Hot Bodies in Cold Zones: Arctic Exploration
In her ethnographic account of Himalayan mountaineering, Ortner
points out that mountaineering involves a "long-term encounter between
two groups, two sets of people—one with more money and power than the
other—coming together from different histories and for different
reasons to accomplish a single task" (1999: 17). The encounter, she
argues, involves "a group of men (later also women) pushing their bodies
and each other up some of the highest mountains on earth", collectively
engaging in a "serious game" of life and death (Ortner 1999: 23). I
suggest there are interesting parallels with early arctic exploration.
Arctic exploration was also a deadly serious game where people often
risked their lives in a collaborative adventure, pushing their bodies
and each other to high latitudes under the mixed banners of honor,
survival, and empire. In the Arctic, the risks sometimes involved the
complications of pleasure, Inuit "seamstresses" and Euro-American males
engaging each other in intimate relations, establishing families and
raising children in the compartmentalized context of emerging empires.
A growing body of literature emphasizes the importance of showing how
the management of intimacy in European colonies was part of imperial
politics. Such a project for the Arctic has hardly been begun. If
sentiments, as Stoler argues (2002), are the "real stuff" of official
archives, biographies deserve careful attention, illuminating contexts
and regimes through private lives, at the intersection of self and
history; indeed, the social sciences and the humanities, including
anthropology, have recently seen such a turn to biographical methods.
Here I apply Stoler's perspective in the context of the Canadian Arctic,
focusing on the life and work of the Canadian-Icelandic
anthropologist-explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962). One source of
evidence in this vein, I suggest, drawing on a recent article by Vanast
(2007), is an early and neglected work by Stefansson focusing on the age
of sexual maturity among Inuit (1920). Published in a medical journal,
Stefansson's article has the appearance of a detached, scientific
account. However, there seems to be a personal twist relating to his own
involvement with the Inuit.
Stefansson was trained in anthropology and theology at Harvard
University and the University of Iowa. Between 1906 and 1918 he went on
three expeditions into the Canadian Arctic, each of which lasted between
sixteen months and five years (see Pálsson 2001, 2005). Stefansson's
name may not ring any bells for many modern readers. However, he was an
ambitious and truly successful explorer in many respects. He quickly
became a public figure in North America and Europe, well-known for his
description of the "Blond Eskimo" of Victoria Island, his discovery of
new lands in the Arctic, his approach to travel and exploration, and his
theories of health and diet. For decades, he was an influential speaker
on the lecture circuit both in North America and Europe and a respected
commentator on geopolitics and the north, indeed anything arctic and
Inuit.
Stefansson only sought for and accepted an academic position late in
his life (at Dartmouth College to which he donated his vast library of
arctic works). His publications, however, were extensive. His key
ethnographic work My Life with the Eskimo (1914), one of the
early, detailed, and perceptive descriptions of Inuit ways of life, is
still frequently cited in anthropological works on a variety of Inuit
issues. Overall, he is probably better known for his later work The
Friendly Arctic (1921), based on his dramatic and fateful last major
expedition during which several lives were lost. Here the writer plays
the role of the surveyor, explorer, and orgnanizer rather than that of
the acute cultural observer. The catchy title and the controversial
thesis of the work helped to establish Stefansson's name internationally
as well as in North America. Quite simply, Stefansson reasoned that
Western (or Southern) explorers could only succede in the arctic context
to the extent to which they learned to adapt to the local resources and
seasonal fluctuations, living as the Inuit—going native, at least up
to a point. While Stefansson's work on the "friendly" Arctic was
rhetorical and contradicted his own practice in important respects, he
had a good argument and his influence on arctic travel and discourse was
substantial.
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