̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Stephen Pax Leonard

Living with the Inugguit

ns480 — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:01:13 +0000

A rare glimpse of daily life among the remnants of the last hunter-gatherer communities of the Polar North, where traditional culture is rapidly being eroded by consumerism and climate change, can be seen online from today.

Shot over a year with the Inugguit, who live in north-west Greenland, the footage documents the lives of the last Inuit people still hunting seals and narwhals with harpoons, and records some of the songs and stories of a community whose vulnerable language, Inuktun, has never been written down in full.

Yet it also captures the fragile nature of a traditional way of life which is perhaps reaching its end. Hunting is becoming increasingly dangerous on the disappearing sea ice of north-west Greenland, but there is little alternative employment. Leonard found a world that has had to come face to face with the effects of climate change and the immediate threat it poses to their culture.

̽��ֱ��Inugguit lived as hunter-gatherers in Greenland’s remote Thule region for centuries. Some say that until they were encountered by Sir John Ross in 1818, they believed that they were the only inhabitants of the world. Today, they live in the northernmost permanently inhabited settlement on Earth. But the region’s glaciers are melting fast, the movement of sea mammals upon which they traditionally relied for their livelihoods is becoming less predictable, and the expense of supporting their communities through the provision of supply ships means that there is some pressure from their own Government, 1,000 miles away, for them to move.

̽��ֱ��film captures a sense of their oral culture - stories, myths, songs and folklore which have only ever existed in Inuktun. 770 people speak this impenetrable language of sighs and groans, in which words can be up to 50 letters long. ̽��ֱ��fear is that if the Inugguit leave their homeland in search of better employment prospects in south-west Greenland, both the language and the cultural heritage it preserves will, within a few generations, potentially disappear. Their language is not widely understood in other parts of Greenland.

More than 15 hours of footage have been edited into a short, filmed report, "Living with the Inugguit".

In part, the film documents the area’s linguistic culture. In one sequence, a 67-year-old former hunter performs one of the Inugguit’s traditional drum-songs, or piheq. In another, a young girl demonstrates how raising one’s eyebrows means “yes”, while pinching one’s nose means “no”. At the same time, however, we see the realities of a lifestyle that is still often caricatured in the west. Dog sledge races take place across the sea ice, a starving polar bear is butchered after being shot at 3 ‘o’ clock in the morning outside Leonard’s door, and violent storms relentlessly batter fragile-looking huts in tiny settlements.

̽��ֱ��most remote of these are barely clinging on. Part of the film was shot in Savissivik, on Melville Bay; a cluster of buildings mainly occupied by male hunters, whose wives have, in many cases, long-since left. ̽��ֱ��effects of climate change mean that it is now almost impossible to reach Savissivik by dog-sledge. Its eldest citizen believed the settlement would be closed down within a decade. Another community, Qeqertat, comprises a population of just 22 narwhal-hunters still cheerfully and stubbornly eking out an existence together at the end of a fjord.

Global warming is not the only reason that life is changing, however. ̽��ֱ��main settlement, Qaanaaq, is home to a community struggling with its own sense of identity as the old way of life disappears. Even here, Amazon delivers, and the material culture and produce of the west has become alluring for a generation who feel increasingly directionless. In this very remote corner of the world, there is only one visiting doctor, one policeman, and little by way of career or employment prospects.

Despite the tremendous changes in their society which have taken place in a very short period of time, the bond of family ties is as strong as ever, with some family members visiting one another four or five times a day. Some young people are caught, however, in a dilemna: “They feel a very special bond to the land and their families,” the film narrative says. “On the other hand, staying might mean an uncertain future.”

What shines through in the film are how the people were friendly, welcoming and armed with a tremendous sense of humour. This is despite a traditional suspicion of white Europeans prevailing amongst some - the legacy of years of exploitation by assorted visitors. Children, appear frequently curious to meet the filmmakers and find out about what they are doing there.

̽��ֱ��dogs which the Inugguit keep for hunting purposes and appear several times in his film became a focal point for the sense of cultural distance he felt at times. Dogs are critical to the Inugguit way of life - they can survive in temperatures as low as -50C degrees, smell seals at distant breathing holes, and save hunters’ lives by finding their way home. Yet the Inugguit have no concept of pets and treat them only as tools.

This is a culture formed against the harshest of backdrops. Local storms were so violent that in some cases the force moved items of furniture across the floor of people's huts. Three and a half months of total darkness ensue after the sun goes down on 24 October.

