photograph, a necklace, or an item of clothing is. Although names are not keepsakes that mourners can touch and handle to remind and link themselves to the deceased, the role they play in allowing mourners to come to terms with their loss may be said to be no less important. According to Volkan, linking objects extend to the realm of phenomena that encompass feelings, desires, memories, and fantasies through which mourners remember the dead either privately or in conversation with others. Names may in theory have a place here. However, names are nonphysical remnants, spiritual entities, potential personhood, and potential relatedness that the bereaved do not keep for themselves in private thoughts or conversations. Rather, they witness the name’s return through its bestowal on an infant, who then becomes an atsiaq: a returned person through which the bereaved continually reinvoke their deceased relation. Contrary to the conventional understanding of a linking object or linking phenomenon, the name becomes part of a living person, who then in turn becomes the linking entity; and not the name itself. There is obviously a therapeutic aspect or even purpose to Volkan’s model, which, like Winnicott’s infant, concerns the mourner coming to terms with irreversible separation from someone the mourner has loved and lost: “The linking object that the mourner creates functions to save him from the pain of mourning and letting the dead die” (Volkan 1981, 336). For Volkan, this kind of mourning is “uncomplicated” and necessitates that the mourner’s fascination with the object will eventually fade after a period of intensity. The mourner will gradually separate and individuate himself or herself from the dead, and from grief itself. In “complicated mourning,” on the other hand (Volkan 1972), the mourner is unable to separate himself or herself from the object. His or her mourning will become pathological. The mourner’s fascination with the linking object will not fade but instead intensify and will mystify the mourner. The mourner may internalize the representation, thereby transforming grief into depression; or the grief may turn pathological (“pathological mourning”), in the sense that the mourner “invests certain inanimate objects of his own selection with magical qualities. Such ‘linking objects’ furnish an external locus at which the self-­representation can meet with the representation of the lost object. The person in established pathological mourning can thus keep alive an illusion of continuing communication

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with the dead, communication over which he feels himself to have absolute control” (Volkan 1981, 84–­85). In the case of mourners in Greenland, we encounter another evident dissimilarity between what linking phenomena, on the one hand, and names, on the other, are supposed to do. The return of the name enables the mourners to continue their communication with the deceased without their mourning ever becoming pathological. In fact, we could argue that in Illorsuit, the real danger arises if the linking object or linking entity loses its relevance and potentiality for continued reinvocation. For it is then that relatedness fails. Mourning in Illorsuit achieves its resolution through the continuing (rather than ceasing) reinvocation of intense relatedness with the linking entity, the atsiaq. As such, the atsiaq continues to be a transitional or linking entity for as long as the bereaved continue to reinvoke the relationship, which implies that the bereaved themselves remain transitional entities for as long as they continue to reinvoke relatedness with the atsiaq. Volkan’s linking object should ideally lose its importance as the mourner comes to terms with his or her grief and finally allows the dead to die. In contrast, with the name functioning as linking entity in Greenland, the mourner can only come to terms with his grief if the name as a linking entity continues to have importance and continues to have the potential to be reinvoked in the future. To do its work, the linking entity must take a new form and reappear as a new person. Therefore, the linking entity does not serve to allow the dead to die but rather to return. That is to say, people in Illorsuit do not necessarily come to terms with death through realizing and accepting death’s irreversibility but rather through the return of the deceased, which is a process of reversing the irreversible. This practice would imply that the name as transitional entity is not really about transition and impermanence at all but about return and continuity. The task in Illorsuit is for the linking entity, the atsiaq, to become active and reciprocate the acts of reinvocation himself or herself. As the name transforms from linking entity to manifesting itself in that real person with whom the mourners sought to link themselves, distinguishing between the atsiaq and the ateq (name) becomes increasingly difficult. The two become part of each other, and over the course of a lifetime, the name comes to belong to whoever possesses the name rather than the one who had the name before. The deceased returns and therefore allows the mourners the potentiality to continue their relationships with the deceased in the living now, not through the name but with the name; not through the atsiaq but with the atsiaq, thus endowing the linking object or entity with continued agency as a living, not a dead, person. Even from an early age the atsiaq begins to reinvoke relatedness

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with the bereaved. We know that names long to return just as much as the bereaved long for their return, and the northern lights, as they dance across the Arctic winter skies, serve as a constant reminder of name souls who have not yet (been) returned. Thus, the atsiaq actually becomes a linking entity from the perspective of the deceased as well. The relationship between the bereaved and the deceased does therefore not just travel one way from the bereaved through the name (manifested in the atsiaq) to the deceased. It also runs in the other direction, from the deceased through the atsiaq and to the bereaved, almost in a mutual reciprocal fashion. Just as the bereaved long for the deceased, so too does the deceased long for the bereaved; and the atsiaq is central in the binding of that continued relationship. Volkan proceeds in his penultimate chapter to discuss living linking objects. In particular, he is interested in what in psychoanalysis is referred to as “the replacement child syndrome” (1981, 320–­21), wherein the loss of a child may cause a guilt-­ridden and depressive mother to “replace” the lost child with another who then becomes a living linking object. Doing so allows the parent to reject the death of the first child, and through meanings ascribed by the parent to the replacement child, the first child thus lives on. Conversely, children can also imagine themselves to be replacement children to their mourning parents. Again, within the framework of psychoanalysis, such patterns are usually associated with pathological disorders and syndromes, whereas in Greenland such a pattern is not only common but actually a sign of healthy and necessary relatedness. The point of the naming process is that the atsiaq learns to see himself or herself comfortably as a so-­called replacement child for a deceased sibling or relative. Greenlanders even have a word for persons named after their dead siblings, angerlartoqut (literally, “the dead has returned home”). All Sikkersoq’s children are their deceased older sister’s angerlartoqut. If we place naming in Greenland as a way of linking objects in Volkan’s terms, the naming process becomes a model for reversing irreversible death. In psychoanalysis, death is a process of irreversible separation and cannot be imagined as reversible without also becoming pathological. In Greenland, however, death presents itself through the prospect of name return, more as a process of reversible or even temporary separation. This is the major difference between Volkan’s linking and Greenlandic naming. Each model serves a similar purpose: to come to terms with separation in bereavement. They do so in very different ways because they make different assumptions about the irreversibility of death. In psychoanalysis, death represents a form of irreversible separation and thus is something the mourner must come to terms with and separate himself from. Rather than letting go of their mourning,

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Illorsuarmiut seem to depend on holding on to their longing in order to reinvoke relationships with the deceased in the present. Turning Away from Loneliness Any form of death is a crossing of a threshold. Both the qivittoq and the suicide are extreme forms of death that have a place in this model of linking objects and entities, which we can apply to our discussion of thresholds and ambivalence. I have already suggested that the similarities between the qivittoq’s and the suicide’s separation sometimes are underpinned by disappointment in relatedness (see also Thorslund 1990b). They both represent ways of turning away from an unsatisfactory or disappointing form of relatedness. It is by taking a closer look at what they each “turn toward” in their respective “turning away” that we most clearly come to see the differences between them and discover that the two are actually not that similar at all. In the previous chapter I discussed the mitaartoq (disguised person), the angakkoq (shaman), and the qivittoq as persons apart. They all achieve an extraordinary kind of personhood by in one way or another, crossing a threshold and engaging with loneliness. All these characters do to an extreme degree what other humans do in their everyday lives to a much lesser degree; namely, seek balance among relatedness, longing, and loneliness. The person who dies by suicide is also, in a sense, a person apart—­not because his or her personhood is extraordinary, or because he or she possesses particular powers, but because he or she also crosses a threshold into a particular kind of death that most people do not and would not. The key here is to distinguish between reversible and irreversible forms of loneliness, which I base on these characters’ ability to return, or reinvoke. What happens to these characters when they cross that threshold? Are they forever changed? Or can they return to human life or human form? All these characters return except the qivittoq, whose way of detaching I thus class as truly irreversible. The person who died by suicide maintains his or her potential to be a linking entity, whereas the qivittoq does not. Contrary to the qivittoq’s name, the name of the person who died by suicide does return. In fact, the name of the person who died by suicide is not considered contaminated like that of a qivittoq. As we saw in the previous chapter, the qivittoq, being the only kind of person who resides alone in the wild, represents antihumanity and antirelatedness. His longing has been transformed into anger, and the only way the qivittoq links or reinvokes relatedness is through a constant threat of extreme loneliness and revenge, which are met by human fear and resentment. Hence, the qivittoq does not represent absolute separation because he is still attached to the human

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realm, albeit negatively. Nevertheless, the qivittoq’s death is irreversible in the sense that he will never be able to return to human form or human relatedness through his name as a linking entity. Suicide is a sinister form of death surrounded by a strong sense of ambiguity, fear, longing, loneliness, and even guilt. It is not a form of death that is easily understood, and, as I will show later, it is not usually a form of death that can be discussed with ease. Thus, suicide separates itself from other forms of death, and this unease with suicide is one of the reasons why it is viewed as a social problem. It is an extreme form of death, which according to some doctrines is a sin and an offense. The threshold into suicide is not where we would expect it to be, because suicide itself is not actually about what we expect it to be. Although there is a threshold of ambiguity between other kinds of death and suicide, as well as between life and suicide, this is not where the threshold lies that separates good and acceptable from bad and unacceptable forms of death. This threshold lies rather between reversible and irreversible kinds of detachment. The threshold that corresponds to what we understand by suicide in a Euro-­American sense leads into becoming a qivittoq. The qivittoq is a person who has carried out hypersuicide. It is the qivittoq rather than the person who dies by suicide who marks the threshold between reversible and irreversible forms of detachment and loneliness. Within the entire repertoire of characters and persons in Greenland, the qivittoq is the only character who is not longed for. Moreover, possibly due to his long life, no one actually remembers who he was. This lack of remembrance only adds to his ambiguity, and the kind of death he represents and is alongside the fact that a qivittoq’s name cannot be returned, which is a strong deterrent for people in Greenland to choose this kind of death today. The ambiguity of a qivittoq relates as much to his own form as it does to humans who have the potential to become one themselves. A qivittoq has reached an irreversible category of personhood, an irreversible form of separation and death, and does not have a place within the human world as a linking entity along with everybody else. It is the qivittoq who cannot return, and it is he who cannot seek redemption, and it is he who is doomed to an ambiguous existence in the realms between life and death indefinitely. The threshold is further underpinned by the fact that the qivittoq represents something so fundamentally antihuman; namely, the full realization of the predicament of living in loneliness or being kiserliortoq. Though the actual practice of qivittoq has long since ceased, it still exists as an antisocial category and a representation of kiserliortoq, and thus as a much-­feared potential for each person. Kiserliortoq is something to be feared, not just as an outside force embodied by the qivittoq but also as a potential that can overcome all humans.

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We are left with one important question. If the qivittoq is somehow more of an exemplar of suicide than is a person who carries out actual suicide, then what kind of death is suicide? Hanging on to their shared yearnings for love, disappointment, feelings of abandonment, and intense loneliness, it is also clear that there is a marked difference between the two. The qivittoq crosses a threshold and becomes loneliness, whereas the person who dies by suicide crosses another sort of threshold and escapes loneliness. This, of course, is a hypothetical suggestion, because we have no way of verifying this with anyone who has died by suicide, nor has the nature of my research allowed me to verify it with anyone who had attempted suicide. However, this seems to be what the cultural logic of the situation suggests, and it is within this idea that we may locate an alternative causality of suicide, or at least we may come to understand suicide in a new way.

5

Be-­Longing

“Angerlarserpit?” (“Are you homesick?”) It was dark outside. Not nighttime but eleven o’clock in the morning. It was winter. Like so many other days, I was at the service house waiting for a shower to become available, and Najaaraq, who some months earlier had warned me against loneliness, now wanted to know if I was homesick. Her question did not surprise me. Many people had asked me the same before. And like all the times before, I could not provide a simple yes or no answer. Instead I chose to answer that I wasn’t homesick as such but that I sometimes missed my family and friends. The aftermath of Danish colonial rule in Greenland has for a long time instigated discussion about what Greenlandic identity might be, how it is manifested and expressed. One of the most dominant ways this question of identity plays out in public discourse is by casting Danishness and Greenlandicness as natural opposites. This discussion about national identities in Greenland, this invariable dichotomy of Others has captured and politicized food, language, behavior, worldviews, and even homesickness. I was wary of saying that I felt homesick because I feared it would be misunderstood as a dislike of Illorsuit. On the other hand, I also worried that my lack of homesickness (for the most part) would make me appear even odder than if I had confirmed it. From the Greenlandic point of view, no one could be this far away from home for such a long time without feeling just a little bit homesick. What kind of person would not be homesick? Even a qivittoq (someone who has turned away) longs for human company and for home. I was beginning to understand how homesickness and longing were important feelings within the overall framework of relatedness in Greenland. Months earlier, Naja naturally had felt homesick on her birthday and likewise her mother at home had longed for her. Tuma had already told me the story

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about when he was younger and, like Naja and other schoolchildren today, was living in the dormitories in the city while finishing his compulsory education. Tuma felt homesick: for home, for his family. He was homesick for one thing more than anything else. He wanted to see Illorsuit from afar, lit only by the moon and the stars’ reflection in the snow, casting the entire landscape in indigo blue. He longed to see it. One evening after Christmas, he took drastic action: Even though it was in the middle of the night, I went to get my dogs ready. It was very cold then. Not like now. Those days there was ice all the way between Illorsuit and the city, and you could drive your dogs all the way from the city to Illorsuit on the sea ice. You can’t do that today. So I drove all the way home. I didn’t even care that I had school the next day. When I reached Illorsuit, I stopped over there [Tuma pointed over the fjord] because Illorsuit was very beautiful when I looked at it from there, standing on the sea ice. Afterwards I went to visit my mother. She was so surprised to see me in the middle of the night. I expected she would tell me off. But she didn’t. She just made a bed for me and told me I had to go back to school the next day.

To declare out loud one’s homesickness (“Angerlarserpunga,” “I am homesick”) or longing (“Kipippunga,” “I long [for you]”) is another way of saying that one feels a bit lonely. It stands to reason that if deliberately seeking detachment and irreversible loneliness is a bad thing, then homesickness and longing might be good things. Despite the remove they necessitate, they are also statements about attachment and relatedness. We might then even go so far as to argue that in times of remove, both homesickness and longing are necessary, for without longing or homesickness, it would be difficult to imagine people ever returning. Longing and homesickness, which I regard to be both feelings and states of being, thus keep people related. Without them, relatives might vanish. This chapter homes in on the inherent tension there seems to be in homesickness (angerlarserneq) and longing (kipisaneq) and their everyday usage. Their tension is not manifested in the positive and negative sides of homesickness and longing, nor in the extent to which people’s experience of these states is able to keep people related or not. Rather, both longing and homesickness, which I take to be expressions of both loneliness and relatedness, can become excessive. Such cases are not uncommon, and unfortunately, they can become dangerous. The tension thus is about carefully managing one’s homesickness while away: to be aware that homesickness is not necessarily a bad thing; that it can be a good thing; and that it can become excessive and therefore dangerous—­as can the complete lack of homesickness. The tension

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is necessary. Maintaining the tension consists of managing homesickness and longing. Homesickness and longing, I aim to show, feed into an overall practice and ideology of belonging to a place, home, or group of people. That is to say, the experience of longing and homesickness is inherent to the experience of belonging. The subject of belonging is a well-­trodden path in the social sciences and humanities, and it continues to be so, especially in a world that appears increasingly smaller as the global digital connectivity is ever more present in our daily lives. Likewise, changes in climate, political instabilities, war, and violence that drive people across national borders in search of refuge seem more insistent in the twenty-­first century than we have seen since the mid-­ twentieth. This body of literature on belonging tends to deal with new citizenships, integration, migration, minority groups, and diasporas. However, the scenario I wish to highlight here is rather different. In my view, belonging, for Illorsuarmiut, is realized through the feeling and the expression of longing. This longing may encompass a general longing for company or for specific people, for particular places in the landscape or on the land (nuna), for foods, for times past, and for potential futures—­things and events that have happened and that once again could be. I treat homesickness and longing together—­not because the two are the same thing or necessarily always go hand in hand but because they do similar things and are expressions of some degree of loneliness. They overlap, and so, it is difficult to talk about one without also addressing the other. We might say that homesickness is a form of longing: for home, for smells, for foods, for sounds at home, or for people at home. Whereas homesickness necessitates physical distance or remove, longing does not always do so, and in this way it is entirely possible to long without also being homesick. People who see each other almost every day may long for each other. Or at least they may say so. “Tell Her to Stop Being So Homesick” Homesickness and longing can be a serious matter of sadness and unpleasantness (nuaninngilaq), both for the person who has gone away and for the people who are left behind. People regularly find various direct and indirect ways of demonstrating their longing, and so too, their belonging. They may send meats to loved ones who are far away and who long for the particular taste of food from home. They may decorate their walls, as is customary, with photographs of family members who are either deceased or far away. Some people request particular songs on phone-­in radio shows or visit particular places on the land that remind them of those for whom they long. Any

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definition of homesickness is of course contingent upon what we mean by home and sickness. In Greenlandic, the word homesickness is angerlarserneq. The root, angerlar-­, comes from “someone who is going home” (angerlarpoq). The meaning of the affix -­ser is unclear but possibly relates to the half-­ transitive verb affix for waiting (-­siivoq) or the transitive -­(t)serpaa, which means “to wait.” The ending, -­neq, is the substantive noun ending. Although the word sickness does not appear in the Greenlandic word for homesickness, we may nevertheless consider it as a kind of illness experienced by individuals who are absent from home and who long excessively for it. During Easter Sunday 2005, only a couple of months after I had returned to Great Britain, I received a telephone call from Illorsuit. It was Karla, who wanted to wish me a happy Easter and to hear how I was doing. I was happy to hear from her because those initial months back in a city, where traffic was everywhere and moments of stillness nowhere, had been quite taxing. Quietly, I was homesick. Karla must have sensed it, because one of her first questions was, “Are you homesick?” I confirmed that I was, and that I had spent much of these past days thinking about what people were doing in Illorsuit: visitors from other villages; schoolchildren who would have returned home for the Easter holiday; days of visits and kaffemiit (celebrations with coffee and cake). The sun would have returned, the temperatures would have dropped, and everything would be beautiful. Ice blue spring, sun glistening, and fresh cold winds on the face that could be warmed in an instant by turning to face the sun. In Illorsuit, Easter is as important a religious and social occasion as Christmas. The church is equally full during Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The former is a somber affair, with the flag outside the church at half-­mast and with all the candles inside the church, on the walls, and on the altar draped with black ribbons to signify mourning. The village choir sings slow doleful hymns—­of a mother weeping at the feet of her son who died on Golgotha. In contrast, Easter Sunday is a happy occasion, and people leave the service to have Easter lunches in their homes. Afterward, people visit. Some visitors arrive from another village farther north. More will arrive the next day. This year, it is their turn to visit Illorsuit; the next year some Illorsuarmiut will go north and visit them. They visit for fun and for socializing. They stay a few days: singing, playing football, holding dogsled races with the Illorsuarmiut on the ice behind Illorsuit where the mainland is close and the ice more secure. This was how I remembered those fateful days. I was homesick. I longed for it all. I longed for them all. Karla’s telephone call had come after Nukaraq’s younger sister, Najann­ guaq, and her family had traveled from the city where they lived to Illorsuit, where they were to spend Easter in the house I had left some months earlier,

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which Karla and Nukaraq now intended to keep as spare lodging for visitors from the city rather than renting out. They had traveled by dogsled the long and arduous route, which now went over land for long stretches of the way and not, as before, over the sea ice. Najannguaq, who by her own admission had been a little jealous of me living in Illorsuit, was excited at the prospect of spending a week there and showing her two children the village where she was born and had grown up. Since moving to the city as a teenager, Illorsuit had remained deep in her heart, and she always considered it her real home. A huge framed color photograph taken from the hill behind the village many years ago decorated the wall immediately above their dining table in their city home, like a window with a view she always dreamed of having, that reminded her family and all the visitors who passed through their home of the place from which she originally came. They had been back to Illorsuit many times before, but they had always stayed with Karla and Nukaraq or other more distant relatives. This was to be the first time they would ever be in a house on their own and live the village (nunaqarfik) life as a people from a village (nunaqarfimmiut). They arrived on Good Friday in high spirits, which were soon dampened when they faced problems lighting the old kerosene heater. The condensation that had gathered on the inside of the windows was beginning to freeze, evening was drawing closer, and the children were getting hungry, tired, cold, and restless. Life as nunaqarfimmiut did not impress them, and even Najannguaq was beginning to lose her high spirits. Her husband and Nukaraq were both poised over the stove. They lit tissue paper and dropped it into the thin layer of kerosene at the bottom of the oven. It wouldn’t catch. They tried soaking the paper in white spirit. Poof! The paper caught fire, but once the spirit had burned off, the fire died. And so they kept trying to light the stove, until Najannguaq’s husband, whose back was beginning to ache, stood up and uttered out loud: “Maybe it’s Jaani [Janne] who doesn’t want us staying in her house. Karla, go and telephone her, and tell her to stop being so homesick!” He had said it half-­jokingly and they had laughed. But, as Karla relayed to me, she would have telephoned me on Good Friday had the kerosene not caught fire the very instant he had said those words. When I returned for a short visit some months later during the late summer, I was told of additional events that had spoken to the possibility that I perhaps had been excessively homesick, and that my anersaaq (spirit) had traveled of its own accord to be in Illorsuit. Therecia had been out of breath when she arrived at Karla and Nukaraq’s house late in the morning of Good Friday. As she and Mikaali had already been on their morning visit earlier that same morning, Karla had been surprised to see her back so soon. Before she

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had the opportunity to ask what had happened, Therecia asked her, “Where is the tikeraaq?” [guest, or visitor who has arrived from afar]?” Karla, who was a little confused by Therecia’s question, answered that Najannguaq and her family were due to arrive later that day but that none of them had arrived yet. Therecia explained that after she had returned from her morning visits, she and Mikaali had been enjoying coffee while listening to the radio and gazing out of the window. Something had drawn their eyes to the kitchen window of the house where I used to live. Although the house was now uninhabited, there was a light shining from the tea-­light lantern that was still hanging in the kitchen window. They then assumed that I had returned to spend Easter in Illorsuit, and Therecia decided to go and greet me. On her way, she confirmed that the candle indeed was lit. But the door was locked, so she went next door to see Karla instead. Both Therecia and Mikaali reasoned that it had been my spirit who had longed and who had lit the tea-­light. “It was your anersaaq!” Therecia whispered. The tone of her voice, the look in her eyes, and the way she positioned her lips to mouth an “ooh,” all signaled her astonishment, and yet, it seemed to me that she was not really very surprised. Events like these are quite common when people go away. Her amazement was rather to demonstrate that I had caused something to happen, beyond my control. I hadn’t willed it to happen. It had willed itself, on its own accord, or on account of my homesickness that had become excessive. My anersaaq had wrestled itself loose and traveled to where I had longed to be. It, we came to reason, had lit a candle in the kitchen window and shown some mild hostility toward the people who intended to stay in a house, where I myself could not be. Therecia’s expression of surprise was, in this sense, then, rather an affirmation that something beyond our control or our will had occurred. Something similar happened when Aqqaluaraq had longed for his wife, Sofia, while she had been admitted to a hospital in Denmark to have surgery. Like many other patients in Greenland, her ailment at the time demanded a doctor with a specialization available only in Denmark. Her stay had been protracted, and one day on returning to her ward from a preoperative examination, she was informed that she had only just missed her husband. He would return later, the nurse told her. At first, Sofia was perplexed. Her husband was, as far as she was aware, not in Denmark at all, and even if he had been, he did not speak Danish and would therefore not have been able to communicate to the nurse who he was and for whom he was searching, let alone find his way from the airport to the hospital. The nurse confirmed that the man she had spoken to was indeed the handsome man in the photo that Sofia showed her (she carried their wedding photo in her purse). The nurse added that instead of his white anorak, he had worn blue overalls and large

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Wellingtons: the black-­and-­orange boots worn by many fishermen in Greenland, which are lined and warm, while wide enough to remove easily should he fall into water. What had he been doing there? Sofia wasn’t too surprised that, in fact, her husband never returned. She telephoned him later that evening to ask whether he had thought about her earlier in the day. Yes, he had thought about her, intensely so. Probably too much, he admitted. It was his excessive thinking, just like my longing, that had caused his spirit to travel to be with the person for whom he longed. We would be mistaken in considering these instances as positive affirmations of close relatedness. Longing too much, being too homesick, thinking too much, talking too much; in fact, doing or feeling anything in excess is usually considered a bad thing. In Sofia’s case, it caused her headaches and nosebleeds in the days following her sister’s departure from Illorsuit after a visit. Her sister had started studying medicine in Denmark, and the two sisters therefore rarely saw each other. They had spent a wonderful week together after not having seen each other for months, but it was over much too quickly. By Sofia’s reckoning, she had longed excessively for her sister after she had gone, which had resulted in severe headaches that came and went for about a week, until one evening when she had nosebleeds. A Place That Has Land Being from a town, city, or village is very much a part of how Greenlanders generally identify themselves, of who they are and where they come from. For Illorsuarmiut, being from a village may not be something they talk or even think about every day, although when they return to the village after a visit to the city, they often talk about the village being less stressful, more peaceful and relaxing for the head and soul. When people are homesick, it tends not to be just for “home,” for the physical boundaries of a house or even for their relatives. It is all of that, but it is also homesick for a way of life and a way of being that relate directly to the fact that one is from a village (nunaqarfik). Nunaqarfik translates literally as “a place that has land”: nuna (land)—­qar (has)—­fik (place). In general, the nunaqarfik is contrasted with the city, that is, a place with houses (illoqarfik). By extension, people from a village (nunaqarfimmiut) and people from a city (illoqarfimmiut) stand in contradistinction to each other, and each defines itself against the other. This distinction does not imply that settlements do not have houses, nor does it imply that cities do not have open land, however. There are a number of reasons why this distinction is so potent in Greenland. In part, it has to do with the country’s history that the village and the

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town have come to represent two of the strongest currents in Greenland. To many Greenlanders, the villages represent the real Greenland. This is where people continue to keep up old traditions of subsistence hunting, and everything it entails, including knowledge of the environment, weather, ice, land, and animal movements and behavior; making and repairing tools and hunting equipment; hunting practices and methods of catching seal, whale, ptarmigan, and caribou; sharing meat; preparing food; and so on. To others, the real Greenland is the future and that is bound up with the city. The city is where young people, the future generation of leaders, are educated. It is where people go to work, broaden their horizons, and gaze at the world outside Greenland. It is in and through the cities that Greenland will eventually secure complete political independence; not in the villages. Thus, villages, and therefore also villagers, are sometimes looked down on by those outside them, to whom they seem backward, uneducated, and, ultimately, a major financial strain on the country’s economy. Many villagers are of course aware of this bias, and some have equally unflattering epithets for cities and city dwellers: cities are stressful places; people there are too busy, uncaring, and estranged from each other, from themselves, and from where they come from. The -­miut affix, meaning “people of ” (or its singular form, -­mioq, “person of ”) is a suffix that is often employed to illustrate belonging to a particular place. However, it is not one that I am comfortable with as it appears in Arctic literature. Being of a place, a -­mioq, implies and entails so much more than place of habitation. It also implies identity, personhood, and a particular way of being, which is different from people who are of other places. In local terms, it makes absolute sense to talk about -­mioqness just as people throughout Greenland do when they talk about being from somewhere. Nevertheless, the way the concept commonly appears in the literature about Greenland, is one that arguably essentializes people as isolated groups of Greenlanders, separated through time and divided by place. Illorsuarmiut, like many people throughout Greenland and the Arctic, travel a lot and much more than a conservative approach to -­mioqness would allow. They travel over great distances and regularly over a considerable amount of time. In fact, people may not re­ turn home for many years. Some never do. We are reminded of Guemple’s (1965) argument about the Belcher Island Inuit in the 1960s, where kinship was reckoned through cohabitation. People there remained kin for as long as they were in proximity to each other. When they moved away, the relation would cease to exist. I hesitate to agree with this point, for if it is true, there would be no use—­let alone place—­for homesickness and longing. What I do agree with somewhat, is the implication of society as surrounded by an elastic band that is able to expand and

