̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Inuit

Modern art’s missing chapter

sjr81 — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 01:01:34 +0000

After being awarded £100,000 by the Art Fund to build a collection of work from Australia, South Africa and Canada, the museum officially opened ̽��ֱ��Power of Paper yesterday. ̽��ֱ��exhibition focuses on artworks made in those countries during an epoch of decolonisation.

It exhibits for the first time in the UK some of the earliest prints made by Aboriginal, Inuit and black South African artists – a rich variety of indigenous art from the 1950s onwards as the end of empire informed works reflecting attachments to land and belief, as well as struggles with violence, dislocation and contemporary city life.

"This show is a revelation," said Nicholas Thomas, Director of MAA and the exhibition's curator. "It presents visions of place and history that are rarely given the attention their eloquence and power deserve, even in today's supposedly global and inclusive art world.

“I'm taken aback by the sheer artistic accomplishment of all the works included, but also love the quirkiness of the artists' take on everything from empire, to township life, to climate change. Why should a military helicopter be hoisting an oversized caribou, walrus and polar bear through the air? You need to come to the show to find out."

Modern art was more than just a project of great Europeans. From the late 1950s onward, as the end of empire gathered momentum, artists in native and local communities began to produce work in modern media in both remote community workshops and city studios; wryly expressing everyday life in townships or settlements, and often illuminating both personal and collective concerns in artworks that could be evocative, oblique or polemical.

Responding to the very limited representation of modern indigenous art movements in British collections, in 2011 the Art Fund awarded the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge £100,000 to build a collection of work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa.

For more than two years, working with a network of artists, workshops and specialist curators, Thomas embarked on what he described as a ‘dream shopping trip’, building a unique collection of around 300 works. While some of the artists are internationally famous, only a few of the works have been on display in Europe.

Art on display in Britain for the first time includes the very first prints produced at the famous Rorke’s Drift print workshop, which played a major role in the development of black art during apartheid.

South African artist Frank Ledimo, whose work King Ubu Encounter (2002) is featured in the exhibition, said: “I create work that is based on the urban landscape in which I live. I have been fascinated by the representation of the figure to relay messages of urban squalor, city life, survivors and victims of urbanisation.”

Added Thomas: “ ̽��ֱ��Power of Paper gives voice to great but marginalized artists, whose words caption their own work. ̽��ֱ��exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom.”

̽��ֱ��Power of Paper runs at MAA until December 6, 2015. ̽��ֱ��exhibition will also feature a working press with opportunities to participate in practical workshops as visitors explore the medium of printmaking as a form of expression.

̽��ֱ��artworks of black and indigenous peoples – a missing chapter in the history of modern art – is brought into sharp focus in a ‘revelatory’ exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

̽��ֱ��exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom

Nicholas Thomas

Joseph Pootoogook

Joyfully I Saw Ten Caribou

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

First atlas of Inuit Arctic trails launched

fpjl2 — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:39:48 +0000

For centuries, indigenous peoples in the Arctic navigated the land, sea, and ice, using knowledge of trails that was passed down through the generations.

Now, researchers have mapped these ancient routes using archival and published accounts of encounters with Inuit stretching back through the 19th and 20th centuries, and have released it online for the public as an interactive atlas – bringing together hundreds of years of accrued cultural knowledge for the first time.

̽��ֱ��atlas, found at paninuittrails.org, is constructed from historical records, maps, trails and place names, and allows the first overview of the "pan-Inuit" world that is being fragmented as the annual sea ice diminishes and commercial mining and oil drilling encroaches.

Researchers say the atlas is important not just for cultural preservation but to show the geographical extent and connectedness of Inuit occupancy – illustrating their historic sovereignty and mobility over a resource-rich area with important trade routes that are opening up due to climate change.

"To the untutored eye, these trails may seem arbitrary and indistinguishable from surrounding landscapes. But for Inuit, the subtle features and contours are etched into their narratives and story-telling traditions with extraordinary precision," said Dr Michael Bravo from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��'s Scott Polar Research Institute, who co-directed the research with colleagues Claudio Aporta from Dalhousie ̽��ֱ��, and Fraser Taylor from Carleton ̽��ֱ�� in Canada.