Amazon provided one ray of sunshine - delivering to the heart of this remote community in a testament to how irresistible forces are killing off the old ways in the Polar North.

A film documenting the disappearing oral traditions of the northernmost settled people on Earth offers a glimpse into how their way of life is threatened by climate change.

̽��ֱ��Arctic hunters believe strongly that we in the West have not listened to nature and now we are paying the price. They think it is time to use our knowledge wisely.

Stephen Leonard

Living with the Inugguit

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Yes

Will the English language ever die?

sjr81 — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:30:50 +0000

These cultural conventions are indicative of how a language impacts the worldview of the people who speak it. In Martu, an Aboriginal language from Western Australian, black and all dark colours are maru or maru-maru while in Vietnamese both green and blue are xanh. ̽��ֱ��Saami of northern Scandinavia have hundreds of words for different types of snow like vuož’že (wet snow), ritni (crusted snow) and chiegar (old snow dug up a reindeer).

Language is not just spoken words but also a gateway into a culture. UNESCO estimates that there are over 6,000 languages spoken around the globe today, half of which are under threat and face dying out. Could this ever happen to the English language?

̽��ֱ��threat to the world’s languages and the eventual fate of English are the driving force behind the work of four researchers: Dr Stephen Pax Leonard, Dr Jon Fox, Dr Andrew Dalby, and Nicholas Oster. They will be discussing their research on Saturday 22 October at the Festival of Ideas, the UK’s only arts, humanities and social science festival which runs this year from 19-30 October (www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas)

Dr Leonard, an anthropological linguist at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, has recently returned from living for a year with the Inughuit people on the remote Herbert Island, northwest Greenland. At the Festival of Ideas he will debut a short film about his time in the arctic and his experiences of living in the community.

̽��ֱ��Inughuit are a semi-nomadic people whose knowledge of their land and culture is based on oral tradition, stories and mythologies which have very rarely been written down. But this traditional way of life is being doubly threatened - both globalization and climate change could prove to be the downfall of this unique society.

Sitting around a TV watching Danish-language shows has replaced listening to the stories of their ancestors. ̽��ֱ��drum-song, or piheq, and story-telling were partially entertainment during the sunless winters and nightless summers but perhaps more importantly says Dr Leonard, “a pool of indigenous knowledge regarding ice systems, weather systems, place names and the habits and movements of the sea mammals on which they depend.”

̽��ֱ��Inughuit world is one of extremes - during the winter three and a half months pass without the sun rising over the horizon as they live only 800 miles from the North Pole. Now it is changing. ̽��ֱ��hunting season is now halved as the ice, which used to form in September, is only thick enough between December and March.

̽��ֱ��effects due to climate change, unsurprisingly, are having a detrimental effect on the traditional way of life of the Inughuit. “Now, nobody knows when the sea ice will come or how long it will stay for,” says Dr Leonard. “ ̽��ֱ��glaciers are melting at a faster rate than anybody ever expected and the movement of the animals has become less and less predictable. ̽��ֱ��Arctic hunters believe that we have not listened to nature and now we are paying the price. They think it is time to use our knowledge wisely.”

It is becoming harder for the Inughuit to survive traditionally based on their hunting prowess. New legislation also makes it more expensive to hunt marine mammals and many Inuguit are resorted to buying expensive, imported food.

̽��ֱ��Inuguit are not the only Arctic occupiers who are struggling in this new, warmer climate. A polar bear entered the town one night in search of food and was shot and killed in front of Dr Leonard’s cabin. It had no blubber - it was starving due to the effects of climate change on its normal hunting and migratory habits.

But many Inuguit do not believe the transformation is a result of human impact - and this too is endangering their language, culture, and perhaps even their lives. Dr Leonard explains that “they believe that the weather changes in cycles. That is what their ancestors told them. If the sea ice disappears, only to return 50 years later, that crucial unrecorded knowledge bound up in the stories will have been lost forever and to the detriment of future hunters.”

Only 770 speakers of Inuktun, or Polar Eskimo, remain although this number grows ever smaller. There are less than ten people left who are able to sing the traditional drum song of their ancestors.

While Inuktun provides over 20 ways of referring to ice and 18 different types of wind young people, according to Dr Leonard, are unable to remember more than a few. ̽��ֱ��youths are finding the traditional hunting life too difficult and leave the community in search of employment. In order to do so they must learn to speak Standard (Greenlandic) and run the risk of isolating themselves, no longer being seen as real Polar Eskimos by those who follow the traditional way of life.