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contract without ever snapping or becoming lax. I would argue the same for the -­mioq category. People can be “of a place,” or belong to that place while they are there, regardless of whether they were born there. Conversely, people may also continue to belong to the place where they were born, or where they once lived, regardless of whether they currently live there. A person who might at one point have been a Saqqarmioq (person from Saqqaq), may become a Nuummioq (person from Nuuk, the capital) once he moves there. After all, Nuuk is where he now lives. Similarly, someone from Nuuk might move to the Illorsuit and become Illorsuarmioq. The -­mioq category is not always fixed, and a person’s designated placehood or sense of belonging regularly changes in accordance with residence. In some cases, it does not change; that very much depends on the circumstances, vantage point, and situated position of the person. What all this suggests is that people can belong to many different places at the same time, and that one does not necessarily discard being one kind of a -­mioq—­for example, a Nuummioq—­just because one moves to Ilulissat and becomes an Iluliarmmioq. People do not always or readily shake off their -­mioqness and where they come from merely because they move somewhere else. Mishaps, misunderstandings, and disputes between people are regularly rationalized in terms of place of origin. “It’s probably because he’s from the South [or the north],” people reason. “That’s how they do things there, where he’s from.” Statements like these are not necessarily meant as a criticism but rather as a way of understanding and rationalizing why a person may have behaved or said something in a particular way that doesn’t quite make sense. Sikkersoq, who herself had moved to Illorsuit after she married, often talked about the village she was from in the Upernavik region as her home. She longed for it and her family there, especially her mother, who was old and frail and lived in the nursing home there. Equally, she would occasionally talk about her birthplace, an even smaller village that had been closed down under the Danish G60 centralization program in the 1960s. In either case, when we use affixes such as -­mioq, we are faced with the reality that while some Greenlanders may stay in a place for generations, others frequently move. The -­mioq category cannot account for the people who have moved away and today live somewhere else, just as it cannot account for all the people who have arrived. Nukaraq was born in Illorsuit and moved to Ilulissat with his family when he was a teenager. Here, he met Karla whose family had relocated to Ilulissat shortly after she was born, when her village, Appat, had closed due to the same centralization policies that had affected Sikkersoq’s life. After marrying, they moved to Illorsuit because Nukaraq had always longed to return. Karla, who had lived in the city most of her life, had hesitated at first. She tried it out

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for a few months one winter, when a house had suddenly become vacant due to relatives moving to a town further north. She had to see for herself whether it was for her, before she could make a permanent move. What struck her the most was the fact that television had only just arrived—­sort of; it was actually a VHS videotape that came by mail once a week, and its contents were transmitted from the newly built transmission house. There had been only one telephone in the entire village. It was located in the post office, which also doubled as a bank office, and where mail arrived once a week. She had found life in Illorsuit difficult at first, especially at Christmastime when she missed her family. But she had also found it exciting to live this kind of life, and to be more involved in making food, drying fish and meat, tanning pelts, sewing, and not having to rush to work every morning or be restricted by employment hours as she had been before. Being a nunaqarfimmioq (or an illoqarfimmioq) implies that you are a particular kind of person who lives a particular kind of life. A villager is the sort of person who can handle or, indeed, who prefers the slow pace of everyday life, the fact that one cannot switch workplaces at the drop of a hat, and that one makes a living primarily off the land. Being on the land and moving between village and land is an in­ herent component of being a nunaqarfimmioq. On the whole, movements between village and land (and sea) are part of everyday life in Illorsuit. For as long as the weather, sila (which is also the Greenlandic word for “world,” “mind,” and “reason”) permits, someone from the village will be out fishing, hunting, picking berries, and setting or checking traps. There are periods in the year when this pattern extends beyond the everyday, into several days and weeks at a time. When winter is darkest, for example, the hunters tend to stay in the village and not go out. This is the quiet time of the year that they spend with their families, preparing tools and equipment, readying themselves for light to return and for the ice to set. In contrast, summer is when they and their families tend to spend longer periods on the land in camps. This seasonal and seminomadic movement is an old and recurrent theme in Inuit research throughout the Arctic. The literature dates back as far as the earliest explorers and missionaries, through Boas’s “Central Eskimo” (Boas [1888] 1964), Rasmussen’s famous ethnographies from his Thule expeditions (e.g., 1925), and Mauss’ s ([1906] 1979) reinterpretation of Steensby’s ethnographic work on the so-­called Polar Eskimos. It is a theme that continues in twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century anthropological literature from the region. Whereas earlier accounts of this pattern may have been more sympathetic to an economic and environmentally deterministic explanation for this pattern, Mauss, in particular, shifted our focus to argue that seasonal variation was not due to seasons or animal migrations at all but

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to social mechanisms whereby Inuit, in order to cope with the extreme closeness and extreme solitude of each season, moved back and forth between the extremities of sociality (Mauss [1906] 1979, 79). To Mauss, the variation was social rather than seasonal, despite what the title his essay might suggest. Although the separation of what we might call the ecological from the social aspects of hunting has most certainly served a purpose in highlighting the fact that hunting is not just about meat and survival, we should also be cautious not to neglect the so-­called ecological and pragmatic aspects of hunting. They are two sides of the same coin and part of the same practice. When it comes to the actual activity of hunting or being on the land or going on a trip, in my experience, it is nigh impossible to reconcile where one ends and the other begins. Everything is social, and yet everything also seems to have some pragmatic elements to it. Of course, people need food, and this is an important reason why people go hunting or fishing in the first place. Food notwithstanding, they also need kin, and memories for the winter, and something to look forward to when winter is at its most tiresome. To fulfill these needs, many Inuit aim to get away from the village and onto the land, where they can recharge psychologically as well as physically. Being on the land is not just about hunting, and hunting is not just about food. The literature on hunting in the Arctic is rich in detail about the aspects of hunting that do not relate directly to economics or to physiological needs of survival. To Nuttall (1992), whose work is on the Upernavik region in West Greenland, hunting is just as much about building and maintaining human relatedness through careful engagement with the landscape, sharing, and remembering. Elsewhere, Graburn (1964) and Bodenhorn (2000) have demonstrated that working together through hunting is one important way through which people construct and express relatedness. Fienup-­Riordan’s ethnography of the Yup’ik (1983) shows how intricate is the relationships between human and animal founded on mutual respect and reciprocity, which is an aspect echoed in Edith Turner’s work on Beluga whale hunts (1994). Undoubtedly, while there is much more to hunting than economics, skill, or physiological survival, one must keep in mind the more hard-­edged aspect of hunting, which ultimately does come down to a question of food. Hunters will, for instance, go hunting at particular times. They will not, for instance, go hunting for a narwhal or a beluga in July as these animals are only there in autumn, when they pass on their migrations southward. Likewise, with Minke whale in late summer; capelin in June; char in June and July; ptarmigan during late winter; black-­legged kittiwake in spring; cod in late autumn; caribou in summer and sometimes during winter; and seals almost all year round, summer and winter. There is a seasonality of hunting

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that dictates when and what people hunt and, therefore also, when and what people share. Some hunters, who had lived in other towns and villages for periods of time, would return to Illorsuit because hunting was bad (according to them) or because there were no animals to hunt in those other places. There are many other elements at play in shaping what a hunting society might be in the early years of the twenty-­first century. Hunters who hunt for a living also fish for halibut, which they sell to the factory in which their wives, sisters, or daughters work, gutting the fish and preparing them for freezing or drying. The women may work at the school, in the shop, or in the local health services, or as child minders. The combined financial income of a family, apart from paying bills, buying clothes and household items (many online or by mail order), goes toward the expense of acquiring and maintaining hunting and fishing equipment. The list includes a fiberglass open boat, an outboard motor, ammunition, nets, lines, string, hooks, gasoline, spare parts, dogsleds, snowmobiles, and so on. Being a hunter is financially costly and not profitable unless there is some way of selling the catch. However, hunting is the only way that families can put fresh and nutritious food on the table and eat the kinds of food they prefer to eat. It is particularly during spring and summer when the weather is less hostile that being on the land, ice, or sea, undergoes a transformation from something that hunters do to something that entire families do together. Who goes where and when seems to be very much a personal choice. Many families have special places where they prefer to pitch their tents or catch particular foods. Some return to the same place year after year and have done so for generations. Life in such camps is a far cry from the “solitude” that Mauss described. Although people often talk of life on the land as an escape from the confinement, humdrum, or stresses of everyday life, the summer life on the land is neither lonely nor isolated; quite the contrary. First, camp life does not go on for weeks on end. The fish that is caught and not dried or smoked immediately in the following days goes bad and will need to be frozen and stored in the freezer at home. So it is with caribou, berries, and other foods. There is always a reason to go back to the village; if not to unload foods, then to restock provisions from the shop. Cigarettes, coffee, tea, sugar, more string may be needed. Someone may wish to join, for instance, an aunt who has arrived by ship from the city; while others may need to go back to work or go on holiday somewhere else in Greenland or in Denmark or elsewhere. Likewise, when on the land, people rarely stay in just one place and catch what is immediately around them. They may have heard that the blueberries across the fjord are particularly good this year, and on their way, they may stop at some relatives’ camp to see if they want to join them. When they arrive at the other side of the

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fjord, they may meet someone who has just caught a seal and is about to cook the first batch of meat. Everyone is invited to stay, eat, catch up on news, and exchange recent experiences about the land, weather, sea, and animals. Mauss’s portrayal of seasonal movements between opposite extremities of sociality builds on the assumption that humans live during winter as large and extended families in confined spaces and that the land is fundamentally empty—­an untouched, pristine, natural wilderness, devoid of human life, memory, or history—­a view which continues to dominate many popular portrayals of the Arctic, even today. Land is not merely the negative for a positive heightened sociality. Yet, it is that too, not because land is fundamentally empty; rather, it is because qivittut (plural of qivittoq), as we saw in the previous chapter, roam the land. Being on the land is not about seeking loneliness. It is about belonging to a particular place; about being an Illorsuarmioq; about being a villager, a nunaqarfimmioq. When Illorsuarmiut talk about Illorsuit as home, they also talk about the many places that surround it. To the untrained eye looking at the land, these places seem to be barely places at all. They blur into their surroundings and form an indistinguishable, amorphous whole. Yet, each place is remembered, talked about, lived in, passed by, and passed through. Each place is given a name, is recognized by everyone; and just as the name may reveal something about the place, the places, irrespective of their names, reveal many stories and memories—­for example, tales of significant events involving qivittut who poisoned a kayak rower who was hungry and eager to turn around a period of bad hunting; or quotidian experiences from last summer, as when a family picked berries late into the evening. There is a large body of Arctic literature that relates to Nuttall’s (1992) concept of “memoryscape”—­a term he developed through his study of people in the Upernavik area of Greenland. It relates to how people use maps or place-­names and, not least, how people talk about the land and move through the landscape. Landscape, Nuttall argues, is not just an action space. It is not simply somewhere people go when they want to get food. It is also a thought space. Events and features in the land demand reflection, and histories are based on events and experiences that come to life when people engage with the land (Nuttall 1992). Named places in the land are arenas for unfolding stories, myths, and past and recent events, and these stories are integral components of those places. One of Nuttall’s assertions, which has been echoed by others (Collignon 2006, 187–­216; Müller-­Wille and Müller-­Wille 2006, 217–­ 30), is that local place-­names are far more profuse than those recorded by Southern cartographers. Place-­names tend to reflect human memory, knowledge, and human thought and events. Names given by Danish colonialists,

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American explorers, or Dutch whalers, in turn, tend to be about claiming territory, building state and empire, and demonstrating power. These names articulate a different kind of history—­a history of exploration—­and express ownership, which goes against the grain of what Greenlanders and Inuit generally understand by ownership and stewardship of the land. Some place-­names, Nuttall shows, refer to a visible or physical attribute of the land or to a particular activity that may have occurred there in the past. Hence, the landscape around Illorsuit contains places with names such as Qoororssuaq (large valley), Marlulissat (twins, referring to two streams that run side by side), or Assak (hand), all describing the geographical features of the local landscape. Other places, such as Alianaatunnguaq (wonderful, little place) or Panissap Qaqqaa (Stepdaughter’s mountain) reflect some sort of anal­ ogy. Many place-­names (as Nuttall also observed in Kangersuatsiaq) ­reveal something more tangible about the land: Saputit (a dam where you can catch fish using a net), Appat (thick-billed murre), Eqaluit (char), or Oqaatsut (cormorant). We should be careful when interpreting the meaning of place-­names and not necessarily take their meanings at face value. People do not go to Appat only to catch guillemot; nor do they catch only char at Eqaluit; and Saputit is visited for a great many reasons other than merely suspending a fishnet across the narrow fjord. Place-­names do not convey knowledge in this literal sense. In fact, Karla and Nukaraq rarely catch char anywhere other than Appat, and each time I have accompanied anyone on a guillemot hunt, it has invariably been in areas in the vicinity of Appat, but not actually in Appat, the closed-­down village that takes its name from the guillemot colony—­a vertical cliff where these seabirds nest on narrow shelves. We should also note that people relate to places and place-­names (and therefore also the land) in different ways, depending upon their own experiences, not least in terms of gender. It is commonly (but not always) men who hunt and therefore generally know the landscape the best, while women’s access to the land is generally more sporadic and seasonal. Place-­names also serve a purpose in assessing spatial orientation. When traveling, people use place-­names as reference points and tools for locating their own whereabouts and direction. Just as human names and kinship terminologies are important in order to recognize, associate, or avoid, so too are place-­names important. Take, for example, a group of people aiming to go fishing, then berry picking, and then eating somewhere else. The group will set off in separate boats. They will quite naturally agree on their destinations, places to investigate, and others to avoid, all of which would be more difficult to navigate were there no place-­names at all. Any hunter or fisherman will know his way around, with or without maps, and the seasoned ones know every pocket of land and every rock lurking just beneath the water surface that may damage

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their boats. Place-­names however, make it easier for people to talk about the land and to communicate knowledge and experiences about the land to others. In Illorsuit, however, place-­names are not generally go-­to registers that reveal some hidden or reified meaning about the past or present, as is the case for Apache place-­names in the western United States. According to Basso ([1996] 2001), Apache place-­names are not mere descriptions of physical characteristics of a place; and nor are place-­names mentioned to convey the route of a person’s journey or as an indication of where one has been. Place-­ names are narratives, and when they are spoken (“speaking with names”), they invoke communal memories from the past. Speaking with names is a powerful speech-­act that evokes a mnemonic sequence of past events and people in specific situations in places in the Apache landscape. Knowledge from the Apache past, embedded and associated with particular places, is drawn on to understand a particular situation in the present. This conception of place-­names resonates with Cruikshank’s argument ([1998] 2000) that Yup’ik stories are a cultural scaffolding that people learn and then refer to in the present in various ways, to make sense of a current situation or to add depth and meaning to it. She also cautions that Yup’ik stories are not used as comprehensive caskets of knowledge readily available for extraction. I would extend this description to Illorsuit place-­names in Greenland. Here, knowledge itself is not reified. Stories mean different things to different people and are colored by the circumstances in which they are told. Places too mean different things to different people. The knowledge harbored in places cannot be conveyed by a place-­name alone or even by a story connected to the place. The significance of place refers as much to the everyday experiences people have in these places. Whenever I was on the land, or at sea, it was usually with Aqqalu or Nukaraq and their families. Passing various areas of land, hills, cliffs, islands, mounds, or beaches, they would regularly point to them and state their names, sometimes adding some further information. Here, they once caught a ptarmigan or a rabbit; on that slope over there, the blueberries used to be big. Here, there are mussels at low tide; over there, they once set a fox trap. Sometimes a qivittoq cave would be pointed out; other times, a beach full of pristine white pebbles, of the same kind that Karla had gathered and placed around the flowers in her front yard on the red rock surface. These memories were usually connected to human activity—­ about having been there at some point or about family members having been there. They would point to relatives’ favorite places and leave this observation suspended in the wind and the roar of the outboard motor, as if to say that knowing one’s way around a landscape is also about knowing one’s own family. Sometimes they would quiz me to see whether I had remembered, by

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asking me questions about where we were and were we were going. As time has gone by and I have begun revisiting many places, my own stories about and familiarity with the local land have become part of my own story and my attachment to the land, just as it became part of theirs. This familiarity with the locality extends beyond the places and the names and into the heart of family, longing and remembering. When we were eating char one winter, Nukaraq asked whether I remembered the name of the place where the char had been caught some months earlier. I did, and added that the char, of course, had been caught at Appat. He smiled at me. My answer not only demonstrated that I had remembered a place-­name, or that we had camped at Appat to catch char, but it also revealed that I had remembered the fact that Appat was Karla’s place of birth and that this was also the main reason this family returns to Appat each year to catch char. Being on the land gives people something to remember. It gives them something to long for. Josepi Returns to Ikorfat In late June, Karla’s uncle Josepi arrived from Ilulissat. He had suffered a stroke a couple of years earlier and had never fully recovered. Physically he was not as strong as he used to be and he tired easily; and mentally he seemed a little confused and forgetful. It was obvious that she was a little worried about his well-­being. He had arrived to Illorsuit with the intention of spending some time in Ikorfat, yet another of the villages that had closed during the colonial centralization policies. It was located on the mainland, and he needed someone to take him there since he didn’t have his own boat. Josepi arrived late Friday afternoon, having caught a lift from someone who was going from Ilulissat to Illorsuit, and had spent one night at Karla and Nukaraq’s house. When Saturday arrived, and the weather was clear, Josepi became anxious to leave. This made Karla worried. For how long did he intend to stay? Would he be able to cope on his own with nothing but a radio for company? He was frail and no longer the great hunter he had been only a couple of years ago. To add to her worry, she discovered he had brought only a few warm clothes, a worn thin sleeping bag, and an old ragged tent. Worried that he would be unable to cook, Karla had packed a bag of provisions consisting of mainly dried meats, fish, and frozen blubber, along with a few Danish provisions: boiled eggs, bread, tinned mackerel, salami, tea, and coffee. It was Saturday afternoon and the shop had closed for the weekend, so they were unable to purchase other necessities such as white spirit and kerosene for the Primus camping stove. Still, he insisted on going, and since he was her elder, she could not refuse nor question him. Josepi bought some kerosene from me and left

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for the harbor, closely followed by Nukaraq, who had agreed to take him to Ikorfat by boat. Keyes (1981), who offers an anthropological perspective on homesickness in the United States, argues that homesickness is rarely about longing for a particular place or for particular people but rather for a nostalgic past. Although Keyes’s point is a good one, it also separates the temporal, the spatial, and the psychological. In a sense, I want to argue the exact opposite about homesickness in Greenland: homesickness is not separable from the land, nor the people, nor the temporal. Homesickness is historically closely related to nostalgia, and Starobinski (1966) traces the development of homesickness in European medical history. Homesickness, or Heimweh, first emerges in Hofer’s 1688 thesis from ideas of regret and desiderium patriae (longing for home country). In seventeenth century Europe, Heimweh was considered much more than a little discomfort; it was a disease. The word nostalgia (Nostalgie) was a neologism that Hofer coined by combining the Greek words for “return home” (νóστος, nostos) and “pain” (αλγος, álgos). Hofer was concerned with why young Swiss soldiers were so inclined toward nostalgia when they went abroad. Many, he reasoned, had never left home before and never had to establish themselves on their own in foreign surroundings. They longed for their mothers’ soup and loving care. They lacked their mothers’ protection, and perhaps also the freedom they experienced in the Swiss mountains and valleys. He saw nostalgia born from a disorder of the imagination, which stimulates the desire to return to one’s native land. In this sense, then, we see how homesickness is not merely about temporality, about longing for a nostalgic unlivable past. Homesickness is also spatially anchored, and thus it connects people through space and time; the past, present, and future; the real and imagined. Josepi spent almost two weeks at Ikorfat. Nukaraq and some of the other men in the village would pass by every day or two to talk to him and make sure he had enough provisions. For most of the time he was alone. He had a radio that he would listen to late in the evenings or when he didn’t have anything else to do. One late afternoon Karla, Nukaraq, Nivikannguaq, and I were out boating. Karla had brought some seal meat that she intended to fry with onions in blubber over a fire of crowberry shrubs. This was summer food, outside food—­cooked outside because it tastes better cooked over a fire and also, according to Karla, because the smell of fried blubber is very strong and lingers too long indoors. We went past the spot where Josepi’s tent was pitched and where he was listening to his radio inside. When Karla invited him to eat with us, his face lit up. She had wanted to go farther up the coast because the qajaasat (Labrador tea, Rhododendron groenlandicum) was in bloom right now. She usually picked qajaasat, hung it to dry slowly, stored

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it, and later infused it in hot water to drink as a tea whenever she had a cold or a sore throat. Yet Karla clearly wanted to feed her uncle, who did not want to leave his camp, so we decided to forgo the quest for qajaasat and instead cook and eat at Ikorfat. Josepi’s heart was set on staying at Ikorfat until he decided to leave himself. Whenever that would be was anyone’s guess. Ikorfat had once been a semipermanent settlement, which for many years was inhabited only during winter but later was inhabited year-­round. Old collapsed turf houses, now barely visible, formed little mounds on the land not far from the shore. Behind a small slope, away from the shore, a few old Christian and pre-­Christian graves lay scattered. Broken wooden Christian crosses lay strewn about. They appeared to be the only evidence of human life in the place, other than Josepi’s tent. Was it not dangerous? Did Josepi seek loneliness on purpose? I was puzzled at his persistence in staying there. I had never heard of anyone spending so much time alone on the land without an explicit purpose. I couldn’t work out why he was there, but I had already learned that asking questions would get me nowhere. It would also be regarded as rude to interrogate another person’s behavior and right to act as he sees fit. So, like Josepi, I waited. There seemed to be some purpose in his insistence on staying there. Why else would he refuse to leave Ikorfat to sail twenty minutes up the coast to have a warm meal in the company of others? If loneliness was not the reason, what was it? Despite having been told fragments of their family history, I hadn’t realized at the time that Josepi, like his brother, Karla’s father, had grown up in Ikorfat. To Josepi (and indeed to most Illorsuarmiut), Ikorfat was not “empty.” Ikorfat was his childhood home and he had now returned to it. However, this was not the only reason for Josepi’s stay in Ikorfat. The rest became clear a few days later when the capelin—­small northern sea fish of the smelt family—­came in. We arrived again at Ikorfat, this time carrying buckets and large tubs; I had been instructed to bring my own. Nivikannguaq carried a tightly woven fishnet attached to a long wooden rod. Its symmetrical loops were homemade and tied with black nylon yarn that had been purchased in the Illorsuit shop. The holes were too small for the capelin but large enough for water to escape immediately, so that the wooden rod would not break from the heavy load. Josepi was no longer alone; two more tents had been pitched near his, and the exposed flat rocks nearby were covered with capelin laid out in regimented rows to dry in the fresh breeze and sun. The fish belonged to Najaaraq, from the service house, who had originally advised me not to be alone in the evenings and who later asked me if I was homesick. She and her husband had pitched a tent, and they would continue to camp until the capelin had dried sufficiently to be stored, and until they had enough to

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last for a year. The capelin lay in thick shoals all along the shore. They arrive once a year in June to spawn, and in this region of Greenland, they are renowned for being particularly large and delicious. Ikorfat is one of the best places to catch capelin because the cliff forms a handy ledge on which to balance while lowering the net into the shoal to scoop them up deftly without making them flee. For Josepi, this also was the only place to catch capelin because this was where he had grown up and where he had a special attachment. This is what he had come for. Piguppunga: I Long to once again Taste My Favorite Food I had been in Illorsuit for a couple of days. It was late afternoon on a gray Sunday, and I was making my way back from one of the communal water faucets carrying two full fifteen-­liter water bottles. I had spent the whole day alone and was wondering where Karla and Nukaraq had gone. Walking back to my house, I found them standing on their porch carving up a seal. “We were over there,” Karla gestured toward the fjord, “and we caught a seal.” I watched for a few minutes as they separated pieces of seal meat: some into a large saucepan and others into several sizes of freezer bags. “Wonderful,” she said. “We have not tasted meat for a long time . . . I have been longing to taste it, and finally today we saw one. Are you coming?” What she meant was not that they had lived as vegetarians but rather that they had not eaten seal meat for a long time. The word meat (neqi) usually refers specifically to the meat of a seal (puisi),1 indicating that seal meat, as in many other settlements in Greenland, is the staple.2 “I will boil it with potatoes, the way we usually do when we catch a seal,” she said, adding, “It’s so tasty.” An hour or so later we were all sitting around the dinner table dipping boiled meat and potatoes into mustard. One of Nukaraq’s younger sisters and her husband had arrived from Aasiaat, and an elderly couple from another village was visiting. Nivikannguaq, who had taken it upon herself to teach me Greenlandic by pointing to random objects and stating their names, had grown quiet and was now happily eating. Nukaraq took over and started pointing to the various pieces of meat and organs that were laid out on a large tray at the center of the table—­najungasoq (rib), uummat (heart), tinguk (liver), isi (eye), tartu (kidney), orsoq (fat or blubber)—­until his younger sister interrupted and asked me if I had ever eaten neqi before. Her question was not a trivial one. As is the case for most Southerners, Danes never eat seal meat. However, as a teenager living for a year in Nuuk in the 1990s, where I worked in the kitchens of a supermarket delicatessen, I had quickly become aware that Greenlandic food (kalaalimerngit) and Danish food (qallunaamerngit) were two very different things. One body of literature on

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the subject regards Greenlandic food as a political marker for the shaping of a Greenlandic national identity, especially when pitched against Danish food as the only other alternative (R. Petersen 1990; Freeman 1996; Kleivan 1996). This attitude is partly to do with what is considered not just healthy but also healing (Borré 1994). In Illorsuit, for instance, seal meat is said to make you full and keep you warm in ways that Danish foods cannot. Cooking seal meat as a suaasat—­a soup with rice, onion, and potatoes and carrots, if available—­is said to both cure and prevent colds, as well as curing physical and mental forms of tiredness. For Danes, generally speaking, Greenlandic food is regarded as smelly, while Danish food is regarded as sophisticated and stylish. Conversely, Greenlanders tend to regard their own food as healthy and tastier. Above all, Greenlandic food has pikkunarpoq—­that is, it has power or strength. Restaurants in the main centers of Greenland today tend to combine the best of both cuisines: Greenlandic produce cooked within a gastronomic framework that appeals to Southern taste buds. One can find whale meat curry, whale steak with caramelized onion and gravy, caribou steak with crowberry jus—­all appropriations of classic combinations where whale and caribou meat simply replace beef, chicken, or pork. But no seal meat is to be found on the menu. It was in the supermarket delicatessen that I tasted seal meat for the first time; I didn’t like it. The second time was in Denmark at a Greenlandic community center. An elderly Greenlandic woman had received a parcel of food from her family in Greenland and had cooked a large pot of neqi suaasat. We sat in the basement outside the kitchen eating copious amounts of soup, gnawing every last shred of meat off the bones, until they were dry and almost white. The second time, I had liked it a little more. It is a well-­known fact that seal meat tastes different depending on where it has been caught. From the vantage point of northern West Greenland, most seal meat from the south does not taste good. Statements and opinions about bad-­tasting or, even worse, tasteless meat are, on some level, also statements about belonging to one place instead of another. Inhabitants in the Qeqertarsuup Tunua (Disko Bay) area, for instance, have for years engaged in friendly banter about which town or village has the most or least tasty seal meat. People from the town of Ilulissat, for example, will boast that their meat is the best, while that of Aasiaat is the worst, and vice versa. Years later, when Nivikannguaq attended college in Aasiaat, her mother would send her parcels of seal meat, because Nivikannguaq found the taste of local seal meat disagreeable. Receiving food parcels helped Nivikannguaq with homesickness, as eating food from home made her feel closer to home. It sated her, physically and mentally. Despite the general sense of unity throughout Greenland as one people moving toward independence within the Danish realm, there is also a general sense that communities outside of Nuuk have been neglected, ignored,