"This atlas is a first step in making visible some of the most important tracks and trails spanning the North American continent from one end to the other."

Over the course of centuries, Arctic peoples established a network of trails – routes across the sea ice in the winter, and across open water in the summer, that stretched for hundreds of kilometres, allowing them to follow the seasonal movements of sea and land mammals on which their lives depended.

̽��ֱ��intricate network of trails also connected Inuit groups with each other. ̽��ֱ��atlas shows that, when brought together, these connections span the continent from Greenland to Alaska. Understanding the trails is essential to appreciating Inuit history and occupancy of the Arctic, say the researchers, for which the new atlas is a vital step.

"Essentially the trails and the atlas reduce the topology of the Arctic, revealing it to be a smaller, richer, and more intimate world," Bravo said. "For all that the 19th century explorers had military equipment and scientific instruments, they lacked the very precise indigenous knowledge about the routes, patterns, and timing of animal movements. That mattered in a place where the margins of survival could be extremely narrow."

̽��ֱ��documents that form the foundation of the new atlas consist of accounts – both published and unpublished – of encounters with Inuit by explorers, scientists, ethnographers and other visitors seeking access to the traditional indigenous knowledge to unlock the geographical secrets of the Arctic.

̽��ֱ��material has been digitised and organised geo-spatially, with trails mapped out over satellite imagery using global positioning systems. It constitutes the first attempt to map the ancient hubs and networks that have long-existed in a part of the world frequently and wrongly depicted as 'empty': as though an unclaimed stretch of vacant space.

This notion of emptiness is one that benefits those governments and corporations whose investments in shipping routes into the northern archipelago conveniently downplay the presence of the people that have lived there for centuries.

̽��ֱ��atlas provides evidence of the use and occupancy patterns of coastal and marine areas that intersect and overlap with significant parts of the Northwest Passage – the focus of recent mineral exploration and potentially a major shipping route. Historical printed sources like those found in the atlas are important for understanding the spatial extent of Inuit sovereignty, say the team, as these records reflect well-established Inuit networks.

In fact, because the maps are the product of encounters between Inuit and outsiders, the new resource also shows patterns of non-Inuit exploration – Western desires and ambitions to map and, at times, possess the Arctic.

"Most of the Inuit trails and place names recorded by explorers and other Arctic visitors are still used by Inuit today. They passed this knowledge on for hundreds of years, indicating intensive and extensive use of land and marine areas across the North American Arctic," said co-director Claudio Aporta.

While much of the Arctic appears 'featureless' to outsiders, it's not – and the Inuit learned how to read the fine-grained details of this landscape. Knowledge of the trails was attained by remembering specific journeys they themselves had taken, or learning in detail instructions in the oral narratives passed on by others.

̽��ֱ��Inuit were able to read the snow, the prevailing wind, the thickness of the ice, and the landscape as a whole. Over hundreds of years, their culture and way of life was, therefore, written into the landscape. ̽��ֱ��region became an intimate part of who they are.

" ̽��ֱ��trails are lived, remembered, and celebrated through the connections that ultimately reflect the Inuit traditions of sharing life while travelling," said Bravo.

" ̽��ֱ��geographical range of the atlas is a testimony to the legacy of the Inuit people, their remarkable collective memory built on practices of detailed observation, and motivated by an enduring sense of curiosity, as well as a set of ethical obligations to the living world they inhabit," he said.

Inset images: Inuit trails and Dr Michael Bravo in the Arctic

New digital resource brings together centuries of cultural knowledge for the first time, showing that networks of trails over snow and sea ice, seemingly unconnected to the untrained eye, in fact span a continent – and that the Inuit have long-occupied one of the most resource-rich and contested areas on the planet.

̽��ֱ��trails are lived, remembered, and celebrated through the connections that ultimately reflect the Inuit traditions of sharing life while travelling

Michael Bravo

Claudio Aporta

Example of an Inuit Arctic trail

Yes

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

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

Engaging with Inuit communities

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dr Barbara Bodenhorn, Newton Trust Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, has an association with the Inupiat (Inuit) communities of the Alaskan Arctic that stretches back almost 30 years. Having lived and worked there, she returns often to learn how the Inupiat engage successfully with their environment – social, political and physical. Her current interests lie in how these communities perceive and adapt to environmental changes as they continue to work towards shaping their own futures.