̽��ֱ��threat to language is not isolated to the Northwest Greenland. With about one language disappearing every two weeks, Dr Dalby, author of Language in Danger and honorary fellow and the Institute of Linguistics, predicts that that the 3,000 languages currently in danger will no longer be spoken by the 22^nd century.

Europe alone has 50 threatened and severely endangered languages. In the United Kingdom ten languages are considered endangered: Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Manx, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Guernsey French and Jersey French. ̽��ֱ��eleventh, Alderney French, has become extinct.

However it is possible, with concerted and deliberate effort, for languages to “be raised from the dead.” Cornish became linguistically extinct in the 18^th century until a campaign to revive it two hundred years later. Now there are over 2,000 fluent speakers.

Eastern Europe also has a list of languages and cultures which are in danger of becoming immersed into a larger, Euro-centric identity. Hungary has five threatened languages while Romania has eleven. Yet again these languages can form an integral part of the identity of their speakers, especially for nationalists.

Yet do everyday speakers of language find their identity bound up in the words which they use? Dr Fox will explore the different usages of language, from those for whom it is simply a method of communication to those who see language as a unifier - identifying, embodying, and constituting the nation.

Dr Fox explains, “Nationalists are the self-appointed guardians of national languages: they do everything in their power to prevent the demise of or changes to their languages. But ordinary people are somewhat more sanguine about changes to their national languages. For them, national identity can simply evolve with language. Whilst the demise of a national language sounds the death knoll of the nation for nationalists, ordinary people are better at rolling with linguistic changes.”

English is the language of globalization that has, in many ways, become an enemy to other languages. Will it ever need to be resuscitated from death’s door? Oster, author of ̽��ֱ��Last Language Franca, doesn’t think so. He also believes though that the current dominance of English in the world is nearing its end. Globalization might have helped the supremacy of English to continue long after the fall of the British Empire but economic and technological development, trade and migration will change the ways which people access and use language.

Yet neither does Ostler believe that another language, Chinese for example, will become the new global leader. He reckons that by 2050, a mere generation, the reign of any single global lingua franca - a language used between people who do not share a common mother tongue- will have met its demise. We are apparently heading towards a diverse, multilingual future in which technology will allow people to communicate efficiently and effectively without resorting to learning a completely new language.

This in some ways may actually be good for English - lingua franca languages often lose their cultural worth as people no longer value the language for its own sake, but rather for what can be attained by using it. Perhaps by recognizing that languages are more than words we can appreciate the necessity to save both the threatened ones, but also remember the heritage of our own language.

Why do languages die will take place on Saturday October 22 at the Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site, 2-3pm as part of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Festival of Ideas. Pre-booking is encouraged. Suitable for ages 14+. www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas

Imagine a world in which there is no difference between blue and black or green and blue. A world where there are hundreds of different types of snow.

̽��ֱ��Arctic hunters believe that we have not listened to nature and now we are paying the price. They think it is time to use our knowledge wisely.

Stephen Pax Leonard

Greenland

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Yes

Death by monoculture

bjb42 — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:00:26 +0000

̽��ֱ��21^st century is the make-or-break century for cultural and linguistic diversity, and for the future of human civilisation per se. An unprecedented and unchecked growth in the world’s population, combined with the insistence on exploiting finite resources, will lead to environmental and humanitarian catastrophes as mass urbanisation meets fundamental problems such as the lack of drinking water. ̽��ֱ��actions that we collectively take over the next fifty years will determine how and if we can overcome such global challenges, and what the shape of the ‘ethnosphere’ or ‘sum of the world’s cultures’ is to look like in years to come.

After having spent a year in a remote Arctic community which speaks a vulnerable, minority language and whose cultural foundations are being rocked by climate change, it is clear to me that the link between environmental and cultural vulnerability is genuine and that the two are interwoven. Cultural practices of the Polar Eskimos are based on a history of survival strategies in one of the world’s most hostile environments. Their language and ‘way of speaking’ is a representation of that. When the sea ice disappears, their stories will eventually go with it.

We, human beings, rent the world for a period of approximately 80 years. It is our duty to future tenants to leave the house as we found it. ̽��ֱ��conservation issue goes beyond everything else and should therefore be at the heart of every policy decision. To do otherwise, would be to live in the 20^th century. At present, linguists predict that over 50 per cent of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken by the turn of the century. Instead of leaving the house in order, we are on the road to the fastest rate of linguistic and cultural destruction in history. Languages die for many reasons, but the current trend is driven by the juggernaut of the homogenising forces of globalisation and consumerism which seems unstoppable and whose language tends to be the new universal tongue, English.