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and marginalized by the political and public powers that reside in Nuuk. In Illorsuit, the disagreement with Nuuk stems in part from the many laws and regulations that complicate the Illorsuarmiut’s lives, not least of which are the hunting quota restrictions. More than a question of legislation or wildlife protection, such restrictions are part of a complex problem concerning local governance and self-­determination, and about the predicament of becoming alienated from one’s own hunting grounds and resource spaces. At the heart of the matter are the question of food security and survival and the thorny is­ sue of what sustainability really is and to whom. A final aspect of food is how it functions within a community such as Illorsuit, where it has a crucial role to play in cultural, social, and psychological well-­being. Food binds people together in the community in Illorsuit through hunting in teams, sharing food between individuals and households, and eating together. Food also binds humans to areas in the land, where particular foods are caught, stored, or prepared at certain times of the year. Fami­ lies huddle together over the distinct smell of caribou soup, which smells exactly like they remember from last year, or perhaps a little different because this caribou was caught somewhere else. Memories of summer camp when the family was out catching char in June will resurface while eating the stored fish in darkest December, giving a boost of energy so they can look forward to next summer’s return to that special place where they always catch char, and have done so for generations. It is memories like these, incorporating all that has gone into harvesting food, that makes food taste good (mamarpoq). Seasons provide a natural rhythm for what people hunt and therefore what people eat. I say this with some hesitation because not only do most Illorsuarmiut have freezers that will preserve foods through sudden winter thaws, but people throughout Greenland have a long tradition of preserving foodstuffs in various ways. There are numerous techniques for drying meat or fish, for smoking fish, for fermenting birds or sea mammals as they do in southern as well as northern Greenland, or even for drying intestines, such as stuffed with eider duck egg yolks as they do in Qaanaaq. This culinary creativity is often lost in hunter-­gatherer literature of the Arctic, where the lifestyle of Inuit and other Arctic hunters tends to be portrayed as one that naturally resists food storage. Nevertheless, being able to eat fresh food and what the seasons have to offer is paramount to hunting and to the point of living in a village. “We are used to eating them around this time,” Karla remarked one spring morning, referring to the black-­legged kittiwake (taateraaq). Until a hunting ban had been put in place on this bird between March and August, Illorsuarmiut would have eaten these birds with great pleasure during early spring. “What are we going to eat?” she wondered. Of course, there was other food, and they were not going to

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starve; rather, her concern was to do with the particular food she and others were accustomed to eating during this time of year. Without it, it was as if she was cut off from the very season of spring. Her longing to eat this bird was a desire for the sensation of spring. The pleasure of eating these birds together with her loved ones was a way of savoring the taste of spring together. In Illorsuit, for food to be good, it has to have strength, pikkunarpoq. There are physical and tangible aspects of strength in food that one should preserve in cooking. For instance, one should be cautious not to rinse meat too many times before cooking it. Karla instructed me once, when I was to babysit for Nivikannguaq and had to cook neqi suaasat for dinner, that I should keep stirring the pot until it had come to a boil. This way the strength from the meat would infuse the broth. Food without strength, pikkunaappoq, doesn’t fill you up. It doesn’t keep you warm and it doesn’t make you happy. More important, food without strength doesn’t make you remember in the same way that food with strength does. The taste and strength of food connects people to places in a way that goes beyond belonging and includes notions of longing too. One afternoon toward the end of summer, Nukaraq caught four seals. No longer being a vocational hunter, this was an exceptional catch for him. Nivikannguaq was out of breath from running from the harbor to my house to announce Nukaraq’s arrival and to enlist me to come to the harbor to lend a hand. We stood on the rock-­surface shore next to the pier. Karla and Nukaraq were carving while they instructed Nivikannguaq and me how to rinse pieces of meat and intestines in the seawater, and which pieces to put in plastic bags for freezing, which to put in saucepans for immediate consumption, and which to put in buckets for further preparation, for drying, or for dog food. Taking into account the central and very public location Nukaraq had chosen to flense (cut up) the seals, it was obvious that he intended to share his bounteous catch with people other than the usual immediate circle of extended family. He had caught much more than they could consume. People gathered around us. One of the seals had been pregnant, and some children examined the fetus, which was obviously too small to be considered meat (let alone a puisi) but large enough to make out that it was a small seal with closed eyes and no fur. Others observed closely as the seals were flensed, separated from their skins, and then opened and carved into chunks and pieces bit by bit, rinsed, and sorted. The best pieces of blubber were cut into neat squares, then salted, and prepared for freezing. These would supplement the dried fish and meat later in the winter. Karla instructed the children and adults nearby to fetch bags and saucepans if they wanted meat, which was then distributed among those who did so. Who has caught what is never an irrelevant point when talking about food. It is not just a hunter’s ability to read and navigate the landscape, or his

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particular knowledge of animals and their habitats, that makes him a good hunter. Nor is it even his ability to catch many animals that makes him a good hunter. It encompasses all that, but above all, a good hunter is someone who shares his meat. In some parts of the Arctic, sharing is spoken of as “demand sharing,” where people can demand a share of meat, even if they are not offered one. Among the Illorsuarmiut, the expectation to receive a share is much subtler and usually is an expression of the manifestation of kin relations. It is in everyone’s interest to share, if one has enough. Sometimes parents may send their children out with a cut of meat, especially to the elderly, or to people whose kin networks are smaller than others’. At other times, especially at the beginning of a season with new foods, people invite one another for supper. The fare may consist in late summer of caribou or in late autumn of a freshly caught cod boiled with its giblets and eaten with crowberries. It may also be a fresh seal, char, or beluga. It is not enough to know where something has been caught; it is also important to know by whom, not because it is relevant to know who shares what but because the who, almost regardless of who it is, factors into the taste of the food. It adds strength. When someone catches a seal, he brings fresh food to his household and to his dogs. He also brings in other sorts of “capital.” Unless seals are in abundance and every household has more than enough (which rarely is the case), the seal, after it has been transformed into meat, is usually shared in one way or another and thus serves to invoke and enhance human social relations.

6

Who(se) Are You?

When meeting a stranger (takornartoq; literally, someone who has not been seen before), Illorsuarmiut do as people throughout Greenland tend to do, which is to attempt to establish identity by asking the question, “Kiuit?” Farther south, this question is “Kinaavit?” Farther north in the Avanersuaq (Thule) region, it is “Kinaatit?” Everywhere the question means the same thing, which is, “Who are you?” The root ki-­ comes from kina, which means “who,” and the ending -­it is the second person singular interrogative ending. The affix -­u-­, which in regional dialect sometimes changes the letter a for u, can have several meanings depending on the context. It denotes “to be,” “to be the cause or a medium for something,” or “to belong to.” In this case, it is the latter which is significant. The question “Who are you?” might just as well be translated as “Who do you belong to?” Or, “To whom do you belong?” Whose are you? I use the term stranger with some hesitation because as it often turns out, people are usually not strangers in the strictest sense of the word. Although Therecia never asked me directly who I was, the first time she visited me, her visit nevertheless sought to establish knowledge of me, through knowledge of my family, and in this way to establish links and similarities between her family and mine. After her visit, I was no longer a stranger. I was invited to her house the next day, where I met her husband, Mikaali, and saw a photograph of his deceased mother who had once lived in the house I now lived in. Her name had been bestowed on one of his granddaughters, who visited briefly that afternoon, as she usually would. Mikaali affectionately called her granddaughter “Old Woman” (arnaq utoqqaq). The horizontally wide and vertically shallow kinship system in Greenland, which is due to the return of names, really comes into its own when strangers meet. They may never have met before, but because people in Illorsuit and, in my experience, other places

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in Greenland go to great lengths to maintain and increase their own network of relatedness and to familiarize themselves with other people’s family networks, these so-­called strangers will know at least someone in each other’s families. Persistently asking questions, such as: “Who are your parents?” “What is your surname?” “Where are you from?” will eventually reveal some kind of relatedness. “Oh yes, I met your mother that time I was at hospital in Nuuk,” or “I have family in the settlement your father is from,” “My nephew is married to a person by that surname also,” or even “My daughter was born in the same year as your son.” People establish knowledge of each other by establishing knowledge of each other’s families. Surnames in Greenland are central to this orientation. The surnames Hansen, Karlsen, Mølgaard, Lange, Berthelsen, Olsen, all tell us not so much about their ancestors or about their origins as they do about establishing connections—­the whose—­in the present. Missionaries introduced Northern European surnames into Greenland from the eighteenth century onward, and with them a whole new way of formalizing clan structures and demonstrating kinship. During the earliest contact periods with Europeans, Greenlanders adopted the surnames of the Europeans with whom they came into contact. For many, this happened through Christian baptism, where the name of the minister or missionary who formalized a Greenlander’s conversion through baptism was bestowed on the baptized. Sometimes people took the names of travelers and explorers, either because they wanted to honor them or because of unions between Inuit women and outsiders. This practice, one could argue, was also a way for Europeans to stake at least a symbolic claim to the Arctic, similar to the colonial exercise of mapping, or naming places in the landscape after European monarchs, captains, explorers, and travelers. In practical terms, this naming process would have meant that people who were not previously related in genealogical terms suddenly, at least according to their surnames, became family. I am doubtful that this would have had any practical effect on the way that people reckon each other as kin or not. Two or three centuries later, whenever conversations turn to surnames, it is my general impression that people are well aware of how they may be related to people with the same surname; of how many family branches grow from the same surname, missionary or explorer; and which areas of Greenland they tend to live or have lived for decades, sometimes centuries. The same is the case for first names. Today, only a few traditionally Greenlandic Inuit names are still in use, due to Christianization and baptism through which Greenlanders were coerced into taking Danish or other European first names. Sometimes the baptized chose names that they had become familiar with from the Bible; and

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other times they chose again the names of missionaries, explorers, and sometimes crew and their family members whom they held in high regard. Establishing the who through the whose, or who someone is by inquiring about their family, shows how structurally central the family (ilaqutariit) is in Greenland. Yet Greenlanders also exercise a pronounced degree of personal autonomy. In the West Greenlandic dialect this is known as nammineq but is sometimes referred to as imminik, which, like nammineq, translates as “self ” or “by him/her self.” In daily speech imminik is also sometimes used to express “Never mind” or “It doesn’t matter.” Personal autonomy is a well-­established theme in the anthropology of Inuit and the Arctic, as a practice, concept, or value, as well as in more general studies of hunter-­gatherer societies. Although Greenlanders would not fall into any traditional understanding of hunter-­gatherers today, we must remember that it was only a few generations ago that most societies could be categorized as seminomadic hunting societies. A common thread linking many hunter-­gatherers is having a strong sense of egalitarianism and also pronounced values of so-­ called individual or personal autonomy. There are, as Gardner (1991) showed, an overwhelming number of theories accounting for the pursuit of individual autonomy. Some have root in the subsistence economy, which is then expressed in child rearing, nomadism and the search for food, the mode of production, or as an adaptive strategy against resource depletion. What is perhaps most interesting here is how egalitarian social organization, which is often said to characterize hunter-­gatherer societies around the globe, not only accommodates pronounced personal individualism but also produces it. This is a point taken up by Ingold in his discussion of hunter-­gatherer individualism (1986). He argues that, far from being in conflict with a social whole, individualism is in fact dependent on it. Ingold argues that the main difference between Western individualism and the autonomy of hunter-­ gatherers is that the hunter-­gatherer kind is, at the outset, grounded in the social—­a point also discussed by Macfarlane (1978) in his work on English individualism. Instead of tracing the origins of individualism to the Reformation and the breakup of the feudal system in sixteenth-­century Northern Europe, Macfarlane traces the roots to thirteenth-­century England, where a particular kind of ego-­centered kinship had been allowed to flourish. In Macfarlane’s view, the English individual is created in the absence and denial of kin relationships and in a quest for aloneness. Even in the most intimate of relationships between parents and children, children had to work and sometimes had to leave home early on in their lives to fend for themselves. It was in this separation that individualism, as we have come to know it, grew.

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To Strathern (1992), however, relatedness is always prior to the conceptualization of the person. She argues that English individualism did not arise from the absence of parent-­child relationships but rather as a result of a particular kind of relationship between parents and children. Be they negative, ceased, or unpronounced relationships, they are still relationships. English individualism to Strathern, then, is a fact and a result of relations, and not something that is opposed to it. In this sense, there may not be much difference between hunter-­gatherer individualism and English individualism. They both apparently seem, at the outset, to be rooted in relations. There is a large body of anthropological literature that attends to the question of the universality of the Western notion of self and individualism. In her monograph on kinship, Carsten (2004) asks how or why it is that we tend to locate the “individual” as something that is distinctive to the so-­called Western notion of human person, while non-­Western personhood, (i.e., the West versus the rest) is “dividual”; that is to say, it is constructed by social relations and divisible into different parts. In Greenlandic person(hood), we might say, for instance, that what makes a human a human person is not the fact that he or she is conceived and born alone. A human person also has soul (tarneq), breath or spirit (anersaaq), a name (ateq), and mind or reason (sila). What makes a Greenlandic person who he or she is, is a combination of all these entities, along with many other social conditions having to do with family and place. All those components come together in the person, and leave the person again upon death, and sometimes during the course of a lifetime. I am not interested here in discovering whether this means that Greenlanders are more individual than in the so-­called West or South, or if the notion of personal autonomy (nammineq) weighs heavier than social relations, or whether it is a result of or the cause of personhood. Regardless of whether personal autonomy is rooted in social relations, this is not where I see the relevant difference between what Ingold (1986) calls “hunter-­gatherer individualism” (nammineq) and Western individualism. The difference in nammineq is in its expression; through the ways and reasons for being exercised as well as the ways in which it is perceived and valued. In fact, Briggs (2001), who sketches out some of the differences in meaning and interpretation of Inuit and Qallunnaaq (white person) autonomies in Arctic Canada, argues that Inuit personal autonomy means so many different things and plays out in such different ways that she is cautious about lumping them all together as one kind of “autonomy.” Nammineq can mean many things: personal autonomy; individuality; personal; by him-­her-­or itself; independence; integrity; live and let live; non-­interference; do it by yourself; responsibility. These are all clearly different, and some have their own words. However,

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they all relate to nammineq. In the next chapter we shall see how nammineq can be used to understand, or not understand, why another person has taken his or her own life; how nammineq is a way of letting go of cause and accountability and accepting people’s right to do as they wish and to accept events as they unfold. But in this chapter, I first want to focus on some of the ways nammineq relates to naming, how it is yielded in children, and how they learn to exercise it. Finally, I investigate how nammineq is used in human relatedness for people to give space to each other to act according to their own preference, and in turn how the concept is employed to smooth out disagreements and to make allowances in interpersonal relationships. In this sense, nammineq is a social convention that helps people maintain social cohesion and achieve reconciliation. By Itself What a name is and what it does vary extensively throughout the Arctic and, in my experience, within a community and a family. The ateq is a good example of both personal autonomy and how a person’s identity, personhood, or personal self comes from something other than himself or herself. Naming is never simply a question of bestowing the name of a recently deceased community or family member onto a child, and thus making the ancestor return. Names first have to be recognized in the infant. The closest kin—­parents and grandparents—­are always watchful of how the infant responds to its environment. Sometimes the infant may appear to be attracted to a particular smell or show a distinct liking for a certain person or for particular households. How the infant behaves in various circumstances usually signifies who has returned. Sometimes parents or other close kin to the newborn have dreams in which they see a deceased person, and such dreams are taken as a sign for naming the infant. This happened to Naja. While she was expecting her son, she had a dream about her fiancé’s grandfather, Malik, who had died tragically on the sea ice while traveling between two villages. In the dream, as in many other dreams of this nature, he smiled and handed Naja a bunch of flowers. It was a sign to her to give her unborn child the name of her fiancé’s grandfather. After a child is given the name, he or she must be reintroduced to the community. Family members of the deceased will often reintroduce themselves to the child in an attempt to trigger the child’s memory. “This is Nukannguaq. He is your nephew, do you remember him?” or “I am your husband, do you remember me?” People ask such questions when they meet the infant to encourage the memory of the returned name.

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Sikkersoq once returned from a visit to another village and told me about a little girl who had been named after her mother’s sister. When they were out walking one day, the little girl pointed to a mountain and asked her mother, “Isn’t it right, mom, I died over there?” Somehow the little girl knew, without anyone ever having told her, that her aunt, her namesake or aqqa, had taken her own life by that mountain. In Barrow in the Alaskan Arctic, Bodenhorn (2000) shows that the decisions children are expected to make on their own are attributed to their personhood, which, in turn, is conveyed by the name or names a child is bestowed and the way these names combine in the child. How an Iñupiaq child expresses his or her personality or person is a reflection of his or her names rather than a sign of biological traits. Biological parents, Bodenhorn argues, claim no responsibility for their children’s actions. In Iñupiaq society, people are their names, not reflections of their parents. Although this is true to some extent in Greenland, it is biological parenting, family, and household that are important for who you are and how you are perceived. “He is just like his father,” Karla would sometimes say about Aqqalu, referring to his pranks and his penchant for teasing women with flirtatious jokes. “That’s how they are in that family.” Iñupiat infants also decide for themselves when they wish to be born, while infants in other Inuit communities are said to have the ability to change sex (Saladin d’Anglure 1994). Although I have never heard of such cases in Greenland, it is nevertheless worth stating that unborn infants here too are believed to possess some degree of agency and awareness while still in the womb. People noted that Sofia’s cleft palate was something that had developed on account of her absorbing her mother’s stress while still in the womb. Her mother had suffered physical and psychological abuse from her then partner, who was Sofia’s father. The only way she had overcome the problem and gained enough determination to eventually leave the relationship was because Sofia, still a fetus, had relieved her mother’s pain by taking it upon herself. Her palate became the way it was, as a result. Sofia’s palate and prenatal agency, which had nothing to do with the name she would later be bestowed, as well as the little girl who remembered the death-­place of her aqqa and aunt, are clearly relationally focused. Yet, these cases also demonstrate an almost hyperautonomy, which is beyond the control of the person it affects the most. The case is the same for homesick or excessively longing people whose spirit or ghost (anersaaq) leaves the body (timi) and travels to where the person wants to be, as discussed in chapter 5. Although these events were also relationally driven—­motivated by an excessive longing for a particular kind of relatedness—­they just happened. The anersaaq decides to travel on its own accord and without the person whose spirit

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it is knowing or even wanting it. In contrast with suicides, where we know how someone took his or her own life but rarely why, in the aforementioned cases, it seems we know why but not how. No one can really know how these things occur. This could be one of the reasons for naming and why it remains so important to people personally, as well as to families and communities. A name is not merely a label we give to a person and then play make-­believe that an ancestor has returned through it when actually a photograph might do just as well. On the contrary, for names to continue to have the potency they do, trying to rationalize or explain them, or claiming to know exactly how their autonomy works in certain contexts, would deflate the potency of names and their autonomy. Learning Nammineq alludes to independent action without outside intervention or question. Children’s ability to exercise personal autonomy is not due to their name alone, nor even due to their own agency. Learning to exercise, express, and manage their own personal autonomy is a process in which parents are very much involved, passively and actively. Managing personal autonomy has found its own language and expression in public discourse among politicians and professionals engaged with community social health and well-­being; and not least in prevention initiatives of gender equality, domestic violence, and suicide. One aspect of talking about this is vis-­à-­vis traditional gender roles, which in some families, villages, towns or entire areas no longer hold true or have relevance. Young boys, younger brothers, and boy children in general are regularly said to be adored, encouraged, loved, and spoiled more than girls. “They are treated like little princes,” the chief of police stated at a conference on domestic violence in Nuuk.1 Traditionally in Greenland, little boys would have grown up to become hunters and providers. The survival of entire families would have depended on the hunters, who, to successfully land big game or withstand weather conditions, would need self-­confidence to think quickly and act fast. How best to keep a young boy motivated to provide for others? How best to give him confidence? One way involves showering him with love, appreciation, and confidence-­boosting attention. Sisters and the older siblings would traditionally have taken on nurturing roles for their younger brother and were encouraged to keep him happy, safe, and secure. These gender roles have been affected by the immense social changes in the country, especially since the Second World War. Today, Greenland’s future independence from the Danish realm depends on increased levels of education in almost all sectors of Greenland. This development has brought its own change in gender roles. It is still primarily women rather than men who

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seek higher education, which means that women are more likely to leave village life as a hunter’s wife behind in favor of travel to a city either in Greenland or abroad. This emergent inequality in gender roles increases feelings of frustration and hopelessness among young men, which can lead to domestic violence or suicide. Learning to use one’s personal autonomy here is really about learning to be a responsible person. Responsibility is neither innate nor bestowed with one’s name; it is something one learns. The young men and women of Greenland are faced with taking on various kinds of responsibilities in different ways. For some, being responsible entails maintaining a way of life, which cuts right to the core of what it means to be a Greenlander. For others, being responsible is best served by looking to the future and finding ways of being less dependent on a relationship with Denmark; for example, the import of expensive Danish professionals on temporary contracts. We should not conflate personal autonomy and responsibility; they are two different things. However, there is an aspect of nammineq that is about responsibility. One must learn to exercise one’s autonomy responsibly—­not excessively or selfishly—­and one must also learn to take responsibility for oneself and not become too dependent on others. Overly protective parents, by inadvertently preventing their offspring from exercising the desire and curiosity to learn by themselves, produce children who will find it difficult to fend for themselves in the future. Some say that parents who drink excessively, and therefore cannot sufficiently look after their children, may cause their children to become too independent, so much so that they may find it difficult to trust other people; or, contrariwise, such parents may create overly dependent children who will seek care and love elsewhere. The social mechanism within most Greenlandic communities is that children are not just the responsibility of the biological parents but are everyone’s responsibility. This means that the community is responsible for children’s safety and care, and not just the state or social services, which sometimes employ conflicting interests or methods of intervening on behalf of or protecting children or families at risk. Children learn to exercise their sense of personal autonomy, nammineq, by employing it and not by instruction. It is employed in learning how to negotiate social relations, how to avoid and solve conflicts, how to share, and, indeed, who is kin, when, how, and when not. Even in mundane everyday life, this learning is evident. One spring day, Karla had fried some seagull eggs that we had collected on a trip. The eggs were sitting in the frying pan on the stove. Nivikannguaq rose from her seat at the dining table to get another egg for herself. I was sitting closest to the stove, and to ensure that Nivikannguaq would not burn herself on the frying pan, I too rose from my

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seat, as I had done so many times before, to assist her. Because I was her older sister (angaju), I had learned that this was my responsibility: to look after my younger sister, my nuka. However, this time Karla intervened: “Nammineq!” Her assertive voice was directed at me. She meant that this time I should let Nivikannguaq help herself. She would not need my help, and she should not be protected. “When we visited my sister, she told me that I am taking away Nivikannguaq’s responsibility,” Karla explained. “She’s right. I have to let her do things herself. If I always tell her how to do things and always keep an eye on her, then she will never learn.” Indeed, how would Nivikannguaq learn to be responsible if she had never been allowed to take responsibility? How would Nivikannguaq learn to manage nammineq if she had not been given the chance to try nammineq? Although nammineq could be said to be a model of nonintervention, it is nevertheless also a model in which parents encourage children to act and behave in a certain way. If a child is too hesitant, is too dependent (or too independent), or shows signs of insecurity or even laziness, parents nudge children in the other direction. At times, Nivikannguaq would be highly inquisitive. She would repeat questions, sometimes about subjects with which she should not concern herself but mostly about things she easily could find out for herself. Her parents would tease, “Nuno naloq!” (“Baby who knows nothing!”) to goad her into using her own sense of awareness, or nammineq, to discover answers and solutions for herself. Children learn to exercise their sense of nammineq responsibly by putting it to use. Young boys line up small rocks and practice their aim by throwing small stones at it. A precise throw can kill a bird or a hare and therefore prove vital should he ever find himself alone and without food on the land. Hardly has the first snow fallen in Illorsuit when groups of young children, girls as well as boys, fasten the oldest, calmest, and most experienced dogs to sleds they have made with their fathers. If no sleds are available, a shopping basket from the settlement shop will do for an afternoon. This is how children begin practicing their driving skills: by each taking turns to drive dog teams through the main path of the village from the helipad to the shop, past the nurse’s station, the laundry, and the bathhouse. As they grow more experienced, they venture farther away onto the sea ice, following the paths already trotted by experienced hunters and their much larger dog teams. A young boy will have witnessed his father driving dogs many times before and knows the calls that steer the dogs’ direction and speed; he will have learned how to handle a whip and what to do if something unforeseeable happens. The first few times the father might accompany his son onto the ice, but once the father feels confident that his son can handle himself responsibly, it

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is time for the boy to start making his own experiences and learn on his own. Overprotection and too much instruction lead to children becoming insecure and prevent children from learning to trust their own instincts and strength. In contrast, lack of guidance and letting children roam in an excess of nammineq leads to selfishness. Most important, spoiled children can grow up to take rejection and disappointment very badly. Finding the elusive balance between too much and too little nammineq is the ideal to strive for, albeit perhaps impossible to attain. Social Convention What I want to say about nammineq is that it guides interpersonal relationships. Although each person is ultimately responsible for his or her own actions, the acknowledgment of people’s right to act nammineq is a way of avoiding placing guilt or holding people accountable for their own choices. Thus, nammineq is a social valve that has the potential to diffuse tension and disagreement in social relationships. It can ease other people’s guilt and inevitable sense of responsibility when something bad happens or if something goes wrong, resulting in a quarrel or worse. Personal autonomy concerns personal integrity. Without warning or explanation in the weeks leading up to Christmas in 2004, Hansi resigned from his position as choir director. Several of the choir members were so disillusioned that they too resigned, as they could not see how they would be ready for the busy schedule of Christmas concerts and carol singing. Nukapiannguaq usually conducted the choir in Hansi’s absence—­when Hansi went to the city with his wife and children or when he did some months’ work on fishing trawlers. Now, he was very unhappy with the situation and slammed his blue folder of sheet music onto the wooden church pew, announcing emphatically, “Kammapunga” (“I am angry”), and walked out. The rest of us sat in silence for a few moments, unsure of what to do. In the absence of anyone who could read music or play the church organ sufficiently well, we decided to leave. I followed Petrine home. Her older brother had returned from beluga hunting with some of the other hunters and been given a share. I was invited to eat along with many others in their extended family. After most guests had left, Sikkersoq and I drank coffee and talked about what had happened. She had not been to practice herself since she had been busy with the share of meat and a mattak (whale skin) that her son had brought. Sikkersoq, a seasoned choir member who sang her alto part by ear, did not seem concerned by the fact that we had lost both our director and his substitute. Nukapiannguaq had left his notes behind, which we read as a signal that he did not

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intend to return. “Imminik” (“It doesn’t matter”), she said. “Sussa” (“Never mind”). Her optimism did not convince me. I looked at Isak, who was Hansi’s nephew and also Naja’s fiancé and soon to be father of Sikkersoq’s first grandchild. He was listening to our conversation. “Can you talk to your uncle?” I appealed to him. Isak looked at me and smiled indulgently. “Jaani,” he said after a short pause, “Nammineq!” This time the word did not translate as “do it yourself.” It meant that it was Hansi’s own decision to leave his position as choir director, and that if he wanted to return, it should be his own decision. If he no longer wanted to conduct the choir, it would be wrong to try to attempt to change his mind. What Sikkersoq had tried to show me, gently, by dismissing the problem as a small glitch that the choir would overcome, Isak said more directly. It was not his place to interfere with his uncle’s decision, nor was it mine or anyone else’s. This also explained why no one in the choir had encouraged Hansi to explain why he had decided to leave. He had already made up his mind. Not only would there be no point in questioning his decision, it would also be rude. Asking the question why (sooq or sooruna) is a risky thing to ask in Greenland. This is especially tricky if the question aims to solicit causality or pursues the reason as to why something occurred the way it did, or why someone has chosen to do something in a particular way. The question is more likely to be perceived as a critique of a person’s ability to act responsibly and rationally, nammineq. The why question is considered not only inane but also rude. In maturity, the interrogator will realize that asking such a question implicitly raises doubt about the integrity and the ability of the questioned to act responsibly. Besides, asking the question why also highlights the questioner’s own level of immaturity, lack of awareness, and improper use and understanding of nammineq. Briggs (2001, 242) talks about the times she would inquire why her adoptive father acted in one way rather than another. Growing impatient with her questions, he finally asserted “Ihumaminik,” which translates as, “I do what I will, or think.” The equivalent Greenlandic expression would be “Isumaminik” and is composed of two words: isuma, which translates as “mind, opinion, reason, perception”; and imminik, which is similar to nammineq and translates as “self ” or “by itself, by himself, or by herself.” A direct translation would approximate “the mind, reason, opinion is its own, or does as it will.” In everyday speech, however, isumaminik translates as a direct request to “mind your own business.” I don’t know what later made Hansi change his mind and return to conducting the choir. Perhaps it was Nukapiannguaq’s announcement that he was angry and his subsequent resignation from the choir himself. Perhaps Hansi realized how important the choir would be for the entire Christmas month.