Exploring these ‘roots of success’ extended to Mexico in 2004. A six-year interdisciplinary project was launched to explore environmental knowledge in forest communities with Dr Laura Barraza, a specialist in environmental education from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, which funded the project. ̽��ֱ��researchers particularly focused on adolescents: their knowledge of the environment, their appreciation of community membership, and their sense of the future.

Since 2006 this project has expanded to include an innovative exchange programme, funded by the US National Science Foundation, between students from the North Slope of Alaska and two forest communities of Mexico. Recently back from taking the Alaskan students to Mexico for a month, Dr Bodenhorn is delighted with the foundational and transformative potential of the interchange: ‘Through hands-on work with scientists and community elders, these young people gain new understanding of global processes, enrich their appreciation of their own local communities, and establish enduring bonds with young people whose worlds are very different from their own.’ As well as providing students with unique learning opportunities, these ‘temporary communities of knowledge’ underpin an anthropological examination of how scientific research is simultaneously understood by scientists, local experts, teachers and students.

Have you ever had a Eureka moment?

Occasionally people make throwaway comments that stop you dead in your tracks (in fact these frequently become titles of my papers!). My first ‘Aha!’ moment happened in 1979 when an Inupiat whaler said that the whale ‘gives itself up to the whaling Captain’s wife’. ̽��ֱ��major stereotype of Eskimos is that they are the most male-dominated of hunter-gatherer groups and, yet, Inupiat whalers regard the whale as giving itself as a gift to the community via the Captain’s wife. With this one comment, everything fell out of place and I realised my assumptions about hunting as well as gender had been wrong. As an anthropologist this is what I look for – what surprises me, what doesn’t fit, what challenges received wisdom.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

That you have to be realistic about what it is you can know based on what you’ve learned. This was advice I was given by an Inupiat woman when I was writing a report and feeling the pressure to generalise. She brought me down to Earth by telling me not to get fussed about discovering the nature of the world, but instead to stay focused on being true to the information I had gathered.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new skill, what would it be?

Recently I’ve thought that perhaps I’d like to be a volcanologist. All the regions I study are profoundly affected by seismic activity and I’m fascinated by volcanoes, in terms of what they can do and how people think about them.

What motivates you to go to work each day?

It’s the thought that I am doing something in which it makes a difference that I’m the one who’s doing it. I don’t mean that to sound megalomaniac but to emphasise that I want my work to require something of who I am. You spend most of your life working, so it’s vital that there’s a real ‘so what?’ element to what you do. It’s important to me that my relationships make a difference to what I’m doing. People in the Arctic communities know me as Barbara, who happens to be an anthropologist, and I think this must help my credibility when I talk to them. My research has always included local collaboration, with a specific goal that there is a local end benefit – whether it’s facilitating environmental education classes taught by local folks, or promoting recognition of local expertise. ̽��ֱ��‘so what?’ of it all is as much about what happens locally as whether I’ll get a publication out of it.

What is your favourite research tool?

Mainly, it’s being able to talk to people. But I think any kind of social science depends on the dedication to use as many tools as possible – combining personal in-depth interviews with listening to people, taking part in what they do, analysing census data and going into the archives to find letters written 100 years ago. What anthropology has to offer is the possibility of working in the same communities for years – as well as having the chance to work in a different part of the world altogether. With any luck, that means your initial impressions and assumptions will get dashed to bits!

At first glance, reasons for researching locations as different as the Arctic and Mexico are not self-evident. But comparison is at the core of Social Anthropology and, for Dr Barbara Bodenhorn, a dual focus on these remarkably different environments is shaping a cross-cultural exchange programme between young members of three indigenous communities.

Through hands-on work with scientists and community elders, these young people gain new understanding of global processes, enrich their appreciation of their own local communities, and establish enduring bonds with young people whose worlds are very different from their own.

Barbara Bodenhorn

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Dr Barbara Bodenhorn

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Yes