I am a romantic and romantics are nowadays always disillusioned because the world is no longer how they had hoped it to be. I had gone to the top of the world and had wished to find elderly folk sitting around telling stories. Instead, I found adults and children glued to television screens with a bowl of seal soup on their lap, playing exceedingly violent and expletive crammed Hollywoodian video war games. Time and time again, I discovered this awkward juxtaposition of modernity meets tradition. Out in the Arctic wilderness, hunters dressed head to toe in skins would answer satellite phones and check their GPS co-ordinates.

Consumerism has now made it to every corner of the world. Some Polar Eskimos may live in tiny, wind-beaten wooden cabins with no running water, but Amazon delivers. Most 8 year-olds who live in Qaanaaq and the remote settlements have the latest smartphones. Media entertainment will, however, never be produced for a language of 770 speakers because it is loss-making. Technology, be it mobile phones, DVDs or video games may support the top 50 languages maximum, but never more than that. Some languages are not suited to these technologies: Greenlandic words are too long to subtitle and to use in text messaging. Polar Eskimos tend to send text messages in Danish or English because it is easier.

As the world embraces the synthetic monoculture of populism and consumerism, linguistic and cultural diversity risk being erased right across the world. For consumerism to operate efficiently, it requires as few operating languages as possible. That way, the message is consistent and the producer’s cost is minimised. This globalised consumerism is the product of a system which is based on an addiction to economic growth. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, and yet it is difficult to hear US presidential candidates or EU officials talk about anything else. Some politicians speak oxymoronically of ‘sustainable growth’ but the combination of a rocketing world population and finite resources is the recipe of ‘unsustainability’ par excellence. Growth has become an abstract imperative that is driving humanity to destroy the ecosystem upon which life depends. If we can shake off the growth habit and focus on the ‘local’ and sustainability for its own sake, minority languages will have a chance to prosper providing they engage with new digital media technologies. ̽��ֱ��Internet represents surely the best opportunity to help support small or endangered languages and yet 95 per cent of Internet content appears in just 12 languages. ̽��ֱ��Internet offers also a chance to move away from television which is largely responsible for the spread of a phoney, idiotic form of entertainment culture where production costs are too high to support minority languages.

I have never met anybody who is indifferent to the elimination of biodiversity or the protection of endangered animal species, but linguists and anthropologists are still being asked to defend linguistic and cultural diversity. In doing so, it should be remembered that a language is so much more than a syntactic code or a list of grammar rules. To treat language as such is to reduce it to its least interesting features. When languages die, we do not just lose words, but we lose different ways of conceptually framing things. For the Polar Eskimos, there is no one concept of ‘ice’, but over twenty different ways of referring to various forms of ice. Through different distinctions in meaning, languages provide insights onto how groups of speakers ‘know the world’.

A language is a collection of statements about the world delivered in a multitude of voices set to a background of music. There is a difference between being able to speak a language fluently and to speak a language like a native. ̽��ֱ��latter requires first and foremost a mastery of the language’s paralinguistic features – in the case of Polar Eskimo, a rich and never random repertoire of sighs and groans and a specific mix of intonation patterns and gestures accompanying particular words and phrases. To be able to speak a handful of languages as a native, you have to be able to act and act well, reproducing exactly certain collocations of words to the rhythm, gestures, flow and timbre of its speakers. This is always more important than just having a large vocabulary or putting the verb in the right place. Each language of the world requires a different voice. When we lose a language, we lose an orchestra of voices that permeate the mind. As well as knowledge and perceptions of the world which are built into local language varieties, we lose the music and poetry of words and speech which elicit so much pleasure. There should be no need to defend linguistic diversity. It and the power of language is something to be celebrated. Without it, the world would be utterly dull. After all, who wants to listen to just Beethoven, when you can enjoy Rachmaninov and Shostakovich too? Not that there is any chance of the Polar Eskimos listening to Beethhoven, they are too busy indulging in virtual reality Playstation war games whose only poetic content is ‘fucking pacify him’.

Stephen Pax Leonard is a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is primarily interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

Having just returned from a year spent documenting the language and culture of the remote Inughuit community of north-western Greenland, Dr Stephen Leonard describes how he witnessed first-hand the manner in which globalisation and consumerism are conspiring to destroy centuries-old cultures and traditions.

We, human beings, rent the world for a period of approximately 80 years. It is our duty to future tenants to leave the house as we found it.

Stephen Pax Leonard

Stephen Leonard.

Stephen Leonard in Greenland.

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Yes