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Or perhaps he just changed his mind again “of his own accord” (nammineq), as though his mind had decided for him, in the same way that people’s spirits may travel away of their own accord if someone is homesick or is “thinking too much” about something or someone. In any case, the choir decided to carry on with or without his direction and began to rehearse the hymns we already knew from the previous Christmas. Suddenly the doors opened one evening while we were practicing a carol for the first of December, a day when the Christmas tree would be lit and the whole village would go to the cemetery to light candles and sing Christmas carols. Hansi walked in and sat in a pew near the front. He listened to us singing for a while before taking over the direction as though he had never left. Maybe, If the Weather Permits Almost everything anyone ever does or plans to do in Greenland is dependent on the weather (sila). And almost all statements that make assertions or promises about the future are followed by the word immaqa (maybe).2 Sila naalagaq (the weather is superior [ruler, governor, sovereign, lord, master]) is what people say whenever they begin to make plans for a journey, or when something is delayed or made impossible because of the weather. How is it that the weather can change from good to bad in a matter of moments? Only the weather knows, and it is for the weather to decide, which is why immaqa is as definite as anyone will dare to predict when wondering whether a journey by boat to the city or a hunting trip next day will actually take place. When I first arrived in Illorsuit, I was never ready when someone invited me to go boating. Nor had I been prepared for the patience required in always being ready to go but simultaneously being ready not to go anywhere at all until further notice. I was preconditioned to assume that the “maybe” following the invitation to go boating, hunting, fishing, or berry picking the next day would require follow-­up confirmation, so I would wait for word, only for someone to phone and ask, “Where are you? We’re leaving now!” I’d grab my clothes, flask, provisions, and knife in a rush and run down to where their boat was moored. Everyone would be ready in the boat, with the motor running, just waiting for me. These two little words—­immaqa and sila—­are rule-­of-­thumb words that, once I began to understand what they entail, made everyday life and interactions with friends, family, and interlocutors so much easier. Talking about the weather and commenting on how one feels about it—­if it feels wonderful (alianaak) or if it is cold (issi) or if it rains, snows, or whatever—­is not idle chatter. It is talk about the weather, and therefore it is important. The scope of sila extends

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much further than weather. Sila is also the word for “mind, reason, the world order,” and the personified weather spirit, silap inua. Before Christianity and colonial rule took root and eradicated many of the traditional beliefs that had existed in Greenland, West Greenlanders believed that survival hung in the balance between humans, animals, the land, and the sea, as well as spirits and other nonhuman entities. Illness and disease were indicative of an overall imbalance in this world order, just as broken taboos and antisocial behavior could create an imbalance, which, in turn, would cause illness, starvation, or death. Although most of these beliefs are outdated today, many of the principles behind them are still prevalent, albeit manifested in a different way. Whenever I was tired or run down, people invariably understood that it was sila—­the weather or the environment—­that was the cause. If Karla’s feet would suddenly hurt or twinge, it was because bad weather was coming. If the palm of her hand began to itch, she knew it to be a sign that a seal would soon be caught, and she would let Nukaraq know so that he could consider going seal hunting. And someone who has lost his mind or reason (silaaruppoq) creates a personal imbalance, not just in himself and his psychological well-­being but also in his social world. Each person has sila. It is not a physical entity like a brain. Nor is it what we traditionally understand a soul or a spirit entity to be. It is an ability or right that each person possesses and that everyone could lose temporarily or permanently. People with severe psychological illnesses are said to have lost their sila. What causes them to lose it is one of those things that just happens, nammineq. Loss of temper as well as acts of suicide, violence, and crime may happen on account of a loss of sila. Nammineq, one of my friends explained to me in response when I asked her why her cousin had suddenly lost his sila or lost his temper with her earlier that morning. The whole village was talking about the altercation. One of the older hunters in the village had witnessed the fracas, as he had been there to organize a hunting trip with my friend’s father. The cousin was originally from another village but lived with his family in Illorsuit where he could earn money by fishing. My friend had been cleaning up in the kitchen. First she had fetched water at the public water faucet, and then she began doing the dishes. Her cousin, who had slept in on account of his having been fishing, had just woken up. He joined his uncle and the hunter in the living room and, finding that there was no more coffee, called through to his cousin asking her to make some more since she was in the kitchen anyway. Annoyed at having had to fetch water by herself and at having cleaned the entire kitchen, dishes, table surfaces, and floors, she responded that he could make his own coffee, nammineq. At that point he lost his temper. He went outside to the shed, grabbed his rifle, loaded it, went back into the kitchen and fired a shot.

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Since he hadn’t aimed at her or anyone else, and because the low-­caliber bullet went through the window and out into the sea, the local bailiff found no grounds to arrest him. He was reprimanded and underwent the social mortification of everyone in the village talking about the event and being apprehensive in his presence. My friend put this episode of his silaaruppoq down to nammineq—­something that just happened. She knew that whatever she had done, her provocation did not justify so strong a reaction. Yet, instead of accusing him of being unreasonable, she ascribed whatever came over her cousin to something that just happened, nammineq. It was a way for her and the whole family to overcome the shock and to move on from the event. Without this ability to forgive and move on, and without the ability to carry responsibility for one’s actions but not be burdened by them, families in small societies would quickly shatter into pieces, and the social order of human relatedness could be destroyed. Both immaqa and sila are concepts that simultaneously denote uncertainty and certainty; and both are forces that are outside human control. We can never know for certain what will happen, and any utterances about plans for the near and distant future will usually be finished with the word immaqa. Maybe. The weather decides most of what people do, and when. When the sila is good, people are busy: working outside, traveling, and going hunting. When the sila is bad, people stay at home, visiting each other and catching up on chores. Humans are subject to the will of others, the uncertainty this brings, and the weather. Of uncertainty, people can be certain. There is another side to this certain uncertainty, which has to do with disappointment. We might expect that the recognition of uncertainty harbored by the practices of nammineq, sila, and immaqa would safeguard against dis­appointment in relationships, yet nothing can do that. Love, care, time, and worry can be invested into relationships with families, friends, and interlocutors alike, yet expectations can still be unmet. For example, Sikkersoq had quit smoking cigarettes one autumn. She had done well and was proud of her achievement, as the days passed and still she didn’t succumb. However, something was troubling her. All the money she saved from not buying cigarettes quickly went to her children, who were young adults and all unemployed at the time. They wanted clothes, cigarettes, DVDs, and other little luxuries. In quiet moments with me, she would sigh and say that she sometimes felt as though her children didn’t love her; that they only loved her money. She was the only one working a permanent job and bringing in a steady income, while her children rarely helped with the housework, the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry, or fetching water (imeq) or nilak—­ice chopped from stranded icebergs and used for drinking water. Her sighs came

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from deep within and her breath could hardly contain them. She knew that she had spoiled her children. She had allowed them to do as they pleased, had given them everything she was able to give, in terms of love and attention, and she provided a childhood and youth not dominated by chores, as hers had been when she was young. Her years of drinking when they were children also contributed to this indulgent mothering—­she wanted to make it up to them. Her youngest daughter’s birthday was just after Christmas, and she had planned a kaffemik (celebration with coffee and cake) for her. As a special treat she had bought a jar of applesauce, whipping cream, and amoretti biscuits, which she intended to layer into an apple trifle at the kaffemik. Unfortunately, her glass bowl had broken during Christmas, so she had no way of making the trifle. By chance, she came across one in the shop, but it was too expensive for her to buy. She turned to her family for money, hoping that they would all chip in. They refused; or they didn’t have the money. She relayed to me that she felt disappointed and rejected and was now convinced more than ever that her children only loved her for her money. This is why she started smoking again, she explained. Remembering Photographically Being socially responsible and doing things the correct way (iluamik) covers many domains. In Illorsuit, the process of remembering is an important part of being a responsible person. Telling stories about experiences on the land or about qivittut (people who have turned away) or other events is an explicit activity, which functions to disseminate knowledge and experiences, as well as being an implicit act of remembering. So too is the return. The return is an unconcealed way of remembering, “re-­membering” the dead in the present. This “re-­membering” is inherent in both the naming ritual in church when the infant becomes a Christian person by being baptized and becomes a social person by receiving names; and in the fact that a returned person now has a larger (“re-­membered”) family than the one into which he or she was born. We usually take remembering to imply that, whatever it is that is remembered is in the past and is now brought into the present. Whoever and whatever is remembered, is remembered because it makes sense not to forget. The remembering of names and kin and everything that it encompasses is not just important for the ritual of naming to prevail. It is also a way of being socially responsible and of illustrating personal responsibility. If we were to draw a typical Greenlandic kinship diagram, complete with returns and adoptive kin (as shown in figure 2 in chapter 1), it quickly becomes clear that kinship in Greenland does not revolve around an ancestral line and that

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what is remembered is, in effect, almost always within lived memory. Therefore, the kinship diagram, taken as an illustration of who is remembered as kin, expands horizontally to include (to Northern European eyes at least) an overwhelming array of family members. Conversely, the diagram is vertically shallow and usually includes only kin of whom people have lived memory. Remembering, then, is not about remembering past generations and long-­ gone ancestors but about the present. It is about what oneself has experienced, can experience, and can be responsible for in the present. In one of her papers on Malayan kinship, Carsten (1995) discusses the same phenomenon of a vertically shallow and horizontally wide kinship system. She shows that due to migration, people in Malaya have forgotten their ancestral kin due to migration to the island of Langkawi. What they do instead is orient kinship toward kin making: in the present, by negotiation of biological boundaries and construction of kin relations with other biologically unrelated migrants; and for the future, by focusing their efforts on making children and grandchildren. We might imagine that in the future, assuming that future generations stay put, kin who are currently alive would form the very ancestral line that today is absent. Alternatively, it is possible that the current form of kinship that lacks an ancestral line would continue, since the ancestral line in the present has been forgotten and therefore might not be missed in the future. The apparent lack of ancestors or an ancestral line in Illorsuit and Greenland has nothing to do with migration or forgetting, and everything to do with remembering. This is as true for biological relatives as it is for named ones. The one who returns through the name is invariably the person who had the name last, and thus the traits or personality attached to the name are only from the person who last had the name. The traits are not from the long string of people who had the name previously, as is the case among the Inupiat, for instance, where the name seems to have or be its own life (Bodenhorn 2006, 151). When entering a typical home in Illorsuit and most other places in Greenland, one of the first things you notice is a depiction of Jesus, usually alive rather than crucified. You will also notice framed drawings, embroideries, or small tapestries sewn from glass beads. These are not purely for decoration. Examining the text drawn, sown, or stitched into these displays, which usually consists of names and dates, we deduce that it is comprised of greetings and congratulations for anniversaries, christenings, births, birthdays, and weddings. They are more than congratulatory cards. They are badges of pride and happiness that function like diplomas to bear witness not only to life-­changing events but also to relatedness. Among them are an overwhelming number of framed photographs of kin, both living and dead; photographs of favorite places on the land, memories of a summer holiday to

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Denmark to visit relatives, or memories from when relatives from far away visited. In recent years, since the introduction digital cameras and home printing, coupled with more affordable travel, this latter category of photographs has become more and more abundant. While these photographs served, when I first arrived, as a useful entrée in discovering who is related to whom in Illorsuit, the photographs function as an indirect way of surrounding oneself with family, of showing who they are, and whose they are. These reminders of kin, of events, of memories operate as an act of showing remembering; like a kinship diagram but ordered and categorized in another way. They comprise what Empson (2007, 64) refers to as a “memory-­map” of kin and events that are brought into the present and made alive. Among the photographs there will always be photographs of newborn babies: children of the household, nieces or nephews, grandchildren. In some, we see adults carrying an infant. The adults are dressed up in national Greenlandic dress. The woman wears a highly elaborate mix of colorful garments: a silk blouse with a floral waistband; sealskin shorts with vertical stripes of embroidered fur and colored leather on the front; and long boots with black sealskin at the top, then embroidered, colorful flowers on white fabric, and below, the kamik—­the traditional white seal leather boot decorated with an intricate embroidery of minute pieces of seal leather. Over her shoulders she wears a beautiful, heavy necklace made from colorful glass beads, and on her wrists, some knitted wrist warmers also decorated with beads.3 The man at her side wears a white anorak, black trousers, and black kamiit, and the infant wears a long white gown. The occasion is a christening. Usually, there is also another photograph of the same baby being held by other adults, or one of the baby with people who stand beside a grave in the cemetery. The named and the namesake are brought together into the same space, time, and photograph. Witnessing such photographs on a wall, we can be almost certain that we are in the home of the bereaved; of those who have an invested interest in a depiction of their loved one’s return. We therefore also know that this image pertains to the present and future more than the past, because it also depicts the anticipation and the potential for a future relation between the bereaved and the atsiaq (someone who is named after a deceased person). It is in this way and for this reason that kinship diagrams in Greenland do not revolve around an ancestral line. An ancestral line would be pointless because, first of all, ancestors and relations are not only biological and, second, ancestors are repeatedly being returned into the present. Likewise, current generations will be brought into the future and remembered there. Greenlandic kinship lacks an ancestral line, not because they have forgotten their ancestors but because they remember them.

7

Asking Why

In Greenland, suicide statistics tell their own story about a rate that is among the highest in the world,1 particularly for young men in some villages and settlements.2 The pattern, which appears in many other indigenous commu­ nities throughout the circumpolar region, is one that has rocketed to epi­ demic levels since 1960. Before then, the rate of youth suicide was relatively low, albeit death of young men in Greenland from accidents was higher than it is today. Whereas suicide statistics baldly report one thing, each human has his or her own story to tell and way of telling it; and herein lies the prob­ lem. People who died by suicide cannot speak, and we cannot ask them why they decided to take their own life. The default position of statistics is to turn humans into figures and slices of pie charts to be counted, discounted, and turned into trends. However, there is another problem inherent in suicide statistics themselves that we should keep in mind when reading suicide statis­ tics: the translation between the actual occurrences of suicide and the rate it produces. Internationally, the suicide rate is calculated in suicides per 100,000 persons, to make proportional comparisons between societies and cultures across the globe. Therefore, the smaller the population, the higher the rate produced by such a calculation. In Greenland, where the entire population is just over half of 100,000 and where some communities have as few inhabi­ tants as thirty people, an occurrence of even just one suicide will produce a disproportionate rate. In other words, the difference between a total suicide rate of 0 and 769 in a village with a population of 130, such as Illorsuit, is one occurrence of suicide. A rate of 769 is unmistakably one of the highest in the world. This may not be because more people commit suicide than anywhere else; it may just as well be because the population against which the rate is calculated is very low.

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From this perspective, it is little wonder that the suicide rate is particu­ larly high in Greenlandic villages and particularly in East Greenland, where the entire population of 3,500 is clustered around two towns, Tasiilaq and Ittoqqortoormiit. We should therefore show some caution when basing a dis­ cussion of the high prevalence of suicide in Greenland on rates alone. Per­ haps we are better off thinking about how suicide is felt, talked about, made sense of, and worried about in Greenland; not because the rate is high but rather because the population in many places there is so small. I suggest that people in Greenland are affected by suicide not because it is something that frequently happens; rather, it is because when it does happen in these small places, it affects almost everyone. There is a significant political point to be made here—­reminiscent of Edward Said’s (1978) theory of Orientalism—­ regarding the Danish media and a generalizing discourse about Greenland­ ers, at a time when Greenland stands in the midst of a process of indepen­ dence. The rhetorical value of Greenlanders as suicidal is an Othering one, in which Greenlandic youth statistically commit suicide at a higher and dis­ proportionate rate to that of their Danish counterparts. The go-­to argument in Denmark concerning the Greenland suicide rate is that it is a direct effect of youth having grown up in families dominated by abuse (sexual, violence, alcohol, and substance abuse; see Bjerregaard and Young 1998, 155–­56; Larsen 1990; I. Lynge 1985; 1994, 554; Thorslund 1990a). The uncritical employment of this argument succeeds in creating a powerful negative image of Green­ landers; at times seemingly motivated by a political eagerness to dismiss Greenland as an immature country drowning in social problems, rather than by any real concern for young people who take their own lives or the families affected by their suicides for years to come. That said, politicians, social workers, and health professionals alike rec­ ognize suicide in Greenland, particularly youth suicide committed by young men in the age group late teens to midtwenties, as a problem. Recent years have witnessed intensification in the implementation of suicide prevention initiatives on a national and local level throughout Greenland. In actual fig­ ures, the total suicide occurrence throughout Greenland was almost halved between 1990 and 2012, from sixty-­six to thirty-­five, though these numbers have far from stabilized.3 With the exception of a couple of years, it is men rather than women who overwhelmingly take their own lives.4 With one of the highest rates in the world, the Arctic is regarded as hav­ ing a suicide epidemic. This problem has received national and international attention from the press, politicians, and policy makers and, not least, from researchers who search for answers to one of the fundamental questions in suicide research: “Why do they do it?” In Illorsuit, people regularly respond

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to this particular question and others relating to the causes of suicide with answers such as “I don’t know” or “It happened by itself.” Answers such as these not only bring disorder to notions of causality otherwise integral to suicide research but also appear to drive a wedge between what can and can­ not be known. This chapter will discuss these “unknowing” answers within local contexts of personhood and the agency of words, and I will argue that, unknowing as they may be, these answers appear to have their own internal logic, not of unknowing but of knowing. The task of coming to know why a person chooses to take his or her own life is a daunting one. Some aspects of suicide we think we know. For exam­ ple, epidemiological as well as psychiatric researchers have identified certain sociological and psychological factors—­so-­called risk factors—­that are said to expose people to a heightened risk of suicide. Ultimately, suicide research asks more questions than it answers; and there are some things about sui­ cide we could probably never know. Epidemiologists and statisticians can­ not ask the person who has died by suicide the whys or wherefores as they can in their research into other areas with living subjects. Similarly, in this context, the conventional anthropological method of participant observation has shortcomings of its own in answering such questions. It is perhaps be­ cause of this ambiguity that our questions about suicide remain so persistent. They persist, as though driven by an internal assumption not only that the causes of suicide do exist “out there” but also that our unyielding demand for knowledge about suicide will one day lead us to them. The very topic and the questions we ask about suicide seem underpinned by uncertainty, ambiguity and, not least, unknowing. In addition, our questions are fueled by a long his­ tory of taboo, fascination, and, it could be argued, the study and subsequent creation of what Hacking has called “an entire ethos of suicide” (2002, 113).5 Since the arrival of the first missionaries, explorers, and ethnographers to the Arctic, normative accounts of Eskimos and their inclination toward sui­ cide have filtered back to the South, leaving the impression that suicide was something that Inuit did with greater ease, social acceptance, and frequency than do people in the South. Among writers, explorers, and missionaries, Franz Boas was perhaps the first anthropologist to address suicide in the Arctic. In his famous ethnography The Central Eskimo, he wrote, “I may add here that suicide is not of rare occurrence, as according to the religious ideas of the Eskimo the souls of those who die by violence go to Qudlivun, the happy land. For the same reason it is considered lawful for a man to kill his aged parents” (Boas [1888] 1964, 207).6 Three quarters of a century later, the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen, who had traveled extensively throughout

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the Arctic during the first half of the twentieth century, described suicides “among some tribes” as social events that always occurred at “the height of a party” (1962, 194): “Everybody in the house either helped or sat on the end of the rope so as to have the honor of bringing the old suffering one to the Happy Hunting Grounds where there would always be light and plenty of game of all kinds” (1962, 195). The nineteenth-­century explorer R. R. J. Ham­ mer (1889, 228) argued that suicide did not exist among Greenlanders, while missionary Heinrich Glahn’s diaries from the 1760s provide several accounts of suicide among Greenlandic elders as well as in younger generations (Glahn 1921). However, in these early accounts of suicide, occurrences among the younger generation are comparatively rare, and most early ethnographic and missionary accounts from the region ascribed suicidal behavior primarily to elderly Inuit burdened by illness or old age (Holm 1887, 104, 181; Birket-­Smith 1924, 258; Ostermann and Egede 1939, 198; Kjellström 1974–­75). Acts of suicide presented themselves as a problem to the Lutheran missionaries who arrived in Greenland from the eighteenth century onward. Their narratives describe suicide as a tradition peculiar to Arctic “heathens,” thus reinforcing the idea of suicide as a problem that Christianity and the advance of civilization could eliminate. According to Steckley (2008), many of these accounts of these are generalized and in the primary sources they are rarely, if ever, described first­ hand. It could certainly be argued that suicide narratives were fueled by the Southern imagination, where the Arctic is the ultimate battlefield on which so-­called primitive man and so-­called civilized explorers struggle for survival against an unforgiving, savage, yet pristine nature.7 If the causes of suicide were somewhat unquestioned then, this was cer­ tainly not the case decades later when, in the years following the Second World War, stark reports of impoverished Arctic communities stricken by alcohol­ ism, violence, suicide, and disease circulated in the press in Canada, the United States, and Denmark. During the 1970s the Greenlandic suicide rate rose dra­ matically, peaking in the 1980s with a rate four to five times higher than that in Denmark (I. Lynge and Bjerregaard 2000, 2; Hicks 2007a, 265; 2007b, 31). It quickly became apparent that the problem of suicide no longer predominantly concerned the older generation, but instead a younger generation of men be­ tween the ages of fifteen and twenty-­four.8 Since then, epidemiological research into the problem of suicide in Greenland has revealed statistical correlations between suicide and other products of modernization, such as alcohol and sub­ stance abuse, poor living conditions, low levels of education, and dysfunctional family and relationship patterns. Tensions and transition between traditional and modern lifestyles, and especially acculturation (Berry 1985) are also often

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described as chief causes of suicide (I. Lynge 1985; Misfeldt and Senderovits 1989; Larsen 1990; Thorslund 1990a; Bjerregaard and Young 1998, 155–­56). The explanation is not without merit. The colonial history and Christian­ ization of Greenland, which began in the eighteenth century and culminated in policies relating to centralization and infrastructure, did indeed bring about disruption and change at an unprecedented speed. This change relates also to the growing separation between men, who prefer traditional lifestyles, and women, who seek education and therefore move away.9 Some return to their villages afterward, while others continue their education elsewhere in Greenland, in Denmark, or even farther away in Europe or beyond, but it is fair to assume that the experience of this separation and its outcome is also in some ways gendered. The acculturation or tradition-­modernity argument is perhaps more powerful as a political statement than it is as a social scien­ tific explanation for suicide. It tends to locate acts of suicide out of people’s own hands within the macrostructures of society, or in a theoretical juxta­ position once popular in social science, while other anthropological research has shown that suicide is also an act of agency (Broz and Münster 2015). Fur­ thermore, the argument presupposes that tradition and modernity are stable and measurable states that people or societies somehow are, thus ignoring that people rather do tradition and modernity and that the concepts therefore inevitably are changeable and fluid. It is not my purpose here to offer a new suicide causality. I do, however, want to move away from the causality-­driven perspective on suicide and try to think of it in other terms: as part of the return and the dynamic between loneliness and relatedness. The acculturation argument is not entirely dissimilar from that of Émile Durkheim, whose sociological study of official European suicide statistics10 es­ tablished suicide as being, first and foremost, a social phenomenon with so­ cial causes. He considered suicide to be a social fact—­something that was part of any human society—­and argued that so-­called anomic and egoistic types of suicide (which at times appear to overlap) vary inversely with levels of social cohesion, integration, and moral regulation. Durkheim concludes his book Suicide by contemplating the rapid growth of suicide in various parts of Europe as “accompanying the march of civilization” ([1897] 2002, 336). He remarked that “so grave and rapid an alteration as this must be morbid; for a society cannot change its structure so suddenly” (336). We cannot dismiss the drastic changes in society that have occurred in Greenland since the mid-­ twentieth century, nor the possible impacts these changes have had in terms of suicide and related social problems. However, one question emerges from the metanarrative presented by both Durkheim and recent Greenlandic sui­ cide research: what do local people say about suicide? That is, how do local

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people define, think about, rationalize, condemn, avoid, or succumb to it? Be­ ing increasingly preoccupied by the task of locating statistical causality and constructing effective policy for suicide prevention, suicide research in Green­ land has been less interested in what suicide is or means in local terms, thus in some ways echoing the suicide prevention efforts in Arctic Canada, which have as their primary aims to “care” and “save lives” (Stevenson 2014). For example, what does it mean to live and die (by suicide) within a culture that, despite psy­ chological acculturation, rapid modernization, and a proliferation of Lutheran Protestantism, maintains elaborate beliefs and concepts about the recycling of souls among animals as well as humans? Intertwined with this question is the problem that statistics are somehow much better at illuminating hard facts than they are at deconstructing ignorance or unknowing, or any knowledge that cannot be reduced to numbers. The material presented in this chapter was initially driven by a desire to narrow this conceptual and methodological gap in Greenlandic suicide re­ search. Although my immediate research concerns did not revolve around why-­questions, but rather around questions pertinent to personhood and re­ incarnation, the research objectives nevertheless fell prey to the assumption not only that a causality of suicide is there for the taking but also that my re­ search would reveal a new and different kind of causality that might contradict but ultimately enhance the already established one. Although a metanarra­ tive of rapid social change is the framework within which much research into Greenlandic social problems is set, Illorsuarmiut do not (usually) embrace such causal explanations for suicide. In fact, in conversations about individual cases of suicide as well as more general discussions of the topic during my fieldwork, people in Illorsuit most often responded with answers such as “Nal­ uara” (“I don’t know”) or “Nammineq,” which, among other things, can be translated as “He just did it” or “It happened by itself.” Knowing and Not Knowing From the perspective of a researcher, these seemingly unknowing answers re­ ceived on the question of suicide not only frustrate the quest for causality but also challenge the idea that the answers are known, thought upon, or even exist “out there” waiting to be identified. And they certainly challenge the idea that these answers could or should be conveyed even if known. In Greenlandic, the word naluara means “I don’t know.” Grammatically, it is an unusually struc­ tured word, in that it sets itself apart from other negations, such as “I don’t” or “I am not.” Greenlandic is an agglutinative and polysynthetic language, and sentences are structured of a few long words instead of several short words.

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Words are constructed by adding a theoretically infinite number of affixes to word stems, with the affixes themselves conveying meaning. A couple of simple examples are “I am sleeping,” sinippunga, and “I am eating,” nerivunga. Their negations, “I am not sleeping” and “I am not eating,” both contain the negative affix -­nngi-­, thus: sininngilara and nerinngilara. Unusually, however, naluara is already a negative, but without the -­nngi-­affix. It requires the same affix -­nngi-­ to be negated into its negative, which is “I know,” nalunngilara, or, accurately translated, “I do not not know.” Speaking strictly from this grammatical per­ spective, the double negative suggests a degree of uncertainty about knowing, as if there is a sort of baseline of not knowing. Significantly, the affix alludes to the idea that knowing or coming to know is a process rather than a given. The level and type of knowledge and unknowing expected of a person in Green­ land varies according to context, age, and maturity. Indeed, what is considered worth knowing in the first place also varies. A “person who knows nothing” is a naluvoq. Such a person is said to have the maturity of an infant and lacks the knowledge and skills in behaving as a responsible person. Meanwhile, as this chapter will discuss, there are also limits to what a person can know and should expect to know. Proctor (2008) explores some of the many ways in which conscious and unconscious forms of ignorance (the process of not-­knowing or ignorance) are produced and maintained. Although he appears to hold the production of ignorance in relative opposition to that of knowledge and science, he, like his peers, regards ignorance not as a mere vacuum of knowledge that exists in and of itself but rather as a social process. The production of ignorance as a “native state” is ignorance in its most obvious or what Proctor refers to as “originary” form; namely, that which is simply not known. It is the naive or childlike form of ignorance, or a place where “knowledge has not yet penetrated” (2008, 4, italics in original), and it is that which we seek to escape through our need and desire to educate, inquire, and learn. Science not only assumes but also depends on the premise that ignorance is to be eradicated by the expansion of knowledge, perhaps because the opposite could also be said to be true: that ignorance, if left unchallenged, possesses the danger to persist and even consume knowledge. This premise could apply to suicide re­ search, which assumes that its advance will eventually make its inherent why-­ questions redundant and ultimately will eradicate the potential for suicide occurrences to happen. In this sense, Proctor argues, ignorance is not just a vacuum out of which knowledge grows. It is also a catalyst and a resource for the advance of science, knowledge, and fact production. Ignorance has a re­ generative capacity, in that each time questions of science are answered, new ones emerge. Thus, the expansion of the boundaries of knowledge does not

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diminish ignorance but instead maintains and continually creates new forms of it, ironically facilitating the continuous need for knowledge and science. Whereas science and, for that matter, suicide research appear ruthless in their efforts to eradicate ignorance (in the case of suicide research, through the identification of causality), the ethnographic material presented in this chapter will show that the oppositional relationship between not knowing and knowing need not be as clear-­cut as set out by Proctor. Rather than ig­ norance being a catalyst for knowledge, this chapter attempts to show that ignorance can also be the end result of knowledge and can be taken as an in­ dicator or expression of knowledge itself. That is to say, the not-­knowing an­ swers, such as “I don’t know” or “It just happened by itself,” are not just ways of evading intrusive why-­questions about suicide, nor are they indicative of unknowing or a lack of causality. On the contrary, despite the fact that these answers do not resemble what researchers would understand by causality, they nevertheless do represent a Greenlandic model for the causes of suicide; the causality being that there are limits to what we can or should know. Recent anthropological discussions of the opacity of others’ minds show that people in Papua New Guinea, in various ways and degrees, hold that it is impossible to know anything about another person’s mind or inner thoughts, even, or especially, when information is communicated orally (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). This discussion goes against the grain of models in social sci­ ence and, not least, ethnographic methods, which tend to assume that achiev­ ing such knowledge is possible through conversation. Their critique extends to linguistic models that presuppose that intentionality is universal in linguis­ tic expression, as well as towards the idea of empathy, another cornerstone of ethnographic research. Linguistic models of opacity instead presuppose nothing or very little about others’ minds, and in some cases, it is even con­ sidered boorish and shameful to empathize with another person. Robbins and Rumsey ask, “Can our theories imagine that we might approach other people without assuming that we can know something about what goes on in their heads?” (2008, 408). The problem seems to have both an epistemological and a moral or political expression—­the first in terms of the extent to which, through language, we really can know anything about others’ minds and inner thoughts; and the latter, in terms of people’s capacity to conceal their inner thoughts and their ability to avoid listening and empathizing with such disclosures (Keane 2008, 478). These claims about opacity shed light on the ways in which people in Greenland generally refrain from talking about suicide. This reticence is not because words or speech lack the intentionality of the speaker as put forth by the opacity claim, but instead because words possess agency of their own. Just

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as Melanesians avoid making assumptions about others’ minds (Keane 2008), so too do people in Illorsuit avoid making assumptions about others’ suicides (and indeed about others’ actions more generally). At the very least, they re­ frain from raising inquisitive questions about these actions. Not knowing about the causes of suicide, I suggest, is based not so much on the opacity of others’ minds as much as it is on wider ideas and expressions of personhood. Each person is responsible for his or her own actions and is respected for his or her individual yet socially responsible choices. This viewpoint relates to the process of nammineq, or personal autonomy, discussed in chapter 6. It is the accumu­ lation of knowledge and learning through action and engagement with one’s social world and discovering one’s own responsibilities and role within it. Do­ ing things the “correct way” (iluamik) involves having the knowledge and abil­ ity to continually and independently reinvoke social relationships, while at the same time not becoming overly dependent and accepting the premise that each person with whom one comes into contact also acts independently. In Illorsuit (and beyond), therefore, not knowing about suicide is not just a question about whether we can or cannot know anything about what goes on in others’ minds. It is also about whether we should or should not ask questions about it. Words Given that the topic is an emotionally charged one in Greenland, my research into suicide was not without challenges. Because people in Illorsuit do not generally talk much about suicide, my queries into the problem were cau­ tious. I often waited for the moment to present itself naturally through con­ versation or for events to unfold, such as visiting the cemetery, which would allow for further questioning. This is not to say that people in Illorsuit were unaffected by suicide, nor that they were indifferent to it. On the contrary, their relative silence about the topic could in fact be interpreted as a marker of concern, of bewilderment, and of grief. Their ambiguously evasive answers to my questions suggest as much. Nevertheless, I interpret their silence on the topic and their seemingly unknowing answers to my questions as an expres­ sion of personhood and distinct ideas about personal integrity and autonomy that allude to the notion that not everything can or should be known. One day when talking to one of my friends—­a woman who has since moved to Nuuk—­the conversation turned to her nephew, who had died by suicide fourteen or fifteen years earlier. She pointed to a photograph that hung on the wall, in which he was a small child holding the hand of his grandfather. “There he is,” she said. I asked her what she thought of the statistical findings

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that suicides among men in Greenland often are preceded by disappointment in relationships or the recent loss of a partner or loved one. She answered hesitantly, “I don’t know . . . maybe . . . it’s possible.” She answered slowly, tak­ ing time to consider her response. However, there was also a hint of surprise in her voice, as if the very suggestion was entirely alien to her. After a pause, she added, “But it is true that his wife left him for another man.” This time, in an attempt to be more precise in my questioning, I asked if she thought that this could be a reason as to why her nephew had taken his own life. Her answer this time was less unclear in its intent: “I don’t know why he did it. It happened by itself.” Her apparent not knowing and evasiveness at answering my question were familiar to me. She had previously answered many of my related questions in similar, seemingly not-­knowing ways, and so too had other people I had approached with analogous questions. There are many ways to interpret her answer. One obvious interpretation is that she really did not know. Another is that she did know but for reasons to do with the assertion of blame, or even guilt, she evaded answering my question. A third interpretation, which is the route taken here, concerns Greenlandic under­ standings of the agency of words and thoughts and particularly the potential hazards bound up in talking and thinking about suicide. Some months later, we were drinking tea in her kitchen while listening to a radio program about suicide, during a week where the media, schools, and public health researchers were devoted to raising suicide awareness. As I listened intently, she suddenly rose from her chair, walked to the radio that was placed upon the refrigerator, and switched it off. Breaking the minutes of silence that followed, she said, “Aargh, I don’t like all this talk about suicide. It scares me. The children are walking around talking about it too . . . They are talking about what it would be like. Even [my daughter] and [her friends]. They have only just started school! I heard them. They were talking about it. It’s because of this week and everybody is talking about it. They have talked about it in school, and it’s too much.” When I asked her what they were say­ ing, she asserted, “They are talking about it. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s just like last summer at the wedding anniversary. Those grandchildren got drunk, do you remember? They walked around outside the school crying and saying that they wanted to kill themselves.” She was frustrated with the radio program and with the attention granted to suicide awareness in the media and in her daughter’s classroom. But I also had the sense that she was commenting on my own repetitive questions about suicide and the thoughts, conversations, and time I appeared to devote to the problem. In contrast with the common perception of suicide attempts in

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Euro-­America, suicide attempts in Illorsuit are not usually perceived or talked about as “a cry for help.” Rather, suicide attempts, whether they are fatal or nonfatal, are perceived as loaded with intent and an actual wish to die. “That was fortunate!” one of my friends said about two teenagers, who on a dark winter evening had interrupted one of their friends, a young man who had hidden behind the family home, holding a loaded hunting rifle to his head with the intention of taking his own life. “Let’s hope he doesn’t do it again . . . Now that he has done it once, he might do it again.” Speaking of another man, now in his forties, who on two occasions in the late 1990s had attempted sui­ cide by hanging himself, she said, “Thankfully his father found him just in time.” The word “thankfully” (qujanartumik) alludes to the intent of these young men, both in their late teens, who would have died had their attempts not been interrupted. Their intent is also underscored both by the fact that one of these men had attempted suicide twice, as well as this woman’s expression of hope that the other young man would not attempt suicide a second time. Thus, the separation between suicide attempts and actual suicides into two distinct categories, prevalent in much Western suicide research, does not seem to carry the same weight in Illorsuit. In the same way that fatal as well as nonfatal acts of suicide are loaded with intent, so too are words. Spoken words are usually taken very seriously and seen as indicators of the speaker’s intentionality, unlike the Melanesian opac­ ity claims, yet with a similar effect. Talking about suicide, sometimes even in general terms, is perceived as dangerous in that it can provoke thoughts of suicide; thoughts which in turn can become directed toward an intended suicide. Historically, words have particular and long-­standing significance in Inuit communities. Particularly along the west coast of Greenland, we know that drum duels were a way for disputing parties to hit each other with the beat of their drum and words of their songs, rather than with their fists. Each opponent would take turns teasing and offending the other and in so doing claiming his own authority in the dispute. These drum duels were controlled social forums in which both the angakkoq (shaman) and the rest of the com­ munity would award victory to the winner by applause, effectively putting an end to the quarrel (Rink [1875] 1997, 32–­35; Birket-­Smith 1924, 398; Kleivan and Sonne 1985, 5). In this way the drum duels provided a safe forum within which the power of disputing words could be controlled and rendered less damaging than they would otherwise be, allowing tension to be relieved but avoiding open interfamily conflict (Thuesen 1991, 53). Basso shows how Western Apache in the United States regularly “give up on words” (1971, 159) in disputes where tension, ambiguity, and danger are heightened. Speech, Basso argues, is not used as a tool to calm or make sense

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of a situation, since speech exacerbates the ambivalence and heightens its ten­ sion. Instead, it is through the use of silence that Apache come to make sense of ambivalences in other people, their surroundings, and their own lives. Something similar appears to be the case for Illorsuarmiut, who do not seem to regard talk of suicide as a tool for making sense of suicide. In Illorsuit, words are powerful: they state intent and, when spoken, ought to be taken se­ riously. Relaying the events surrounding an arson that destroyed a fish plant in a nearby village, a friend of mine explained that a former employee had been displeased by his dismissal and as a result set the plant ablaze. When I questioned how that affected the many village families who had been forced to relocate to the municipal city to seek employment, my friend’s response was, “It’s their own fault. He had warned them many times that he wanted to burn the plant to the ground.” In other words, the arson could have been avoided had the villagers taken seriously the words of the former employee. Words should be taken seriously. We could interpret the hesitance or unwillingness to verbally explore the intricacies of suicide as a fear of “crying wolf ”—­that is, the fear that any such expression eventually would come to lack intentionality. Excessive talk is a form of behavior that Greenlanders commonly ascribe to Danes. Illorsuar­ miut often contrast themselves with Danes, who, they say, use words irre­ sponsibly and generally say things that should not be said. Through their use of words, Danes are therefore seen as exacerbating tense situations while at the same time reducing the significance and potency of words. Thus, there seems to be a tactical purpose to the evasive answers about suicide. Talking about suicide without intent is as unnecessary as it is imprudent. However, it is not just in interpersonal relationships that words must be used cautiously. Words, like acts of suicide, do not just harness the intentionality of the speaker; they also harness agency in themselves. They have the ability to transform thoughts and speech into events; to unintentionally render thoughts and the spoken real. Being homesick or talking excessively about absent people or places for which a person longs can cause a person’s spirit, unbeknownst to the person, to wrestle itself loose from the body and travel to the place or people for whom the person longs. Although the person in question may not intend for his or her spirit to travel, the spirit nevertheless does what the person’s mind desires or longs to do. This is related to the concept of nammineq, which we shall return to in the next section. Several people can tell stories of having encountered the spirits of absent family members when on the land in hunting camps during summer, at home, when in the city, or even when admitted for surgery at a hospital in Copen­ hagen. The longing spirit not only causes havoc to the people and places it

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seeks but can also become lost and thus fail to return. Similarly, spoken words have agency in that they can produce entirely unintentional consequences. That is to say, words have agency in themselves and for this reason are only rarely spoken carelessly. Returning to the woman’s account of “talking about” suicide, whether her worry was founded not so much on what her daughter had said as it was on the fact that something was said is difficult to determine. It is equally difficult to conclude whether her unknowing was genuine, tacti­ cal, or even a sign of disinterest, when she was asked to reflect on a possible cause for her nephew’s suicide. She discussed her daughter’s talk of suicide alongside another episode from a previous summer when three cousins—­all young teenagers—­had been drinking at their grandparents’ wedding anni­ versary. She and other adults had overheard their tearful conversations about wanting to die. Perhaps she was worried that her daughter was sharing even general thoughts in conversation with her friends about suicide and that she too would one day get drunk and attempt suicide in a similar way? Or per­ haps she was worried that her daughter’s talk about suicide would become excessive and cause her fascination with suicide to transform into an actual suicide? Whichever the case, the potential agency of words and thoughts pro­ vides a framework for understanding the woman’s caution regarding detailed discussion of what was said by her daughter and her friends. I suggest that this caution provides a framework for us to discuss tactical unknowing that is ori­ entated toward preventing potential suicides in the future. Likewise, the agency of words provides a framework for understanding the woman’s supposed not knowing when she reflects on the possible causes of her nephew’s suicide. Minding Your Own Business The intentionality of the speaker and the agency of words should be seen as part of the wider context of personhood, the name, loneliness, and related­ ness in general. The birth of a child and the subsequent naming is not about welcoming a new person into the community. It is rather about welcoming back a loved one and ensuring that children become acquainted with their kinship roles and responsibilities. This is not so much a question of teaching as it is one of reminding, and subtly encouraging children to increase their own awareness. As infants are introduced to members of their biological and namesake’s families as well as the community, people reintroduce themselves in ways that assume that the infant will remember his or her identity, that of his or her family member, as well as the nature of their preexisting relation­ ships. Coming to fill and understand one’s multiple roles and responsibilities

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within this large network of relationships is an ongoing social process of re­ invoking particular relationships at particular times. Kin relationships that were once severed by death can be formed anew. Among people in Illorsuit, this process of increasing awareness and knowl­ edge is described as nammineq. The process of refamiliarization, like child rearing, is not one that can be forced or instructed. After all, it is a model of noninterference and respect for personal autonomy and integrity. Neverthe­ less, it can be encouraged. Being the return of recently deceased family and community members, children learn to exercise their sense of nammineq and reach decisions independently from a very early age. Although nammineq stands in contrast to Western ideas of supervised child rearing, this trial-­and-­ error process of child rearing should not be confused with complete freedom. The nammineq process is one of letting children learn to manage responsi­ bility by allowing them to engage with responsibility. A surfeit of a sense of nammineq can lead to selfishness, stubbornness, and carelessness, whereas a deficit of nammineq can lead to shyness and overdependence on others. It is the responsibility of parents and elders to allow a child’s responsibility to develop but also to guide and nurture this development. Scolding and punishing children for making mistakes or for irresponsible behavior is generally frowned on in many Inuit communities (Briggs 2001, 237). Although parents in Illorsuit occasionally, like many other parents across the world, do raise voices at their children, it is rarely without disapproving frowns and murmurs from bystanders. As we have seen, words should be used with caution and, certainly in serious matters, not without intent. Scolding a child is regarded as reducing the parent or elder to the psychological level of a child, but more important, it also discourages the child from learning. Children are given questions and tasks, urging them to make choices independently. Despite the obvious emphasis on some form of individualism, it is important to stress that this personal autonomy or integrity is realized through a very active and in­ tense system of relatedness. This relatedness is actualized by continually being reinvoked through social activities, sharing, hunting, eating, visiting, singing, and using kinship terminology in particular ways. Thus, personal autonomy cannot be divorced from social responsibility. Briggs’s pioneering study of the emotional education of Utku Inuit chil­ dren (1998) provides a rich example of the way in which sociality and au­ tonomy feed into each other among some Inuit communities. While being socially responsible and nurturing social relations is a moral and proper way of being, acting accordingly is up to each person individually. Briggs shows us how Utku children learn the importance of being social during childhood

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through a variety of games that incorporate cultural ideals of sociality and community, autonomy, and lessons about isolation, loneliness, and anger. Parents essentially expose their children to various moral choices, sometimes even quite dangerous ones, where it is up to the child to choose the right path and to respond in a responsible manner. It is in this process that a child de­ velops not only the recognition of the importance of the social but also, and more important, his or her own sense of autonomy and the ability to make the right choices for later on in life. In other words, as with nammineq, chil­ dren learn the command of their sense of personal autonomy by being al­ lowed—­or, rather, compelled—­to put it to use. When Christiansen (1991) discusses how the suicides in Ilulissat are often met by what she interprets as indifference, she relates it to the term isumaminik, which, we remember from chapter 6, is connected with nammineq. Directly translated, isumaminik means “the mind is its own,” and in everyday speech it can be a direct order to “mind your own business.” Isumaminik is an articu­ lation of nammineq, expressing both a statement and an ideology of nonin­ terference. Melanesian opacity claims about others’ minds suggest that we cannot know another person’s inner thoughts, whereas isumaminik implies instead that it is impertinent, fruitless, and even rude to enquire about them. Isumaminik or noninterference is central to ideas of politeness and good be­ havior. Christiansen (1991) pursues the argument that isumaminik is an ide­ ology that contributes indirectly to the high suicide rates in Greenland; there is simply no local drive for prevention. I would argue that isumaminik—­a model of noninterference—­should not be confused with indifference. Rather, isumaminik is about entitlement, integrity, and responsibility whereby relatives of a person who died by suicide hold that they should not interfere or question another person’s thoughts or motives. This framework provides a way for us to make sense of unknowing an­ swers to questions about suicide. Nammineq marks a boundary between not knowing enough and knowing too much, particularly if we set unknowing answers to why-­questions within the context of blame. We remember the woman’s hesitation and apparent surprise when I asked her opinion about her nephew’s suicide and the possibility of it being caused by a failure in re­ lationships and being disappointed in love. “I don’t know . . . maybe . . . it’s possible,” was her answer. The awkwardness of my question lay in the fact that I was asking her to probe a much-­loved relative’s sense of awareness, and thereby questioning his ability and right to act nammineq. Had she an­ swered my question another way, she would have done so in line with my question (and immaturity) and therefore necessarily raised doubt about her nephew’s personal integrity. Within this context, then, unknowing answers

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about suicide reveal not so much not knowing on the part of people in Illor­ suit as they do reflections on my questioning, which tacitly directed blame, not only at her nephew but also by extension at his wife, children, family, and even the woman herself for somehow having failed him. Holding together nammineq with unknowing answers about suicide can be seen as an expression of personhood. Nammineq is a social norm that com­ municates something about the metaphysics of the person who is asked, as well as upholding social conventions about the sorts of questions we can ask of him or her. Nammineq seems to comprise an ideology whereby certain things cannot be controlled or are beyond human control and intervention, and thus—­at some level—­it contradicts ideas about suicide prevention latent in the search for suicide causality. In so doing, it also sets a distinct boundary between what can and cannot be known. By placing the unquestioned respon­ sibility of a person’s actions, even suicide, either with the person or the event itself, Illorsuarmiut thus disperse tension, doubt, and ambiguity, even from the person with whom the responsibility is placed. Unknowing answers are quiet refusals to tamper with this order, just as much as they are a way of letting go of, or disengaging, causality. Unknowing answers about suicide frustrate both the notion of causality and the assumption that a cause, as a form of knowl­ edge, can even be known. However, on closer examination it also becomes apparent that there is an internal logic to unknowing answers about suicide. They have reasons or, so to speak, even causes. Arguably the why-­question, as posed by epidemiologists and ethnogra­ phers, is of two different orders. Each produces very different answers. The epidemiological approach asks statistical questions, involving coroners and police reports, that create a metanarrative of statistical correlations to answer a why-­question. Ethnography, on the other hand, looks to the culture and so­ ciety in which the person who carried out the suicide lived. It asks questions about the meanings of suicide, as well as of the bereaved. I have suggested that, nevertheless, these two approaches have in common the question of why because suicide itself is inscribed with uncertainty, ambiguity, stigma, and, not least, fascination. If we relate the study of suicide to Proctor’s claim that the expansion of knowledge begets ignorance and unknowing, we see that this is indeed the case. Even before we begin our study of suicide, whichever approach we assume, our study is constrained by the fact that we cannot pose our questions to the people concerned and, for obvious reasons, we cannot rely on participant observation alone. Thus, uncertainty and unknowing not only are inherent to the study of suicide but also persist in new ways in our research findings and sometimes, as we have seen, even explicitly in the an­ swers we receive to our questions.

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This ambiguity and unknowing are pervasive in the language and discus­ sion of suicide, whether in theoretical terms or as part of a wider discourse of prevention, both inside and outside Greenland. Such ambiguity, however, is manifested not in Greenlandic questions about causality but rather in speech and the expression of thoughts about suicide. Words are themselves ambigu­ ous in that they possess agency and can transform thought into reality. This notion presents an evident challenge to Euro-­American discourses and thera­ peutic assumptions that “talking is good.” It also problematizes age-­old an­ thropological methods in which language is the cornerstone of ethnographic fieldwork. In general, nonspeech or unspoken thoughts and knowledge about suicide challenge conventional ideas about language and the transmission of knowledge. We often assume that a good ethnographic informant is one who not only knows something about what we wish to study but, moreover, has something to say or show to us and, most important, is willing to relay this knowledge to us. This principle is as true of fieldwork as it is of causality-­ driven research. If verbal expression is taken as a marker of knowledge, then perhaps we can take unknowing answers to be an expression of ignorance and swiftly seek another informant. However, as we have seen, seemingly un­ knowing answers reveal not only a reason for not talking or knowing about suicide but also knowledge about the agency and power of words. Questions of personhood naturally arise out of discussions of nammineq, which here is taken to be an expression of virtuous unknowing and an inde­ pendent process by which events unfold and by which people act and become social and individual persons. It thus communicates something about the metaphysics of personhood, as well as being a social convention that dictates what should or should not be asked of a person. Moreover, nammineq also seems to mark a boundary between what can and cannot be known. We re­ member Proctor’s discussion of knowledge and ignorance whereby ignorance is seen not only as a precursor for knowledge but also something that the ex­ pansion of knowledge continuously re-­creates in new and fascinating ways. The two are engaged in a relationship whereby the expansion of one continu­ ously creates new reasons and ways for the other to persist. With nammineq something similar and yet quite different is at play. Nammineq is the process by which Illorsuarmiut come to know and, in so doing, to act in the “correct way” (iluamik). Similarly, unknowing about suicide grows out of knowledge about living and what it means to be a person. In this understanding, and contrary to Proctor’s argument, nammineq is thus a cutoff point where why-­questions become superfluous and even quite rude. By alleviating tension, guilt, and blame, nammineq places responsibility and integrity with the individual and pushes the question of unknowing up against the very limits of knowledge, of

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causality, and of what can be known, and into a realm where only unknowing answers make sense. Thus, unknowing answers about suicide disengage from the quest for causality that permeates suicide research, while at the same time constitute knowing answers of an altogether different kind of causality and knowledge: one in which things can happen by themselves, and where there are limits to what can be known.

8

You Are Given Your Name So You Won’t Be Lonely

“You are given your name so you won’t be lonely,” said a young man once when I told him I was interested in knowing more about naming. He said no more, and I didn’t ask. His statement makes an inescapable connection between naming and loneliness. By extension, it also implicates kinship and wider relatedness. Let’s assume that he was referring to the named person, the atsiaq or angerlartoqut, as well as to the kin of the dead namesake. The atsiaq receives his or her name so that he or she won’t be lonely and so that the be­ reaved kin won’t be lonely. Since we know that some people experience lone­ liness nonetheless and that loneliness will always be a potential for anyone, can we reasonably assume that the name alone safeguards against loneliness? In this final chapter I want to come back to some of the questions I raised at the outset about how we are able to make sense of Greenlandic kinship in a new way, by looking at it through the lens of loneliness. I attend to this ex­ amination first by showing how relations are continually being reinvoked. We have already become familiar with some of the ways that Illorsuarmiut rein­ voke relatedness. Visiting and having a kaffemik (celebration with coffee and cake for a birthday or holiday) constitute one way; sharing foods and chores represents another; eating particular foods, caught in particular places or during certain seasons, is yet another. Separation and detachment (whether temporal or spatial), feeling homesickness and longing, make for another kind of reinvocation, which can become excessive and out of control. In this chapter I will take a closer look at how the use of kinship terminology is also a re­invocation. Kinship, we know, isn’t something that simply exists per se. Like other kinds of relations to do with human experience, it is a social process that is made, re­ made, and experienced by the people who live it. It must be performed or acted

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on to become real and established. The anthropological literature abounds with examples where relations must be performed, acted out, and on, for relations to be established and for people to really become kin. I refer to Bloch’s (1971) study of how kinship terminology is used tactically to make nonkin into kin; and Carsten’s (1991) work on how foster children are made kin; or Strathern’s (1981) work on kinship in a village in Essex. My point here is that reinvocations are not merely part of a process that establishes kinship and turns people into relatives, nor are they solely expressions or affirmations of already established relation­ ships. Although they are that too, my point about reinvocations (and the reason for using that particular word) is that they are also expressive of the other side of relatedness—­the longing and potential loneliness inherent in them. People are not simply “called into being,” to use Bodenhorn’s (2006) terminology, just once, when they are named, given birth to, or adopted. They are “called into be­ ing” by being invoked repeatedly, through the use of kinship terminology and through expressions of longing, homesickness, and loneliness. This brings me to my second point about kinship, which is one I have at­ tempted to show in various ways throughout this book; namely, that loneliness and longing are not outside kinship and relatedness, they are part of it. This point applies even in cases located outside the human realm, in the extreme form of loneliness and disappointment personified by the qivittoq (someone who has turned away). Even here loneliness exists as a potential outcome—­as a warning, perhaps, for all humans not to let themselves disappoint excessively and also not to disappoint others. A kinship diagram (such as figures 1 and 2, shown in chapter 1) will al­ ways be an ideal representation; a reduction of how things really are. It tells us very little about how relations are actually played out, how they are acted on or performed, and the longing and loneliness inherent in the relations. In examining kinship, I thought it might be fun to try to draw a new kin­ ship diagram, based not on biological relations but on names and adoptive relations alone. It turned out to be an impossible task—­not because it was overwhelmingly complicated but, oddly enough, because the new kinship dia­ gram that was supposed to look different from the traditional one ended up looking almost identical. Such was the case because it is through kinship ter­ minology that these relations are cemented and reinvoked, so I could take individuals from one biological family and put them into other families to replace their deceased namesakes. Since the framework of kinship terminol­ ogy at the outset is biological, the diagram would look just the same. There is no way of distinguishing in classic diagrammatic terms that the “father” in one family was actually not biologically related at all. And yet since biological relations are not supposed to be part of this or any diagram at all, there would

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be, in effect, no family for this namesake to be “father” in, and we might even question whether he could ever be considered “father.” Every time we would move namesakes into other families, his relatives in that family would, by virtue of themselves being namesakes, be transferred to other families. The resultant effect would be that each time we would move one named relative into a new family, that family would crumble because those relatives would move into other families, which again would crumble, and so on in an endless spiral of collapse. Kinship diagrams, like kinship generally, are a representation of related­ ness. The circles, triangles, and squares emanate the sense that all relations are permanent and stable, except when we cross over failed and ceased relations, and dead relatives. The crossing off of a relative when the relation has been broken is almost as permanent as the relation itself. It is the sheet of paper onto which these diagrams are drawn that signifies the unaddressed loneli­ ness in kinship. It is where we usually locate loneliness in our discipline—­that is, outside relatedness, as if it were not part of the experience of kinship, or behind relatedness, as something onto which we make or draw relatedness. Imagine for a moment that we erase all the lines of relatedness that connect us as relatives in a diagram. We find ourselves as singular individuals with no relation to any other figure who is drawn next to us on the same sheet of pa­ per. We are as strangers, with no likelihood of ever coming to acknowledge each other, even as strangers. Similarly, imagine if, instead, we erase all the representations of people (figures) in a kinship diagram. All we are left with are lines that we could call relations, which originate nowhere and lead no­ where. They are tentacles, just floating around on the background, trying to grab hold of something, perhaps, and finding nothing but loneliness. Although not actually a figure-­background reversal, what I have sought to do with this book is to reverse the order between figure and background. I attempt to bring to the fore the blank background of loneliness to try to understand what loneliness might look like as figure and what role it plays in kinship as background in Illorsuit. Whereas ideal representations of kinship in general, and that of Inuit specifically, tend to focus on how and why relat­ edness works, I will argue that an ideal model of kinship in Illorsuit necessar­ ily is a model that entails the unideal, the loneliness. Names, Nicknames, and Kinship Terms Regardless of how parents have discovered or decided the names of their child, it is customary to ask permission from the bereaved before the name is

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bestowed; or at least to let the bereaved know of a family’s intent to bestow the name of their deceased relative on a child. Therecia had telephoned Karla to let her know that they intended to give Therecia’s grandchild’s son one of Karla’s father’s names, as one of his middle names. “It made me so happy that I started to cry,” Karla remembered. “It is as if my father is alive again.” However, in ad­ dition to the naming of children after deceased relatives and friends, giving birth, and parenting, what actually makes kin real and relevant is that people express their relatedness to each other in everyday life. One way that people do so in Illorsuit is by expressing their longing (saying “Kipippunga,” i.e., “I long [for you]”), which will often trigger a positive response in turn: a hug, a visit, a conversation, a walk. Another less dramatic but commonplace mode of ex­ pression is the use of kinship terminology when addressing each other—­often in the form of nicknames. What people’s names might be and who they are named after is one thing; what people are called and how they are addressed is quite another. Names, terms of address, and kinship positions, as we can easily imagine, do not always respect the given boundaries of sex, age, and kinship relation. Male names can be given to female babies and vice versa; a child may be referred to as a grandparent, and someone who is biologically unrelated may easily be referred to as kin. Traditionally, nicknames were closely associated with name utterance ta­ boos, and people would have used nicknames when addressing each other to avoid calling each other by their real names. At the beginning of the twen­ tieth century, Bertelsen describes how the passing on of the name among West Greenlanders would occur once the remainder of the umbilical cord had dried and had fallen off the child’s body (Bertelsen 1918, 253–­54). An old woman would name the child by smearing seawater around the child’s lips, signifying that the child would feed from the sea, while quietly uttering the names of ancestors that are being bestowed on the child. What the child was named and how the child would be addressed were, however, two entirely different matters (Bertelsen 1918, 232). According to Bertelsen, people be­ lieved that stating a person’s name (ateq) could summon the spirit or soul of the deceased. This observation was echoed by Birket-­Smith (1924, 414) in his ethnographic notes on Inuit in the Aasiat area in the southern part of Qeqer­ tarsuup Tunua (Disko Bay), where he claimed that because of the prevalence of nicknames due to name utterance taboos, some mothers did not even know the real names of their own children. He was perhaps overemphasizing the importance of name utterance taboos, and he overlooked the difference between not knowing and not wanting to say. The return of the deceased through his or her name would simply not be possible if no one knew the

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real names. Nevertheless, in observing such taboos, people would have made up nicknames and used them when addressing and referring to each other as they went about their everyday lives. In my experience, names in Illorsuit are not secret nor surrounded by utter­ ance taboos in this way; at least, not after a child has been named. Before a child is named, however, it is customary that the child’s intended names be kept relatively secret and be unspoken until the actual christening, when they can be made public. Today in Greenland it can take several months before a child is named. Greenlandic villages usually have sacristans ordained to carry out weekly church services and observances of key holidays in the Lutheran church calendar. However, rites of passage—­such christenings, weddings, confirma­ tions, funerals, and communions—­must be carried out by pastors brought in from larger towns and cities, so christenings are regularly put on hold until a pastor becomes available. Therefore, weddings, christenings, and confirma­ tions can all take place during the same week because of the uncertainty sur­ rounding a pastor’s arrival in the village. One of my friends was waiting in Illor­ suit for a pastor to arrive to christen her three-­month-­old baby. When I asked her what she planned to name her child, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “not yet” (suli naamik). I assumed at the time, like Birket-­Smith, that she did not yet know the name of her son, and therefore could not say. Later I learned that while she was pregnant, she had had a dream in which her child’s name­ sake (aqqa) had revealed himself, and that she must have known the name of her baby when I asked her. Karla was quick to point out to me that I had asked the mother before the baby was christened, and that this was reason enough not to tell me or anyone else. I was reminded of the time Sikkersoq cautioned me not to whistle at the northern lights. “This is what the old people used to say when I was a child,” she said. “Don’t whistle if you can see the northern lights.” Old stories tell of the northern lights being the names of dead relatives playing ball with wal­ rus and seal skulls while they wait, longing, to be returned. Sikkersoq smiled wryly as she spoke, as if she herself wasn’t sure whether to believe it, or as if she wasn’t sure whether I would believe her. Trying to figure out whether her instruction was serious, I suggested to her that I should try to whistle. All the while laughing, she ordered me not to. The question here is not whether Sikkersoq and others believe that the northern lights are name souls or that something terrible will happen if a child’s intended name or names are uttered before christening. The point is that we can never know what will happen; or conversely, what will not. The uncertainty that is inscribed into a name, and into other inexplicable beings such as the qivittoq, and events such as spirits

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traveling when homesick or longing excessively, are what make these entities so potent. They are part of human existence and experience, and yet, we can­ not really know how to harness and control them. Traditionally, names were mainly genderless. That is, names that had be­ longed to a man could quite easily be bestowed upon a girl, and vice versa. However, traditional names are relatively rare in Greenland today (although they have been going through somewhat of a revival recently), and names now are typically biblical and Northern European. We might assume this would complicate the bestowal of the names belonging to one gender on the other, but this problem is resolved by adding or removing the feminizing suffix -­ine or -­ina. Hence, Jaaku (Jakob) changes to Jakobine, Petrine to Piitaq (Peter), Iivarti (Edvard) to Eva, Tuma (Thomas) to Thomasine, and so on. It may be that some names cannot easily adapt in this way, but in these cases, people can choose from their other names. People usually have between three and five first names, and at least one of their names will feminize or masculinize. For some people, one, some, or all of these five names may be returned names. For others, it may just be one returned name, and the remaining names have been given because it was the parents’ decision to do so. Although a nickname or kinship terminology is today still very much in use as a form of address, it is not my impression that people use nicknames because of a taboo or because they fear invoking someone’s ateq. Rather than being used to cover up names or to deflate the power of reinvoking a name, kinship terms actually do the reverse. They are a way of acknowledging the return of a name, personhood, and reinvoking the relation. By far the most common nicknames in Illorsuit are based on kinship ter­ minology that is specific to the sibling generation: angaju (older brother or sister, to a same-­sex younger sibling); aleqa (older sister to a younger brother); ani (older brother to a younger sister); nuka (younger brother or sister to an older same-­sex sibling); naja (younger sister to an older brother); and aqqalu (younger brother to an older sister). Sometimes these nicknames are formal­ ized to the extent that they act as their real names, which everyone will use regardless of their relation. Nukaraq’s given name was Juansi, but no one ever spoke of him or addressed him as Juansi; everyone knew him as Nukaraq. Likewise, Sofia’s husband’s christened first name was Jakob; yet everyone knew him as Aqqaluaraq (little [-­(a)raq], younger brother). Sikkersoq’s daughter, Naja, was named Aviaja, but everyone knew her as Naja (little sister to an older brother). This does not mean that Aviaja, Nukaraq, and Aqqaluaraq were younger siblings to everyone who addressed them as such. Rather, their nick­ names had arisen and become meaningful within their own sibling groups.

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The precision in Greenlandic sibling terminology allows us to explore not just the kinship position of the person who is addressed—­that is, little brother or big sister—­but also the relation. Who is the little brother or the older sister a sibling to? If a boy is called Nuka, we know that he has an older brother; and if a girl is called by the same name, Nuka, we know she has an older sister. With the name Naja, we know she has an older brother, and with Aqqalu, we know he has an older sister. In this way, the relation and the relative are implicitly invoked whenever people address each other using kinship terminology, es­ pecially related to the sibling group. Kinship terminology can take the shape of semiformal nicknames; and sometimes kinship terminology can be proper names: Naja, Aqqalu, Nuka, Aleqa, or variations on these names being among the most popular ones. But most commonly people use kinship terminology in everyday life to reinvoke a particular kinship relation. Naja may then, at any given moment, become Nuka if her older sister addresses her, or Angaju, if it is her younger sister who does the addressing. It is quite possible that these kinds of nicknames originate during the time that parents have to wait for their children to be named. Rather than calling them by their intended names, parents and siblings begin to socialize the infants as relatives into the household by addressing them by kinship ter­ minology. These kinds of nicknames that take root directly in kinship ter­ minology are about relatedness. Each time they are uttered, they reinvoke a relationship between the person who is being addressed by the nickname and the sibling to whom the nickname is relative. That is to say, each time Naja is addressed as Naja, it is also an occasion in which the relationship with her older brother (ani) is implicitly invoked. Similarly, with Nukaraq and Aqqaluaraq, each time someone addresses them by their nicknames, their relationships to their older sisters (aleqat, plural of aleqa) are respectively in­ voked too. In Denmark and in Northern Europe, it is usually the norm that younger generations address their elders using the kinship terminology ap­ propriate to their relationship: Mother, Father, Uncle Thomas, Auntie Susan, Grandmother and Grandfather; whereas younger generations are usually ad­ dressed by their name. Strathern (1992, 18–­20) discusses this pattern in 1980s England and suggests that it is a practice that serves to treat and encourage children as individuals, as opposed to the older generations who, by virtue of being addressed by kinship terminology, are promoted as relatives. In Green­ land, however, we see almost the reverse at play; namely, that children are ad­ dressed by kinship terminology usually appropriate to their position within a sibling group. I would argue further that while this practice promotes chil­ dren as relatives and siblings, this relation making is also one that promotes children as individuals with multiple roles and responsibilities. The precision

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of Greenlandic sibling terminologies also tells us something about the posi­ tion of a person within a sibling group. When Sikkersoq would address her oldest daughter Petrine as Panik (Daughter) or Paninga (My Daughter), it was always an implicit appeal to their mother-­daughter relationship. If she addressed her as Naja, it would be an implicit appeal to her relationship with her older brother; and, likewise, when she addressed her as Angaju, it would appeal to Petrine as an older sis­ ter, with an emphasis on her relationship to her younger sisters. Very rarely, Sikkersoq would address Petrine as her younger brother, Aqqalu, because Petrine was the atsiaq (someone who is named after a deceased person) of Sikkersoq’s younger brother who had died by suicide in the 1980s. The utterance of nicknames brings to mind Austin’s ([1955] 1975) notion of “speech-­acts.” He describes how rituals or social situations wherein certain words, said in a certain way, by a certain person, at a certain time and place, possess the force of an action. A ritual may comprise a blessing during a church service, or it may be a witch’s spell, a prayer, a curse, or a wedding vow. It can oc­ cur when a pastor utters the names of an infant during baptism, a ritual where, in addition to becoming a Christian, the infant also becomes a social person with a name. In Greenland, the entire community learns just who has returned through a prayer, a spell, a blessing. Through words, the speaker reaches be­ yond the words themselves, or indeed beyond the action alone. By addressing her daughter at one moment as daughter or older sister and as younger sister the next, Sikkersoq performs a speech-­act. Her words do something; they re­ invoke a relation, and they invoke Petrine as a relative with a particular set of responsibilities. Kinship terminology can also have a tactical purpose, as Bloch (1971) showed was the case among the Merina in Madagascar. According to Bloch, it is not enough merely to translate kinship terminologies to understand their meaning; we also have to observe them used in practice. This point was also made in the 1960s in debates about Arctic kinship, because, hitherto, studies had been obsessed with systems, classification, and terminologies, without really trying to understand the way that these were used and what they meant in everyday life. He observes that the Merina term for kinsman (havana) is one that, curiously, Merina use to address people who are not kinsmen. While people who are kinsmen might recognize one another as havana, they do not usually use the word to address one another. Thus, nonkinsmen are not true havana, yet they are considered and talked about as havana because they are loved as if they were true kinsmen: they are kinsmen by extension. Bloch concludes that the employment of the havana term has a tactical purpose: it serves not merely to label nonkin as kin but also as a moral appeal with the

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purpose of inclusion. Being addressed as havana encourages nonkinsmen to act as kinsmen and to help with labor tasks, for example. Similarly, I suggest that addressing each other as kin in Illorsuit is con­ nected to morality and the obligation to act and be kin. The tactical purpose here is slightly different. Whereas in Bloch’s case it is only people who would ordinarily be regarded as nonkin who are addressed as kin under specific cir­ cumstances, kinship terminology in Illorsuit applies to everyone who is kin. Who is the kin is a matter of potentiality that is not limited to naming, biology, or even adoption. In Euro-­America we tend to think of adoption as a long and complicated legal process undertaken by childless couples to become the legal guardians of a child who is either an orphan or who, for other reasons, has been put up for adoption. This kind of adoption exists in Greenland too; it is administered by the government social services and subject to the same inter­ national conventions of child protection as anywhere else in the world. Before this, it was common for childless couples to be given children by young un­ married women who had become pregnant, or by large families who did not have the means to look after more children. In some areas of Greenland, child­ less couples could occasionally ask a couple to have a child for them, similar to what we now call surrogate parenting. Adoption, however, can also encompass other scenarios; strangers, newcomers, or people with few relatives and small families can be adopted as kin. I, myself, was adopted into two families, partly because if I had not been, people in Illorsuit would have seen me as lonely. In the anthropology of kinship, this kind of relatedness has traditionally been spoken about as “fictive kinship,” highlighting the fact that kinship relations of this kind are not underpinned by biology. Nevertheless, this kind of kin­ ship in Greenland is very real, and despite the fact that it is not underpinned by biology, its expression is. Nonkin are spoken to and about as if they were kin, in terms that are usually indistinguishable from other terminology. Sofia and Aqqaluaraq, who did not have children of their own, had Aqqaluaraq’s biological nephew living with them. He had decided for himself (using his personal autonomy, nammineq) when he was nine or ten years old that he wanted to leave home and live with his uncle and aunt. Instead of addressing him as Soraluaq (Nephew), Sofia always referred to him and addressed him endearingly as Erni (Sonny). While instead of calling them Angak (Uncle) and Ukuaq (Aunt), he addressed them as parents, just as he did when addressing his biological parents. A foster daughter, who had been placed in their care periodically by the authorities since she was a small child, also lived with them for periods of the year. They thought of, spoke of, and spoke to her as if she were no different from a daughter of their own.

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Relative, Not Relative, Relative . . . What happens in the reverse situation? Why do some people cease to ad­ dress each other as kin? On the one hand, it may be an expression of a failed or fizzled-­out relationship. This will invariably happen when people move away or affinity dwindles. The cessation of kin terminology can last until the time presents itself, perhaps, as a result of growing close again, to reinvoke the relation. Some­times people cease to address each other by kin terminology as a result of disputes—­as a warning to others. Both Nuttall (1992) and Boden­ horn (2000) show that relatives can be cut off or thought of and spoken of as “used-­to-­be” relatives. I have never witnessed such a cutoff in Illorsuit, but I have found it elsewhere in Greenland occurring among relatives, siblings, and friends. However, such a cutoff is usually the result of a dispute that is too difficult to put right; and not merely because relations have fizzled out or quietly ceased to make sense. Perhaps the size of the community plays a part in the marked lack of cutoff in Illorsuit. If one were to cut off and deny relat­ edness here, family and community would quickly begin to disintegrate. If one has to make a cut—­so to speak—­in places like Illorsuit, there is only one option, which is to go away. Tuma, whom we met in chapter 2, who battled alcohol addiction, eventually left Illorsuit and has, to my knowledge, not been back since (though I did hear that he and his wife were no longer drinking). By simply leaving Illorsuit, his kin relation still exists in title and memory, even if not in actual everyday practice. While kin may address each other as relatives today, it is no guarantee that they will do so next year. During the winter of 2004, Petrine had been going to a few drinking parties ( festi). One Sunday evening while sharing a cigarette beneath the extraction fan in my kitchen, she recounted to me all the fun she was having at these parties. I could not help but wonder what her parents, and especially her mother, might say if they knew what Petrine got up to in the evenings; especially since I knew that both Sikkersoq and Aqqalu had given up drinking and were actively not drinking. In her position as a health worker in the village, Sikkersoq had often encouraged people through rehabilitation, and she liaised with health and social workers in the city on behalf of people in Illorsuit who wanted to become sober. So I asked Pe­ trine how she thought her mother would react. Petrine’s response surprised me: “Whatever. No matter. Sikkersoq used to drink too.” This was the only time I heard Petrine refer to her mother using her name rather than her kin­ ship position as mother. It was as if Petrine, for a brief moment, dismissed or relegated her mother into a position as an unrelated person. One reason

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could be due to Petrine’s own childhood disappointment over the fact that her parents had not (because of their drinking) been able to look after her and her siblings properly. Friends and family had looked after the three children during the times that their parents’ drinking was particularly bad: when they had fought and argued. It was all due to the pain they felt after losing their firstborn daughter, Paninnguaq, Sikkersoq understood. She and her husband had “lost their way” (tammarpoq) in grief and found it difficult to return. Referring to her mother by her name can be seen as a deliberate inverse of a relationship. Allocating her mother to the role of nonrelative was a performa­ tive way of disassociating herself from her mother—­not in the present but retrospectively. By using her mother’s name, she apparently was reinvoking a disappointed relationship from the past, rather than the close and healthy one that they had in the present. Being the only health worker in a village such as Illorsuit meant that Sik­ kersoq was always working. She had surgery hours during weekdays, and the rest of the time, she was always on call. For a long time she had been yearn­ ing for a substitute who could fill in for her whenever she needed to take time off or when she wanted to go on the land for a day or two. Yet her job required her to be always nearby, and if she wanted time off, a replacement from the city would have to be organized and cleared with her superiors at the city hospital. Sometimes during weekends and when on call, she curtly dismissed patients for nonurgent matters that could wait until the following day. One weekend afternoon, Karla complained that she had a headache and wanted to know whether I had any tablets. She was clearly annoyed at the fact that she had telephoned the healthcare station but not received a positive response. “The juumooq doesn’t want to open,” she complained. I was con­ fused; not by Karla’s annoyance, but by the fact that she referred to Sikkersoq as the juumooq (medical assistant). Why did she not call her Sikkersoq? I also wondered at the disagreement that seemed to lie beneath Karla’s dismay. Karla and Sikkersoq had always been very close friends. In fact, Karla had frequently looked after Petrine during the years Sikkersoq and Aqqalu were mourning the loss of their daughter, and Petrine even affectionately called Karla Anaanassaq (Stepmother), and Karla called Petrine Panissaq (Step­ daughter). I asked whether the juumooq she was referring to was Sikkersoq. She responded by raising her eyebrows in the affirmative. Then why did she call her juumooq? Was this a case of a severed relationship? A subsequent incident at a local shop raised further questions in my mind about treatment of kin as nonkin. Alcohol licensing laws in Greenland are clearly displayed in shops and supermarkets. It is illegal to sell alcohol to any­ one under the age of eighteen; and it is illegal to sell alcohol to anyone who is

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deemed to be under the influence. These regulations are particularly helpful in villages such as Illorsuit, where populations are small, people know one another well, and many people are related in one way or another. Display­ ing the regulations makes it possible or easier for relatives and close friends not just to adhere to the law but, more important, to refuse each other. One Saturday before closing time at midday, the shop was particularly busy. It had been payday the day before, so people had money to spend on shop-­bought food, candy, potato chips, soda, a piece of fruit, and other comfort treats. The till was fully staffed; and in the long line of waiting customers stood Tuma. He pushed with his feet a crate of empty beer bottles that he intended to exchange for cash at the till, as part of the recycling program.1 While the salesperson counted his empty bottles, Tuma walked to the back of the shop and picked up another crate of beer that he wanted to buy. The woman be­ hind the counter fetched the money he was owed from the till. She was his younger cousin, and I knew that they were close. He pointed to the crate, indicating that he wanted to buy it. She blushed and shook her head. It was clear that refusing her cousin was as uncomfortable for her as it was for him. He did not plead with her as his cousin or ask for special privileges. Instead he turned to a young man who stood immediately behind him in line, who had recently turned eighteen, and asked him to buy the beer for him. Handing him the money, he explained, “Pisiniartitsisoq naaggaarpoq” (“The shop as­ sistant says no”). Still blushing and uncomfortable by the situation, the shop assistant—­his cousin—­agreed to sell the beer to the young man, although she knew who the real beneficiary of the transaction would be. Why did he speak of his cousin as “the shop assistant”? Was he showing disapproval over her re­ jection of his request? I certainly thought so at the time, just as I thought that Petrine, by using her mother’s name instead of calling her Anaananga as she usually would, or Karla calling her close friend by her professional position rather than by her name, were demonstrating dissatisfaction and showing detachment—­that is, responding to a rejection by turning away. I was mistaken. Now I am convinced that these were attempts to avoid just that. They were ways of showing respect and acceptance of a decision made by another. By addressing her mother’s drinking as something an­ other person—­not her mother but some other, named person—­did, Petrine avoided taking her mother to task for something that had happened many years ago. Speaking of her mother’s drinking as something her mother used to do would be the same as holding her accountable in the present for some­ thing that happened a long time ago. We both understood, of course, that we were talking about her mother, but it was precisely for that reason that Petrine ascribed the burden of the responsibility to a name. Placing responsibility in

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the same breath as invoking a very close relation would be too much to bear in terms of the guilt she would be ascribing to her mother, as well as in terms of the disappointment she herself would have to face. For Karla and Tuma, the case was slightly different and is symptomatic of small and close-­knit communities. Karla spoke of one of her best friends (Sik­ kersoq) as a juumooq precisely because, despite her dissatisfaction, she under­ stood that the juumooq had a job to do and that her friendship with Sikkersoq was not worth jeopardizing because of a headache on a Sunday afternoon. As in Petrine’s case, a complaint about rejection by one of her closest friends would be quite a serious accusation and, under the circumstances, an unjusti­ fied escalation could potentially lead to a dispute, disappointment, or detach­ ment. Therefore, Karla complained not about her friend but about a person in her professional office; she did not mention her dear friend’s name until encouraged by me. Similarly, Tuma did not call his cousin “shop assistant” to be sarcastic or confrontational. Likewise, she did not refuse him service to be confrontational or punctilious. Despite adherence to the regulations taped onto the counter, her body language revealed her discomfort in refusing her cousin. By accepting what she said, Tuma did not lose face publicly, and he allowed his cousin to get on with her job. More important, she would still be his cousin and on good speaking terms the next day. Sometimes people in Illorsuit do not address relatives in the usual man­ ner—­by using kinship terminology—­but instead use their names or profes­ sional job titles: for example, the schoolteacher, the juumooq, the sacristan, the social worker, the factory manager. Doing so allows for friends and rela­ tives to act nammineq, and therefore decision making and actions that are part and parcel of their job description are facilitated, without jeopardizing relatedness. By not reinvoking relations in some circumstances, people avoid disappointment and confrontation and therefore maintain the potential for relatedness to be reinvoked in the future. When Will She Return? When Naja gave birth to her son, he was given a middle name after his pater­ nal grandfather; this had already been decided because Naja had seen him in a dream. Her son’s first name did not originate from any relation; Naja and her fiancé, Isak, had decided on the name Kaali together, simply because they liked it. The infant, however, had an uncanny resemblance to Naja’s deceased older sister, Paninnguaq—­Sikkersoq and Aqqalu’s oldest daughter who had died when she was still very young. One afternoon, Sikkersoq was ponder­ ing the physical resemblance between her grandson and her oldest daughter

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and noted that the likeness between the two was more than just physical; her grandson showed a strong liking for Sikkersoq. She could console his crying just by holding him, and when he would not sleep, she would hold him in a particular way, which would make him relax and fall asleep. Sikkersoq was simultaneously puzzled and amazed about this. She wondered how, or rather why, this was so, and she came to the conclusion that it was something that Naja had willed to happen; or rather, it was something Naja’s longing had willed to happen. Many years ago, when she was still quite a young child, Naja had discovered that she had once had an older sister who had died. She was upset by the fact that she had never met her or known her, and she cried for several hours while pleading the same question again and again: “When will Paninnguaq return?” Sikkersoq had found it upsetting at the time because Naja’s longing was her longing too. She had lost her daughter, her firstborn. All her subsequent children, including Naja, had been named after her. They were all their older sister’s angerlartoqut. Due to the fact that she was Paninnguaq’s angerlartoqut, Naja was, in the­ ory, her own sibling. This also applied to her other siblings; they were, in a theoretical sense, all the same person. Or to put it another way, the same per­ son, their older sister, lived in all of them. One of their first cousins—­a young girl a little older than them who was born a few months after Paninnguaq died—­was also named after Paninnguaq. She was her atsiaq, and they had a special relationship. Whenever the cousin Paninnguaq visited Sikkersoq, they were close and affectionate and often sat together holding hands. Bio­ logically, Paninnguaq was Sikkersoq’s niece by marriage and, because of her name, this Paninnguaq was in some way also her daughter. Despite the fact that the daughter Paninnguaq was returned through the siblings and their cousin, it was the events of one fateful evening all those years ago, when Naja voiced her intense longing, that had caused Naja’s own son, born more than a decade later, to bear an uncanny resemblance to the longed-­for sister. This episode speaks partly to the role of longing in the return and how long­ ing, while not obligatory, can at least be instrumental in making a return hap­ pen and is in some ways similar to what we saw in chapter 5, where excessive longing and homesickness can make spirits take a journey through space. At the same time, this episode about Naja’s son speaks to the fact that names re­ turn in their own way. It is never, and it can never be, as simple as giving a child a name and then expecting the deceased’s name to return. We might wonder if Naja’s longing that evening all those years ago indicates that Paninnguaq had not returned at all? Or maybe she had returned but not in a way that was recog­ nizable to Naja. According to Sikkersoq, it was Naja’s unintentional utterance, or “perlocutionary act” (Austin [1955] 1975)—­namely, a question expressing

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intense longing being asked again and again by someone who was too young to know what she was asking for—­that was one day fulfilled in an unexpected way. It did not happen autonomously (nammineq) but because Naja had wished it so all those years ago. Obeyesekere’s (2002) study of eschatology and reincarnation in different societies devotes some pages to Inuit naming practices, which he regards as a mode of reincarnation. He is particularly interested in the way that the recog­ nition of a reincarnation is expressed through kinship—­that is, how named people come to possess both the kinship positions of their dead namesakes and the ones within their biological family. He makes a particularly percep­ tive point when he argues that Inuit do not reincarnate solely for the purpose of the continuation of a kinship system. Instead, what makes Inuit reincarna­ tion relevant and workable, and indeed makes the kinship system persist, is that it is the bereaved kin who desire for their deceased relative to reincarnate, or return. Without their desire, or what I prefer to call longing, the return would not be recognized. I believe that he is partly correct. If we reduce Inuit kinship to the extent that the bereaved desire for their deceased to return, we risk losing sight of the uncertainty in naming, the lack of inevitability of return, and the fact that names will return by their own accord. Obeyesekere is correct that longing is necessary for the name to return and for the return to be acknowledged and recognized. Nevertheless, as we have just seen, this longing is no guarantee that the name will return or that it returns in the way we expect. By extension, this also means that name, kinship position, and system will not correspond to what the bereaved have longed for. To put it more bluntly, you can long all you want, even name all your children after their deceased older sibling, your firstborn, but this is no guarantee that the acuteness of your grief, your loneliness, or your longing will cease. Nor is it any guarantee that even the dead person’s angerlartoqut will not long for the sibling after whom she is named. The relationship between the expectation harbored by a return and how this return comes into being does not always match. In other words, there is more to the return than the desire of the be­ reaved, which is about the nammineqness of how things happen and should be allowed to happen. When it comes to translating all of this into a kinship system, the continu­ ation between the dead and the returned is inexorably far from straightfor­ ward. One may be given one’s name so that one and one’s kin won’t be lonely. One’s name alone does not safeguard anyone from loneliness because, as we have already seen, there are many degrees of loneliness. Loneliness, then, is not absent from kinship. It is necessary for kinship, and it finds resolution in

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kinship: in the initial return of an ancestor and in all the reinvocations that follow throughout a lifetime. Naja is at one and the same time herself and her older sister; her sister Pe­ trine is at one and the same time herself, her mother’s brother, and her older sister. It is complicated for us as outsiders to fully grasp how anyone could ne­ gotiate all those persons or roles simultaneously. In fact, no one can; and no one does. Names are an intrinsic part of the person named and not detachable entities between which people deliberately shift. Names are multiple sides or aspects of a person, and they may return or be invoked in subtle ways, such as a dislike for a particular food, a flicker of a memory, a skill, or the way a person laughs. Another important factor that can make reinvocations difficult is that people in Greenland move and travel. Some people are named after deceased relatives or friends who lived in other places in Greenland and with whose be­ reaved kin they might only rarely come into contact. What does that mean or do in terms of the longing of the bereaved and for the kinship system these returns are supposed to produce? If Inuk’s deceased wife’s atsiaq is born and raised in a town several hundred kilometers away from the people who were most closely related to her when she was alive, who will address her as Nu­ lia (Wife)? Who will address her as Anaanaa (Mother)? And who will address them, in turn, as Ui (Husband), or Son, or Daughter? The bereaved kin will have no way of reinvoking their relation to her, their mother’s atsiaq, except perhaps during a rare Christmas when they all have the means to travel to be together. Or perhaps on the little atsiaq’s birthday, when they will be able to have a kaffemik in the absence of their mother’s or wife’s atsiaq. They may well feel relieved and happy that their mother has returned, like Karla was when she discovered that her father would return. However, it is important to acknowl­ edge that there sometimes is a vast difference between the clarity and relative permanence of the kinship system that we imagine naming produces and how it manifests and plays out. The distances and the multiple kinship roles any given person has make reinvoking necessary and allow for relations to be expressed in any number of ways. It is my experience that, as much as any of these things, named rela­ tions are about love and closeness between the bereaved and the returned. Those moments are reinvoked, again and again. The atsiaq of Karla’s father is, we remember, one of Therecia’s grandsons. He carries as his middle name one of Karla’s father’s middle names. He lived next door to us with his parents and his younger brother and went to school with Nivikannguaq each day. Most of the time, for weeks on end, he would remain that boy next door, Therecia’s grandson, Nivikannguaq’s schoolmate, a young boy, like any other

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young boy in the village. Then suddenly one day, while meeting by chance on their paths, Karla would stop in her tracks, look at him affectionately and call him over, “Ataatanga!” (“My Father!”). He would smile coyly but know what he had to do. “Paninga” (“My Daughter”), he would reply. It was in this very moment that they would be relatives: father and daughter. After this brief moment of recognition and affection, they both went on their way. Similarly, one evening at choir practice in church, Petrine and I were sit­ ting in one of the pews waiting to be instructed in how to sing our alto part. One of Petrine’s mother’s brothers stood next to us, with his back turned, looking through his notes. Usually, Petrine would address him as Uncle, but suddenly she called out to him in a way I had never heard before. Quietly, to draw gently his attention to her, she said, “Angaju.” She called again: “Angaju.” Her uncle now turned around and smiled, realizing that she had called him Big Brother. She stood up from her seat and embraced her uncle who, in this moment, had become her big brother. “Nukara” (“My Little Brother”), he whispered into her hair. The moment was over. Figure-­Ground Reversal What I described in the first chapter of this book as a move between related­ ness and loneliness (in Mauss’s [(1906) 1979] terms), can be elaborated further through the notion of a figure-­ground reversal. Although loneliness and re­ latedness are apparently at opposite ends of a scale, in practice they are much closer together. They are, so to speak, part of the same picture. A figure-­ ground reversal is a visual illusion that consists of an illustration with two or more images sharing the same border. One of the most well-­known examples is Rubin’s Vase by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915. The figure de­ picts two silhouetted faces looking at each other. Between them, in a contrast­ ing color, is what appears to be a vase. The illusion presents us with at least two options for interpretation. In this particular case, we may interpret the figure as a symmetrical vase. Yet, after some time, our eyes shift focus and we may come to discover that either side of the vase is a face looking at directly at another. The figure is no longer one vase but two faces. Vase and faces can con­ tinue to reverse, each taking turns to be figure and ground, or foreground and background image. Either interpretation is correct. Our eyes may shift be­ tween the vase and the faces, but it is always impossible to see both the vase and the faces clearly at the same time. Rubin argued that “when two fields have a common border, and one is seen as figure and the other as ground, the imme­ diate perceptual experience is characterized by a shaping effect which emerges

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from the common border of the fields and which operates only on one field or operates more strongly on one than on the other” (Rubin [1921] 2001, 225). The illusion is useful to us because it is a great demonstration of how we intuitively make a distinction between figure and ground, in any visual perception. That is to say, our brains make sense of figures visually by distin­ guishing them from their surroundings, the ground, and thus also compre­ hending a difference between figure and ground. The moon in the night sky, a fallen apple in the dirt, or these words and letters printed in black on a white page—­these are all figures, because they are so unambiguously different from the background against which they stand: the dark sky, the brown dirt, the white page. Thus, they all illustrate a figure-­ground relationship. Rubin ([1921] 2001) states that a field or the ground, which is essentially without shape, can be experienced in an entirely new way if it too becomes surrounded and then suddenly appears to take shape as figure. This is what happens in a figure-­ ground reversal: we cannot make out what is figure and what is ground. We cannot, to return to the vase-­and-­faces example, discern whether we see a white vase on a black background or two black faces on a white background. This is because both the vase and the faces are fields that share a common border. Each can be figure and ground, but never both at the same time. The figure-­ground reversal of objects and illustrations is made as an ar­ gument about the way we make sense of figures and objects in the world around us. In Gestalt psychology, this figure-­ground relation concerns the way in which we as humans try to create order out of a chaotic world. When we create order, or a whole out of chaotic parts, the whole is greater and has an authenticity of its own, which is independent of its parts. In anthropology, the figure-­ground reversal is perhaps most famously used by Wagner (1987) among the Barok of Papua New Guinea. His discussion of the burial and the feast depicts a reversal so intricate that both burial and feast appear “collapsed together and shown to be one and the same thing” (Wagner 1987, 61). The ritual in question is also a visual representation of how the Barok celebrate and complete their relationship with the dead, through the reversal of a tree turned, literally, upside down; cooked pigs are served atop its roots, which are now the crown, and young living women are seated around the base of the tree trunk, the branches, and burial ground. What I want to say about kinship in Greenland is that we can understand it as a figure-­ground reversal. This reversal is not a visual representation as much as it is a practice through which relatives seek to achieve a balance between relatedness and loneliness, as they go about doing kinship (and loneliness) in the everyday. Each reinvocation is an attempt to establish balance between

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relatedness and loneliness. We have seen how returning can be excessive or occur in the wrong way, for instance, as an expression of unresolved feelings of extreme relatedness, as in homesickness and longing. We have also seen how disputes can sometimes be resolved through the right kind or degree of detach­ ment, while disputes and the experience of loneliness can also escalate in ex­ cessive kinds of detachment, in qivittoq, walking away in anger, and in suicide. Longing and the experience of loneliness are necessary for a return to happen, but if or how this return actually occurs is not only a matter of longing. Some dead have still to return, and others, though already returned continue to re­ turn in strange ways as a result of extreme longing. Moreover, a return, as when a name is bestowed on a person, does not always safeguard against loneliness, just as it is not a guarantee of relatedness. Names, as with any other relation, whether they are biological or adoptive, need reinvoking again and again. It is in those moments that returns are repeatedly actualized, and where relatedness and loneliness come together in a figure-­ground reversal. It is in the very mo­ ment when loneliness is expressed as relatedness that relatedness is expressed as loneliness. I returned to Illorsuit for a brief visit a few months after having left in January 2005. Summer was ripe, and it was the busy season for gathering food storage and creating memories and stories for winter. While I was there, an elderly woman called Johanne passed away. She had been suffering from cancer for a short while and, knowing her chances of survival were dismal, she had refused treatment. She had wanted whatever life she had left in her to be dignified and without additional pain. By the time I had arrived, it was only a question of time. The juumooq had looked after her and administered pain relief and medication, but since the juumooq’s own mother, who lived in a nursing home in a town farther north, had suddenly also become critically ill, the juumooq had decided to travel to be with her. Johanne was then trans­ ferred to a hospital in Ilulissat where health staff would provide her with the necessary care until the juumooq returned from her trip. Some of Johanne’s children and their spouses, including one of my closest friends, Sofia, had ac­ companied her to Ilulissat and stayed there for the weekend to make sure she was comfortable in the hospital. Everyone in Illorsuit was anxious for news, and word arrived that she was receiving good care, that she was in good spir­ its, and that her relatives were now making their way back to Illorsuit. They were due to arrive late in the evening. I was standing outside, smoking a cigarette in the evening sun, when sud­ denly the dogs around the houses started howling loudly as if it were feeding time. I looked around, but I couldn’t see feeding taking place. A few minutes later one of Johanne’s grandchildren appeared from the house next door, car­

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rying a flag. He tied it to the flagpole, raised it all the way up, and then low­ ered it back down to half-­mast. “Aanaa toqusimavoq” (“Grandmother has died”), he answered quietly, when I asked him what had happened. I quickly went inside and relayed the news to Karla and Nukaraq. Their replies were almost mute in disbelief. “But they only just left her,” Karla said, talking about the relatives who were traveling back to Illorsuit. Karla asked me if I wanted to come along to Johanne’s house, where her husband had stayed behind. I looked out the window onto the village and saw groups of people walking to and from the house, outside of which the flag also flew at half-­mast. We got ready to leave, and as we walked down the steep staircase at the side of the cliff, Karla eventually answered a question I had asked her a few minutes earlier. I didn’t know how to give my condolences in Greenlandic. “You should say misiginneqataavunga” (“My condolences”). We passed people leaving as we were arriving at the house. On entering, the atmosphere was somber. From the bedroom to the right of the kitchen, I heard one of her grandchildren cry­ ing. He had lived with his grandparents for the past couple of years and was very close to his grandmother. He was being comforted by one of his cous­ ins. We went through the kitchen to the living room where some of Johanne’s children who had not gone to Ilulissat were gathered; among them was one of their daughters who herself had cancer (and died a few months later). She was on the telephone with relatives who lived away from Illorsuit, perhaps some of Johanne’s relatives from farther north, where Johanne had originally come from. I located Johanne’s husband, shook his hand, and spoke to him as Karla had instructed. We found a place to sit. People poured in, and people left. Some cried loudly. Others sat still and stared into nothingness as their eyes welled up. Someone had lit candles in the windowsills and on the tables. Johanne’s daughter had come off the phone and found a place to sit. She suddenly heard the grandchild, her nephew, crying from the bedroom. She rose from her chair, saying his name, and went to him. We sat quietly. I was reminded of how this evening was like a kaffemik and yet so different, almost opposite. There was no coffee, cake, or congratulations. But there were people shaking hands, and people huddled together on the sofa and in the chairs, and people standing up, waiting for seats to become available. No one talked or appeared to take any particular notice of anyone else in the room. People had come together to pay their respects and to support the family by making sure that they were not alone. I suddenly heard a loud cry. It was my friend Sofia. The group had now ar­ rived at Illorsuit, unaware that Johanne had died in the four hours it had taken them to get home. Seeing the candles, the flags at half-­mast, and the visitors walking to and from Johanne’s house, they realized what had happened. Sofia

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was hunched over and screaming. Karla found me in the kitchen comforting Sofia and told me it was time to go. We walked away from the house in silence. As more people approached, we didn’t greet each other as we normally would but gazed downward as we passed each other. Karla lit candles to put in the windowsills, and Nukaraq asked me how I had found it at Johanne’s house. I didn’t really know how to reply, so I said that it had been very sad. He thought for a moment and then said that when someone dies in a village in Greenland, you can really feel it. It is, he said, very different from in a town or city. In a vil­ lage, it involves everyone; everyone supports the bereaved. Later in the night as the summer dusk fell, I noticed that people had lit candles in their windowsills. The candles burned all night, as they did during any times of sadness (death, funerals, the tsunami in 2004, Good Friday) and during happy times (Christ­ mas, Easter Sunday, births, weddings, and birthdays). What is figure and what is ground, in terms of relatedness and loneliness, in an episode like this is not easy to ascertain. Sudden grief and the kind of loneliness, known to anyone who has experienced the loss of a close relative, might be the ground on which a figure of relatedness is acted out: the people coming together in the mourners’ house to share the grief in an act of close­ ness, and a reinvocation of relatedness. Conversely, we might also say that it is relatedness that is the ground—­the everyday investments in relatedness, the frequent visits, the utterances of kinship terminology—­onto which the tragic events of the loss of a loved one becomes figure, in the quiet tears of visitors who display their own sorrow and longing, in a house where the loss and sense of loneliness is most intense. They light candles in the windowsills to show that they too are feeling the loss. In ideal representations of kinship (and indeed ideal representations of anything), we tend to understand a perfect workable model that involves ideal people in ideal action under ideal circumstances. Ideal models tend to edit out uncertainty, and rarely, if ever, is uncertainty part of them. In kinship in Greenland, however, returns and relations in general hinge as much on uncertainty as they do on loneliness and longing. An ideal model of kinship in Greenland does involve uncertainty because relations may disappoint, re­ invocations may not be reciprocated, returns may not be actualized, requests may be rejected. Loneliness is always a potential outcome, just as it is the same uncertainty that makes reinvocations all the more powerful. Rubin re­ minds us that in a figure-­ground reversal, we will never be able to see figure and ground as the same surface at the same time; we cannot see both the vase and the faces simultaneously. Put into kinship language, we will not be able to see relatedness and loneliness at the same time, equally. They cannot both be figure or ground at the same time. One of them will inevitably step

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up to the front. In making the figure-­ground reversal an ideal representa­ tion of kinship, we are endeavoring to try to see both figures as figures at the same time—­that is, to see relatedness and loneliness in kinship simulta­ neously. The reinvocation is an attempt to achieve an elusive balance in kinship between relatedness and loneliness. It is thus an attempt to do what Rubin says is impossible in a figure-­ground reversal. Achieving this elusive balance in kinship and experiencing relatedness and loneliness simultaneously may not be wholly achievable much of the time. Yet, is that not the point about an ideal model? In the days after Johanne’s death, several of the women were concerned about the extent to which Sofia cried. “It’s too much,” Karla worried. “She should calm down.” It lasted for one or two days. Sofia would cry inconsolably as she went about her chores: at the service house doing laundry, going to the shop, or helping some of the elderly in the village with their cleaning. Then suddenly she stopped. “They called,” she said, when I visited her to say good-­ bye, as I was leaving the next day. “They called from the village further north where Johanne is from and where she still has relatives. A little girl was born last night. They would like to name her Johanne.”

Appendix 1: Kinship Terminology

aanaa aataa aja(k) akkaa akulleq aleqa aleqat anaana angaa angajoqqaat angaju angajulleq angerlartoqut ani anaanassaq aqqa aqqalu ataata atsa(k) atsiaq erneq ernutaq illoq naja ningaaq ningiu nuka nukariit nukarleq nulia

Grandmother Grandfather Mother’s sister Father’s brother (Sibling) in the middle Older sister to a younger brother Plural of aleqa Mother Mother’s brother Parents Older brother or sister to a younger sibling of same sex Oldest (sibling) Someone who is named after a deceased brother or sister Older brother to a younger sister Stepmother or like-­a-­mother Deceased person whose name has been bestowed on a newborn Younger brother to an older sister Father Father’s sister Someone who is named after a deceased person Son Grandchild Cousin Younger sister to an older brother Uncle; husband of Father’s sister or Mother’s sister Old woman, or female head of a family Younger brother or sister to an older sibling of same sex Siblings, either male or female Youngest (sibling) Wife

164 nuno panik panissaq qatanngutigiit soraluaq ui ukuaq

appendix 1 Baby Daughter Stepdaughter Siblings, both male and female Nephew or niece Husband Aunt; wife of mother’s brother or father’s brother

A Note on Kinship Terminology Generally, Greenlanders often use kinship terminology as terms of address, and when they do, they also regularly use the possessive form signified by the affixes -­ra or -­ga in the singular, or -­kka in the plural: “My son” (ernera), “my mother” (anaanaga), “my parents” (angajoqqaatikka). In the regional and northern dialect of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), people ordinarily add n before a soft g, so that -­ga becomes -­nga. Words for “my mother” (anaanaga) or “my daughter” (paniga) in standard West Greenlandic are thus anaananga and paninga in the local northern dialect. In addition to being used in the everyday as family members address each other, especially kinship terms in the sibling category are also commonly used as nicknames and proper names. Kinship terms such as naja, aqqalu, and nuka, may therefore also be people’s nicknames. These kinship terms may also be proper given names as bestowed by christening in church. Kinship terms of address also commonly go together with the affixes: -­nnguaq (cute, little) or -­raq (little). “Cute little younger brother” or “cute little younger sister” is thus either nukannguaq, najannguaq, or aqqalunnguaq, depending on the age and gender of his or her siblings. “Little son” is erneraq, “little younger sister” is najaaraq or nukaraq, and “cute little daughter” is paninnguaq. Kinship terms with these affixes may be used in everyday speech as kin address each other, or they may also be proper names. In fact, Najaaraq, Nukaraq, and Paninnguaq are all common Greenlandic proper names. The -­nnguaq and -­raq affixes are also frequently added to proper names such as Peter (Piitaq), Johannes (Juansi), or Anne (Ane): “Cute little Peter” is Pita­ nnguaq, “Cute little Johannes” is Juansinnguaq, and “Little Anne” is Aneraq. Whether people add the -­nnguaq and -­raq affixes to kinship terms or to proper names, they ordinarily do so as a sign of affection and endearment. Sometimes they also do so to distinguish between other Peters, Johns, Najas, or Aqqalus.

Appendix 2: Glossary of Other Greenlandic Language Terms

ajoqi anersaaq angakkoq angakkut angalaarpoq angerlarserneq Angerlarserpunga angerlartoqut aqqit arsarnerit ateq Avannaa Avanersuaq festi ilaqutariit illoqarfiit illoqarfik illoqarfimmiut Illorsuarmioq Illorsuarmiut iluaq iluamik imaq imeq immaqa imminik imminortoq inuillivoq

Church sacristan Spirit, ghost Shaman Plural of angakkoq Walking around, being on a journey Homesickness “I am homesick” The namesake of a deceased older sibling; literally, “The dead has returned home” Plural of ateq Northern lights Name North Greenland Big North, Northwest Greenland Drinking parties Family Plural of illoqarfik A place that has houses: town or city People from a city Person from pseudonymous village of Illorsuit Plural of Illorsuarmioq Nice, comfortable The correct way Ocean, sea Water Maybe By himself or herself; also used as expression meaning “Never mind” or “It doesn’t matter” someone who has died by suicide Seeking loneliness on the land

166 Isumaminik juumooq kaffemiit kaffemik Kalaaleq kalaalimerngit Kalaallit Kalaallisut Kalaallit Nunaat kamiit kifaanngissuseq Kipippunga kipisaneq kiserliorneq kiserliorpoq kiserliortoq Kitaa Kiuit? kuanni Kujataa Mamarpoq mattak mitaartoq mitaartut Naluara naluvoq nammineq neqi nilak nillerpoq nuaninngilaq nuaniipoq nuna nunaqarfik nunaqarfiit nunaqarfimmiut orsoq palasi Piguppunga pikkorik pikkunaappoq pikkunarpoq Pilluarit Pilluaritsi pinngortitarsuaq

appendix 2 “Mind your own business”; don’t interfere Medical assistant; derived from Danish for “midwife” (jordemoder); Plural of kaffemik Celebration for birthdays and special holidays, where coffee and cake are served Greenlander Greenlandic food Plural of Kalaaleq Greenlandic language Greenland Boots Freedom; independence “I long [for you]” Longing Loneliness Lonely; “He or she feels lonely” Someone who is a lonely person or lives in loneliness West Greenland “Who, or whose, are you?” Wild angelica South Greenland “It’s tasty” Whale skin Person who is disguised Plural of mitaartoq “I don’t know” An ignorant person Personal autonomy; as a phrase, “He just did it” or “It happened by itself ” Meat (especially seal meat) Freshwater ice Cold Unpleasantness, sadness Boring Land A place that has land: village or settlement Plural of nunaqarfik People from a village Fat, blubber Pastor “I long to taste my favorite food” Clever, skillful, proficient, and competent Lack of strength or power in food Strength or power in food “Congratulations to you” (singular) “Congratulations to you” (plural) Nature

appendix 2 piniartoq piniartup nulia puisi pulaarneq pulaarput qajaq qallunaamerngit Qallunaat Qallunaatut Qallunaaq qamutit qasoqqasoq qasunarpoq qiviarpoq qivippoq qivittoq qivittut Qujan(aq) siku sila Sila naalagaq Sooq Sooruna takornartoq tammarpoq tarneq tikeraaq timi toornaq toornaarsuk Tunu umiaq unaaq uterpoq

167 Hunter Hunter’s wife Seal Visit, visiting Visitors Kayak Danish food Plural of Qallunnaaq Danish language Dane or white person Dogsled Exhausted (mentally) Tiresome Someone who faces people; opposite of qivittoq Practice of turning away permanently, walking away into the wilderness with the intention of becoming a qivittoq Someone who has turned away plural of qivittoq “Thank you” Sea ice Weather, mind, reason, the world “The weather is superior” “Why?” “How come?” A stranger To lose one’s way, disappear Soul Visitor from far away Body Helping spirit The devil East Greenland Boat Harpoon Return

A Note on Language and Spelling Kalaallisut, or the Greenlandic language, is a polysenthetic and agglutinative language, which is to say that it consists of word stems and a theoretically infinite number of affixes that glue together to make words that usually carry the same meaning as entire sentences in fusional languages such as English. Kalaallisut has several dialects. Wherever relevant, I have maintained the regional northern dialect, which varies from standard West Greenlandic in a number of ways, most notably in replacing the letter a with the letter u in the future-­affix -­ssa and in the addition of the letter n before a soft g.

Notes

Chapter One 1. Canis lupus familiaris. 2. Pupils enrolled in village schools usually travel to the city to finish their primary schooling in the school year following their Lutheran confirmation. 3. Not to be confused with the town by the same name in the Ummannaq region. 4. The Greenlandic word for northern lights (arsarnerit) is related to the noun ball (arsaq) and the verb playing ball (arsaapput). 5. I take “the South” and “Euro-­America” to be similar to what is commonly referred to as “the West.” Neither are unproblematic terms, nor can they be defined solely by borders, time frames, identities, or cultures. From the vantage point of Greenland and the North American Arctic, “the South” and “Southerners” usually refer to the colonizers in Europe and North America (Denmark, Canada, and the United States). I use the terms here to refer especially to northwestern Europe, Canada, and the United States, understanding that there are vast cultural, societal, historical, and political contrasts within and between these regions. 6. A suggestion for which he has been taken to task by several Arctic scholars since: see Bodenhorn (2000, 130); Nuttall (2000, 37); and, not least, Burch (1975), who saw kinship as a central pillar of Inuit communities, around which most other relations and social activities were structured. 7. Angelica archangelica. 8. The use of amulets for instance, used for protection against evil spirits or curses (Gad 1969, 124–­25). 9. Among them were Pôq and his wife, who received the names Christian and Christine in 1728. The following year, Pôq, his wife, and their children set on a voyage to Denmark, during which they died of smallpox (e.g., Gad 1969, 207). 10. As Denmark was under Nazi occupation, the local administration and the Danish ambassador in Washington, DC, had difficulties agreeing on who was officially in charge of Greenland. The Danish ambassador was forthcoming about Greenlandic requests for shipments and other forms of assistance and entered a treaty with the US government that acknowledged Danish sovereignty in Greenland; while Denmark, via the Danish ambassador, allowed for American military presence in Greenland. These air bases in Greenland became an important part of

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the US armament during the Cold War (Gad 1984, 274–­279; Lidegaard 1991, 179–­183; A. Sørensen 1995, 96–­97). US military presence in northern Greenland remains an integral part of the US missile defense system today. 11. See also Lidegaard 1991, 201–­4; Lindgaard Høyer 1999; Petersen 1986; B. Sørensen 1998. 12. Much of the Arctic, including Siberia, has experienced a similar history of forced resettlements and a wide and swift modernization followed by a string of social problems, including suicide (Mancini Billson and Mancini 2007; Bogoyavlensky 1997; Brody 1975; Hicks 2007a; O’Neil et al. 1994; Pika 1993; Rasing 1994; Sampath 1990). It is perhaps no coincidence that it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the suicide rates in Greenland, as with other Arctic regions, suddenly rocketed and continued to do so in the 1980s and well into the 1990s (Hicks 2007a). 13. Qallunaat is a Pan Inuit name for whites or Southerners. In Greenland, it relates directly to Denmark (Qallunaat Nunaat) and Danes, distinguishing them from other Europeans. In Greenlandic, the English are called Tulut (plural of tuluk) and England is Tuluit Nunaat. The Norwegians are sometimes called Umittoormiu, and the Germans Noorliit. 14. Kalaallisut was made the official language of Greenland by decree in 2009. It should be noted that the languages (some would argue, dialects) spoken in East Greenland (Tunumiit oraasiat) and Northwest Greenland (Inuktun) differ in profound ways from Kalaallisut. 15. The sudden drop in sealskin prices was a direct result of an aggressive and misguided campaign against industrial sealing by international wildlife conservation movements, such as Greenpeace, PETA, and Sea Shepherd. Backed by celebrity actress ambassadors and film crews, the campaign targeted a comparatively small pocket of the large-­scale industrial sealing, the Newfoundland fishermen, who practiced an annual spring seal cull. The arguments were that seal hunting was cruel and unnecessary and that the seal was an endangered species. These arguments were proven false at the time and continue to be false today. Inuit seal hunting, which has been necessary for the physical survival of humans and dogs for millennia, got caught in the storm. The campaign had succeeded in a ban on imports of sealskin to European and American markets, causing the prices for sealskin to plummet. By the time lawmakers realized that Inuit communities who practiced subsistence hunting were affected by the ban and that the footage shot by one of Greenpeace’s campaigns turned out to be fabricated, it was too late. The market had crashed, and the sealskin, effectively a by-­product, could no longer bring the same vital income to subsistence hunters in Greenland as it used to (F. Lynge 1992; Wenzel 1992). Although Greenpeace has apologized for the harm it caused Greenlandic hunters, other environmentalists still refuse to distinguish between industrial sealing and subsistence sealing in which the sealskin is a by-­product. 16. Owing to the cost of electricity and wiring, the two houses shared an electricity meter. In effect the houses were built less than 2 meters apart. Chapter Two 1. Thomas Wolfe writes, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence” (1962, 676). 2. I take unhuman to be distinct from the much-­used category of nonhuman animals, and nonhuman beings. The qivittoq is an example of an unhuman. 3. Although some people like to eat uuaq (Greenland cod), many don’t and tend to regard this fish as inferior to saarullik (Atlantic cod).

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1. Also known as Nerrivik in Avanersuaq, northwestern Greenland. See also Sonne 1990. 2. Some versions of this myth also relay the origin of the white man, Qallunaaq, as the offspring of a woman and a dog (Sonne 1990). 3. Although it is true that a woman could choose to turn away and become a qivittoq, among Illorsuarmiut, a qivittoq is usually spoken of as a man. 4. Place name meaning “beautiful, sweet little one.” It is located at the bottom of a nearby fjord. 5. Rigshospitalet, or the Copenhagen University Hospital, is the hospital in Denmark to which most Greenlanders are referred for treatments and surgery that cannot be undertaken in Greenland. Patient referrals are common and have become an integrated part of the health system, with interpreters, social workers, and accommodation specifically for Greenlandic outpatients and parents of Greenlandic child admissions. Chapter Four 1. When Hammer here talks of “Greenlanders,” he is referring to the ones inhabiting the Disko Bay area. 2. For the early missionaries, suicide and qivittoq practices almost certainly presented a problem. According to Bertelsen (1940, 178), the first mention of qivittut was in the early eighteenth-­century diaries of Hans Egede’s sons from 1735 (ten years after Hans Egede first arrived). Here, the qivittoq is mentioned briefly in a case of marital disappointment (Ostermann and Egede 1939, 171) and again by a girl who exclaims her intention to become a qivittoq if the Egede sons do not bring her along on their travels to Copenhagen (206). Chapter Five 1. Each species of seal has its own name, such as natseq (ringed seal), aataaq (Greenland seal), natsersuaq (hooded seal), or ussuk (bearded seal). In addition, a large range of words exists to describe the state the puisi is in: “a seal that rests in the sun on the sea ice”: uuttoq; “a seal that is caught in a net”: napittoq. However, once a seal is dead, carved, shared, or cooked, or going through a similar social process, it will usually be referred to as neqi (meat) rather than puisi (seal), in much the same way that people in other parts of the world distinguish mutton from sheep, beef from cow, or pork from pig. 2. One of the most well-­known and most frequently cooked dishes in Greenland is seal soup (neqi suaasat), which translates directly into “meat rice.” It is a soup containing meat from a seal boiled in water along with round-­grain rice and, depending on availability, onion, potatoes, and carrots. Whether neqi suaasat contains neqi from a natseq or any other kind of seal, the neqi is invariably from a puisi. Any other form of meat, say, from a caribou (tuttu) or beluga (qilalugaq), is distinguished by its animal of origin: tuttup neqaa and qilalugap neqaa (“meat from caribou” and “meat from beluga or narwhal”). Chapter Six 1. In the original Danish, “De behandles som små prinser.” 2. In my experience, the word maybe and the notion of uncertainty intrinsic to the immaqa concept seem to carry the same weight wherever I have encountered them in Greenland. In

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Inuktun, which is spoken in Avanersuaq, Northwest Greenland, immaqa is ammaqa, and in East Greenland it is uppa. 3. National dress varies throughout Greenland. In West Greenland, the women’s kamiit are usually knee length and white. However, they may sometimes be long, reaching above the knee, and dyed red or blue, depending on the region and the age or stature of the woman in question. Similarly, the color of the silk blouse reflects the age of the woman: light pinks and reds for young girls; dark reds, blues, and purples for older women. Chapter Seven 1. Having recorded a total Greenlandic suicide rate of 3.0 (calculated per 100,000 over five years) in the years between 1900 and 1930, Bertelsen (1935) argued that most of these cases were most likely caused by serious mental illnesses. The suicide rate began to rise in the 1960s, reaching a total rate of around 40.0 in 1972 and 90.0 in 1980, peaking at a total rate of more than 120.0 in the mid-­1980s (Hicks 2007a, 265; 2007b, 31;) The total suicide rate in Greenland then declined slightly and appeared to stabilize in the 1990s to around 100.0 (Hicks 2007b, 31; Pedersen and Bjerregaard 2012, 48), falling to 84 between 2005 and 2009, but rising again to 110.4 for the years 2010 and 2011 (Bjerregaard and Larsen 2015, 26055). A crude total suicide rate for the period 1970–­2011 is 87.7 (Bjerregaard and Larsen 2015, 26055). Comparatively, the total suicide rate in Denmark has been decreasing slightly since the 1990s (Center for Selvmordsforskning 2018), from 16.0 in 2000 to 12.8 in 2016 (World Health Organization [WHO] 2018). This rate is lower than the total suicide rate in the United States, which was 15.3 in 2016, but higher than that of the United Kingdom, which was 8.9 in 2016 (WHO 2018). 2. There are regional differences to the suicide pattern. The suicide rate is especially high in Northwest and East Greenland. The crude average for the period 1970–­2011 was 187.7, which is more than double the national average for the same period (Bjerregaard and Larsen 2015, 26055). Peaking between 2000 and 2004 at about 270.0, the rate has decreased to about 200.0 between 2005 and 2011. The lowest suicide rate for the period 2005–­2011 was about 50.0 in the capital (Bjerregaard and Larsen 2015, 26057), where the population is rising and naturally therefore may also produce a lower rate. The total male suicide rate in Greenland was around 160.0 in the 1990s. During the same period, the suicide rate among young male teenagers aged 15–­19 was fifty times higher than the same age cohort in Denmark (I. Lynge and Bjerregaard 2003, 4), and forty times higher for the age cohort 15–­24 (Hicks 2007a, 270). The crude average for the period 2000–­2011 reflects this trend, the suicide rate for young men aged 20–­24 being just over 400.0 while it was 297.0 for young men aged 15–­19, and 251.0 for those aged 25–­29 (Bjerregaard and Larsen 2011, 26055). There is also a peak in the suicide rate for young women aged 15–­19 of 152.0 for the period 2000–­2011 (Bjerregaard and Larsen 2011, 26055). 3. In 2010 the total suicide occurrence of sixty-­one was almost the same as it was in 1990 (sixty-­six), having jumped from thirty-­six only two years before. The year 2008 also saw a drop in the total occurrence, from fifty-­eight in 2006 (Grønlands Statistik 2013). 4. Rather unusually in 2006 and especially so in 2010, women represented nearly a third of the total suicide counts of fifty-­eight and sixty-­one, respectively (Grønlands Statistik 2013). 5. Euro-­American patterns of suicide were not always a timeless option (Hacking 2002, 112–­ 13) but a historical artifact of a nineteenth-­century obsession by French medics with suicide. A sudden rise in suicides across Europe deemed to be caused by insanity prompted French medics and statisticians to begin recording information on each accessible case of suicide. Every

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attainable fact about each corpse was important. All findings were recorded, compared, measured, and fed into an overall suicide pathology. By the end of the nineteenth century there was so much information about European suicides that it created an entire ethos of suicide that spoke to the method, the time and place of death, and even the suicide note. 6. Similarly, in his early twentieth-­century work The Eskimos: Their Environment and Folkways, Weyer observed, “Life sometimes seems harder than death, and so is regarded as a little thing to give. Like the Stoic who argues, metaphorically, that if the chimney smokes one should get out of the house, the Eskimo justifies suicide, especially if age of infirmity renders one useless and a burden” (1932, 248). Nearly forty years later, Balikci devoted an entire section of his monograph The Netsilik Eskimo to suicide, violence, and infanticide. About suicide, he wrote, “There is a certain uneasiness among the Eskimos to leave this world when, under certain concrete conditions, an almost inevitable suicidal tendency develops” (1970, 168). 7. For an excellent discussion of such narratives, see Fienup-­Riordan (1990) and Marcus (1995). 8. The young male suicide rate (cohort 15–­24) has remained at a rate of over 400.0 per year on the Greenlandic west coast (excluding the capital, Nuuk) since the 1980s (Hicks 2007a, 268), whereas on the Greenlandic east coast the suicide rate for men consistently peaked with 1,500.0 every year in the first half of the 1990s (Hicks 2007b, 32). 9. This is a pattern prevalent in many Arctic communities today. See Fogel-­Chance (1993), Hamilton et al. (1996), B. Sørensen (1993), and Vitebsky (2000). 10. For which he has been extensively critiqued, especially by Douglas (1967). Chapter Eight 1. To ensure that bottles and cans are returned for recycling in Greenland and Denmark, many shops charge the customer a universal deposit per bottle when soda or beer is purchased. The deposit is refunded when the customer returns the bottles to the shop, from where they are returned to the supplier for recycling or reuse.

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Index

acculturation, 40, 127; suicide, as causes of, 125–­26 Agamben, Giorgio, 44 agency, 110, 124; and suicide, 126; of words, 129, 131, 133–­34, 138 alienation, 40–­41 anersaaq (ghost or spirit), 63, 86, 110–­11 angakkoq (shaman), 14, 48, 52, 56, 58, 63, 132; central figure of, 16; as character type, 64; and ritual, 54; roles of, 55; threshold, crossing of, 53; toornaq (helping spirit), 54–­55; tupilak (little figurine), 54 angerlartoqut, 7, 13, 78, 140, 153–­54 anonymity, x anonymization, x anthropology, 4, 35, 157; of thresholds, 48 Apache, 96, 132; silence, importance of, 133 aqqa (deceased person), 75 Arctic, vii–­ix, 5–­6, 19, 21, 27–­28, 45, 54, 89, 91–­92, 94, 102, 104, 106, 109, 147, 169n5; personal autonomy, 107; suicide in, 123–­25, 170n12; turning away permanently, practice of, 57 Arctic Canada, viii, 36, 53, 71, 108, 127 Aristotle, 42; potential, as precursor for actuality, 44 Arnaqquassaaq. See Sassuma Arnaa (Mother of the Sea) ateq (name), 6, 10, 77 atsiaq (someone who is named after a deceased person), 6, 13, 69–­70, 75–­77, 121, 140, 147, 153, 155; as linking entity, 78 Austin, John L., 147 Baffin Island, 57–­58 Balikci, Asen, 173n6 Barok, 157 Barrow, AK, 9, 110

Basso, Keith H., 96, 132–­33 Belcher Island, 8, 89 belonging, 21, 84, 90, 101 Bertelsen, Alfred, 143, 171n2 (chap. 4), 172n1 Berthelsen, Rasmus, 17 Birket-­Smith, Kaj, 143–­44 Bloch, Maurice, 141, 147–­48 Boas, Franz, 91, 124 Bodenhorn, Barbara, 9–­10, 92, 110, 141, 149 Briggs, Jean, 36–­37, 57, 70–­7 1, 108, 115, 135–­36 Canada, 125, 169n5 cannabis, 65 Carsten, Janet, 9, 108, 120, 141 Central Eskimo, The (Boas), 124 child-­rearing, 71; learning process, 135; and nammineq, 134–­36; personal autonomy, and relatedness, 135; scolding, frowned upon, 135; and sociality, 135–­36 Christian II, 14 Christian IV, 14 Christianity, 52, 55, 117, 125 Christiansen, Ing-­Britt, 136 Church of Greenland, 61 climate change, x, 47 Cold War, 169–­70n10 Coleman, Leo, 40 colonialism, viii–­x, 19; centralization policies, 40; and modernity, 40 colonization, 40 Copenhagen (Denmark), 48, 56 Cruikshank, Julie, 96 Damas, David, 8 Davis, John, 14 decolonialism, 19

184 Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel (Royal Greenlandic Trade) (KGH), 15. See also Kalaallit Niuerfiat (KNI), Royal Greenland, export division of Denmark, 17–­19, 23–­26, 36, 40, 50, 61, 87–­88, 93, 101, 112, 120–­21, 123, 125–­26, 146, 169n5, 169–­70n10, 170n12, 171n5, 173n1; suicide rate in, 172nn1–2 Dorset Culture, 13. See also Tunit drinking, 47, 65, 119, 150–­51; binge drinking, 33; drinking parties, 65, 149; as isolating activity, 34; and loneliness, 35; problem of, 32–­34; as public and social health concern, 34; types of, 34 dualism, 9 Durkheim, Émile, 126; egotistic suicide, notion of, 39 East Greenland, 123, 170n14, 171–­72n2 (chap. 6); suicide rate in, 172n2. See also Greenland; Northwest Greenland; West Greenland Egede, Hans, 15–­16, 56, 171n2 (chap. 4) Ellesmere Island, 13 Empson, Rebecca, 121 England, 26, 146; individualism in, 107–­8. See also Great Britain; United Kingdom Erik the Red, 13 Eskimos, 13, 124; suicide, justification for, 173n6. See also Inuit; Polar Eskimos Eskimos, The (Weyer), 173n6 Eskimo Type of Kinship, 6 Essex (England), 141 ethnography, 36 Euro-­America, 6, 22, 131–­32, 138, 148 Europe, 14–­15, 98, 107, 146, 169n5; suicide in, 126, 172–­73n5 festi (drinking parties), 34, 149 Fienup-­Riordan, Ann, 92 figure-­ground reversal, 156–­58, 160; kinship, as ideal representation, 161 freak shows, ix–­x Freuchen, Peter, 124–­25 Frobisher, Martin, 14 Gardner, Peter M., 107 Germany, 17 Gestalt psychology, 157 Gisaro, 37 Glahn, Heinrich, 71, 125 “God’s Lonely Man” (Wolfe), 41 Graburn, Nelson H. H., 8, 92 Great Britain, 23. See also England; United Kingdom Greenland, viii, xi, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13–­14, 26, 28, 30–­31, 40, 42, 48, 53, 57–­58, 65, 70, 80, 93–­94, 96, 115,

index 136, 138, 149, 155, 169n5, 170n13, 171n5, 171–­72n2 (chap. 6), 173n1; adoption in, 148; air bases in, 169–­70n10; alcohol licensing laws, 150–­51; birth years, 25; centralization policy (G-­60), 18–­19, 21–­22, 90, 97; children, personal autonomy of, 112–­13; Christianization of, 106, 126; colonization of, 16; Danish colonial rule in, 15; Danish constitution, added to, 17; Danish language in, 19; domestic violence, 112; drinking, as public and social problem in, 34, 125; drum duels, 132; European whaling activity, as center of, 15; food in, 100–­103, 171n2 (chap. 5); forced relocation, 21; gender roles in, 111–­12; halibut industry, nationalization of, 22–­23; home rule, 22; homesickness in, 98; hymns of, 17; identity in, 88–­89, 105; independence, move toward, 111; infants, agency of, 110–­11; infrastructure of, 18; and kinship, ix, 11, 105, 119, 140, 157, 160; kinship diagrams in, 119–­21, 142; land, attitude toward, 45–­46; language of, 170n14; learning in, 111–­14; and loneliness, ix, 35–­36, 43; loneliness in, as rare, 44; Lutheran Christianity, conversion to, 15; missionaries in, 15–­16; modernization of, 17–­18; mourning in, 77; myths of, 17; naming in, 78; national dress, 172n3 (chap. 6); national identity, 20, 82, 100–­101; nation-­ building, process of, 19–­20; objectification, feeling of, 20; Othering in, 82, 123; personal autonomy, 107–­8, 112; reincarnation, belief in, ix, 19; religion in, 52; responsibility in, 112; return, belief in, 19, 160; rites of passage, 144; sea, attitude toward, 46; sibling terminology, precision of, 146–­47; strangers in, 62, 105–­6; suicide in, 71, 126–­27, 129, 133; suicide rate, among men, 130–­31, 172n2, 173n8; suicide rates in, ix, 19, 72, 122–­23, 125, 170n12, 172n1; surnames in, 106–­7; tourism in, x, 20; traditional names in, as rare, 145; unknowing in, 128; villages, as real Greenland, 89; weather, dependence on, 116–­17. See also East Greenland; Northwest Greenland; West Greenland Greenland Ice Sheet, vii Greenlandic food, 103; vs. Danish food, 100–­101; national identity, shaping of, 101; and sustainability, 102 Greenlandic Lutheran Church, 16 Greenpeace, 170n15 Guemple, Lee, 8–­9, 11, 89–­90 Hacking, Ian, 124 Halloween, 51 Hammer, R. R. J., 71–­72, 125 havana (kinsman), 147–­48 Hofer, Johannes, 98 Højer, Lars, 63–­64 Holtved, Erik, 25

index homesickness, 4–­5, 11, 20, 40, 86, 88, 101, 110, 133, 140–­41, 158; definition of, 84–­85; and loneliness, 83; and longing, 82–­84, 98; and nostalgia, 98; as spatially anchored, 98; and temporality, 98 hospitality, 51–­52 hujuujaq, 37 hunter-­gatherers: egalitarianism, strong sense of, 107; individualism of vs. English individualism, 107–­8 hunting, ix, 5, 18, 28, 46, 95; bad hunting, 53; continuity of, 40; landscape, reading and navigating of, 103–­4; reindeer hunt, 58–­60; relatedness of, 40; seasonality of, 40, 92–­93, 102; and sharing, 6, 104; subsistence hunting, 23 Iceland, viii identity, 6, 49, 71, 89, 105, 109, 134; national identity, 20, 82, 100–­101; public discourse, 82 Igluligmiut communities, 8 ilisiitsoq (witch), 30–­31 iluamik (correct way), 119, 130, 138 immaqa, and uncertainty, 171–­72n2 (chap. 6) individualism, 40, 107–­8, 135 Ingold, Tim, 107–­8 inuillivoq, 46 Inuit, viii, 6, 13, 15–­16, 47, 51, 53–­54, 89, 91–­92, 102, 106, 108, 110, 125, 135, 143, 169n6; anger, absence of, 36–­37; and child-­rearing, 71; and kinship, 9, 11; kinship, and “shared bone,” 8; naming practices, 154; ostracized, temporary condition of, 37; personal autonomy, 107; seal hunting, 170n15; seasonal migrations, 27–­28; and sociality, 45; and suicide, 124; as word, 20; words, importance of, 132. See also Eskimos; Polar Eskimos Iñupiaq, 9–­10, 110 isolation, vii, 18, 36, 39, 40, 42, 47; responsible choices, making of, 37; as socializing process, 37 isumaminik (minding your own business), 136 Japan, 23 kaffemik (formal gathering of people), 2, 12, 24, 38, 85, 119, 140, 155, 159; as institution, 23 Kalaallit (Greenlanders), viii Kalaallit Niuerfiat (KNI), Royal Greenland, export division of, 22–­23. See also Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel (Royal Greenlandic Trade) (KGH) Kaluli, 37–­38 kayaks, 13–­14 Keyes, Ralph, 40, 98 kinship, ix, 6, 8–­9, 13, 35, 89, 92, 119, 135, 160, 169n6; acting as, 9; active kinship, 148; adoptive kin, 10, 149; being without, as potential position, 31; bilateral system of, 6; biological kin, 10; and disputes,

185 149; as figure-­ground reversal, 157, 161; ideal models of, 11; kinship diagrams, 7, 141–­42; and loneliness, 36, 141, 154–­55, 157, 161; and longing, 141; memory-­map, 121; as mutuality of being, 10–­11; names, bestowal of, 11, 146; names, return of, 105; and nicknames, 143, 145–­46; as nonkin, 149–­50; and personhood, 10; and photography, 75–­76, 84, 86, 105, 111, 120–­21; potentiality, as matter of, 148; and reincarnation, 154; as reinvocation, 140–­41, 155, 157–­58, 161; and relatedness, 140–­41, 146, 148, 152, 161; and remembering, 120–­21; and sharing, 104; social kin, 10; as social process, 140; Western personhood, 108 kinship terminology, 6, 10–­11, 13, 135, 140–­41, 143, 145–­46, 152, 160; cessation of, 149; tactical purpose of, 147–­48 kiserliorpoq, 38–­39 kiserliortoq (extreme form of loneliness), 30–­31, 39, 42, 56, 62; as existential potentiality, 45; qivittoq, as representation of, 80 Kleinschmidt, Samuel, 17 Kleivan, Inge, 51 land: as home, 45; and landscape, 94–­95, 106; and loneliness, 46–­47; and remembering, 97; as wilderness, 45 Langkawi, 120 liminality, 48, 52; as permanent state of mind, 49; as temporary, 49 Lindenow, Godske, 14 Lindh, Anna, 2 linking objects, 74, 77; names, overt form of, 75–­76; naming process, and reversing death, 78 Little Ice Age, viii loneliness, ix, 11, 20, 24, 31, 57–­59, 62, 64, 68, 79–­80, 134, 136; as dangerous, 38, 52; definitions of, 36; and drinking, 35; existential loneliness and loneliness anxiety, extinction between, 41–­42; extreme forms of, 48, 56; as feeling, 36; forms of, 36, 38, 43, 46; and homesickness, 83; as human condition, 41–­44, 170n1; human creativity, as essential condition for, 41; as human potential, 4; kin, being without, 31, 36–­37; and kinship, 141, 154–­55, 157, 161; on land, seeking of, 46–­47; and longing, 141; modernity, as product of, 39, 41; and naming, 140, 154; as necessary evil, 42, 47; as potential, 43; as predicament, 36; as profane existence, 45–­46; and qivittoq, 81; as random, 31; and reinvocation, 160; and relatedness, 4, 13, 27, 39, 42, 126, 141, 156–­58, 160–­61; and return, 29, 158; and separation, 12, 54; social control, as form of, 36; as social process, 4, 35; as state of being, 4, 12; and suicide, 70; temporality of, 38; and urbanization, 40–­41 longing, 4, 11, 20, 40–­41, 79, 97, 140, 143, 160; and absence, 12; and homesickness, 82–­84, 98;

186 longing (cont.) and kinship, 141, 154; and loneliness, 141; and relatedness, 110; and return, 153–­54, 158 Lynge, Inge, 70–­7 1 Macfarlane, Alan, 107 Madagascar, 147 Malaya, 120 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 8 Mauss, Marcel, 27, 29, 46–­47, 59, 91–­92, 156; profane, use of, 28, 45; seasonal movements, portrayal of, 94; and solitude, 93 Melanesia, 129–­30, 132, 136 “memoryscape,” 94 Merina, 147 Mijuskovic, Ben L., 41–­45 missionaries, 58, 61, 71, 106–­7, 125 mitaartoq, 50–­52, 63–­64 mitaartut (to be disguised), 48–­52, 62 modernity, 39, 126; and colonialism, 40; and loneliness, 41 Morgan, Lewis H., 6, 8 mourning, 35, 74, 77, 79, 85; as complicated, 76; as pathological, 76; replacement child syndrome, 78 Moustakas, Clark E., 41–­42, 44 naluvoq (person who knows nothing), 128 naming, 20, 76, 111, 148, 152–­53, 155; autonomy of, 110–­11; bestowal of, 6, 11; of children, 142–­44; deceased relatives, returning of, 6; and exploration, 94–­95; as genderless, 145; and identity, 6; of infants, 109–­10, 134; and kinship, 11, 146; and loneliness, 13, 140, 154; loneliness and relatedness, 13; and namesakes, 3, 6, 10, 25, 34–­35, 63, 75, 110, 121, 134, 140–­42, 154; naming process, 78, 106; naming traditions, 6; and nicknames, 143–­ 47; and personhood, 6, 110; and relatedness, 13; relatedness, as guarantee of, 158; and return, 73, 109; and rituals, 119, 147; speech-­acts, 96, 147; utterance taboos, 143–­44 nammineq (self), 107–­8, 111, 116–­18, 133, 154; children, sense of, 134–­36; personal autonomy, 130, 148; personhood, expression of, 137–­38; refamiliarization, process of, 135; and responsibility, 112–­15, 138–­39; social cohesion, maintaining of, 109; as social norm, 137 Netsilik Eskimo, The (Balikci), 173n6 New Delhi, 40 Newfoundland, 170n15 nomadism, 107 Norse, viii, 13, 15 North America, 169n5 Northern Ungava Inuit, 8 Northwest Greenland, 170n14, 171–­72n2 (chap. 6); suicide rate in, 172n2. See also East Greenland; Greenland; West Greenland

index Nunavik, ix Nunavut, viii, ix, 13, 20 Nuttall, Mark, 10, 38, 52, 62, 92, 94–­95, 149 Nuuk (Greenland), viii, 2, 14, 16, 20–­21, 48, 90, 100–­102, 111 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 154 Orientalism, 123 Others, 82, 123 Papua New Guinea, 37, 129, 157 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 170n15 personal autonomy, 107–­9, 111–­12, 130, 136, 148; personal integrity, 114–­15; and relatedness, 135; social responsibility, 135 personhood, 6, 10, 43, 56–­57, 64, 68, 78–­80, 89, 108–­10, 127, 137–­38, 145; intentionality of, 134; and suicide, 124, 130 Petersen, Robert, 57 pikkunarpoq, 103 placehood, 21; and place, 89–­90, 108 place-­names, 97, 106; communal memories, evoking of, 96; and land, 95–­96; as narratives, 96; spatial orientation, assessing of, 95 Polar Eskimos, 91. See also Eskimos; Inuit potentiality, 43, 77, 148; and actuality, 44; concept of, 44; as existential, 45; existing potentiality, 44; generic potentiality, 44; impotentiality, at heart of, 44–­45 Proctor, Robert, 128–­29, 137–­38 profane existence, 28, 45; social dispersal, purpose of, 47 Protestantism, 127 pulaarneq (visiting), 25–­26; as social activity, 23 Qiqiqtamiut communities, 8 qivittoq (someone who has turned away), 38, 43, 47–­49, 56, 69, 82, 94, 119, 144–­45, 158, 171n3, 171n2 (chap. 4); ambiguous existence of, 80; animals, language of, 62–­63; as character type, 64; clothing of, 60; death, as irreversible, 80; death, as kind of, 73; and detachment, 62; devil, pact with, 61; fear of, 64, 68; as hostile, 60; humanity, discontinuity from, 73, 80; and hypersuicide, 80; kiserliortoqness, archetype of, 62, 80; and loneliness, 62, 64, 68, 80–­81; meaning of, 57–­58; names, loss of, 63; as no longer human, 68; no return, 62, 64–­65; pity toward, 62; relatedness, wish for, 62; remembrance, lack of, 80; seasonal pattern, 59; social responsibility, 64–­65; as stranger, 61–­62; and suicide, 71, 73, 79; suicide, as kind of, 72; suicide, synonymous with, 58; threshold, crossing of, 64, 68, 81 racism, x Rasmussen, Knud, 91

index Reformation, 107 reincarnation, ix, 127; and kinship, 154 relatedness, 6, 8, 20, 35, 41, 43, 52, 58, 62, 75, 77–­79, 82, 106, 108–­9, 134; of hunting, 40; and kin­ ship, 140–­41, 146, 148, 152, 161; and loneliness, 4, 12–­13, 27, 39, 42, 126, 141, 156–­58, 160–­61; longing for, 110; and naming, 158; personal autonomy, 135; and proximity, 28–­29; social responsibility, 71; and suicide, 70; temporal aspect of, 28; withdrawal, as necessity, 29 remembering, 97, 134; kin, photographs of, 120–­21; and responsibility, 119 return (uterpoq), 55–­56; and absence, 29; concept of, 4–­6, 10–­11; and loneliness, 29; and sociality, 29; and withdrawal, 29 Rink, Hinrich, 17, 56 rituals, 37, 48–­49, 51, 54, 64, 119, 147, 157 Robbins, Joel, 129 Rubin, Edgar, 157, 160–­61; Rubin’s Vase, 156 Rumsey, Alan, 129 Sahlins, Marshall, 10–­11 Said, Edward, 123 Sassuma Arnaa (Mother of the Sea), 16, 53–­54 Save the Children, 19 Scandinavia, 40 Schieffelin, Edward L., 37 Schneider, D. M., 9 seals, 5, 51, 103–­4, 171n1 (chap. 5); anti-­seal fur campaigns, 22; hunting for, 30, 170n15; seal meat, 100–­101; sealskin, 60, 170n15 Sea Shepherd, 170n15 seasonality, 40, 93, 102; seasonal migrations, 27–­28, 91–­92 Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo, The (Mauss), 27–­28, 47 Sedna (Sea Woman), 51, 53 shamanism, 54–­55, 58 Siberia, 170n12 siku (sea ice), 61; climate change, 47 sila (weather), 116–­18 sociality, 4, 27–­28, 37, 47, 91–­92, 94, 135, 136; forms of, 45; and return, 29; and socialization, 58 social media, x solitude, 27–­28, 43, 46, 56, 68, 92–­93; urban solitude, 40–­41 soul travel, 14 Spier, J. D., 6 spirits, 53–­54, 64, 116–­17, 144–­45, 153; of absent family members, 133–­34 Starobinski, Jean, 98 Steckley, John L., 125 Steensby, Hans Peder, 91 Strathern, Marilyn, 108, 141, 146 suicide, viii, ix, 46, 58, 81, 111–­12, 134, 136, 158, 170n12, 171n2 (chap. 4), 172n3 (chap. 7), 172n4,

187 172–­73n5; and acculturation, 125–­26; agency, as act of, 126; ambiguity about, 124, 138; causality of, 127, 129, 137–­39; death, as suicide form of, 80; and disappointment, 69, 71; as egotistic, 39; ethos of, 124; in indigenous communities, 122; and intent, 132–­33; justification for, 173n6; and loneliness, 70; personal autonomy, 130; and personhood, 124; as public health concern, 19; and qivittoq, 71–­73, 79; and relatedness, 70; and responsibility, 130; reticence toward, 129–­30; risk factors, 124; as social phenomenon, 126; suicide rates, 122–­23, 125–­26, 172n1, 172n2; suicide studies, 19; unease with, 80, 131; as unknowing, 127–­31, 136–­39; words, intentionality of, 132–­33 Suicide (Durkheim), 126 temporality, 38; and homesickness, 98 threshold, 52, 57, 64, 68, 79–­80; as divide, 49; liminality, as site of, 49; liminal space, 48; and qivittoq, 81; and rituals, 48–­49; and shamans, 53 Thule, 13, 91 Thule Culture Inuit, viii, 13–­14 Thule Trading Station, 25 Toornaarsuk (spirit master), 16 tourism, x, 20 Tunit, 13, 14. See also Dorset Culture Turner, Edith, 92 Turner, Victor, 48–­49, 68 United Kingdom, 26; suicide rate in, 172n1. See also England; Great Britain United States, 17, 39, 96, 98, 125, 132, 169n5, 169–­ 70n10; excessive individualism in, 40; suicide rate in, 172n1 urbanization, 39; and loneliness, 41; urban social solitude, 40 Utku, 135–­36 uuaq (Greenlandic cod), 47 Volkan, Vamik D.: linking objects, 74, 76–­78; linking phenomena, 75 Wagner, R., 157 West Greenland, 13, 20, 38, 92, 101, 117, 143, 172n3. See also East Greenland; Greenland; Northwest Greenland Weyer, Edward M., Jr., 173n6 whaling, 15 Winnicott, D. W., 76; transitional objects, 73–­75 witches, 16, 30–­31, 38, 63–­64, 147 Wolfe, Thomas, 41, 170n1 World War II, 17, 111 Yup’ik, 92, 96