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Issue 7.1: Fall 2008
Gender on Ice


Hot Bodies in Cold Zones: Arctic Exploration
Gísli Pálsson

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.

Herschel Island

The early zoning of the earth into regions or culture-areas underlined Western ideas about borders, cultural differences, and the exotic. The "Arctic", however, neither had clear boundaries nor a firm definition. For some, it represented anything beyond latitude 66°33' north, for others it began with the tree line, and for still others it was identified by average temperature. For most Western whalers, early explorers, and anthropologists, the Arctic was a radical other. This was underlined by frequent references in Western discourse on the Arctic to "going in" and "coming out", indicating that civilization ended where the Arctic began. Despite their othering of the people of the Arctic, European travelers often formed intimate relations with their indigenous collaborators, relations without which they would not have survived. The loosely defined Arctic Circle continues to be deeply enmeshed in the geopolitics of northern states and international bodies focusing on development, resources, and climate.

One of the key sites in the exploration and colonization of the Canadian Arctic was Herschel Island, located a few miles from the arctic coast close to the Mackenzie Delta (see Map 1). The number of guests who wintered there, mostly in relation to whaling, peaked soon after 1890, with approximately 1500 people. The Inuit living on or near the island provided European whalers with food and clothing in return for southern goods, including tea and sugar. Many accounts of local life dwell on stories of drinking and fighting. The main reasons for the expansion of the settlement at Herschel Island had to do with changes in fashion and morals in Europe. Among women of the aristocratic classes, wide and flexible dresses had increasingly been replaced by more firm and restricting clothes. Sometimes they were carefully tightened around the waist to underline the Victorian forces applied to women's minds and bodies. Corsets, especially when strengthened by whalebone, baleen, were seen to be useful for this purpose. The French elite spoke of "Corps Baleine". The growing market for corsets invigorated the whaling industry at Herschel Island. The price of whalebone increased and the operation of whaling boats became a lucrative business, even under the difficult conditions of the Arctic. Ironically, Victorian ideas about the clothing and constitution of women's bodies were the driving force behind the development of the whaling community on Herschel Island, a community that apparently posed a fundamental contradiction to the virtues that the corset symbolized in Europe.

Map 1: Stefansson's field
Map 1 Stefansson's field. (Drawn by Lovísa Ásbjörnsdóttir).

Over the years the whalers on Herschel Island—a mixed group of Whites, Afro-Americans, Siberians, Inupiat, and Cape Verdeans ("Portuguees")—established a colorful, multicultural colony on Herschel Island. Hundreds of whalers arrived from the south, with their goods, languages, desires, beliefs, and diseases (notably measles, tuberculosis, and syphilis). There was racial tension between southerners as well as between guests and natives. In 1884, a few wives of whaling masters wintered on Herschel Island, along with their children. While this had a noticeable impact on social life, normally the whalers arrived without their families. Inuit males often worked as hunters or mates and Inuit women as seamstresses, either "on deck" or "below deck", as "seasonal wives". Suddenly, when the whaling stocks had nearly collapsed and hunting was no longer economical, they were all gone. In the process, however, Canada had expanded its empire. And for the Inuit life would never be the same. For almost twenty years, roughly from 1890 to 1908, Herschel Island was a frontier boom-town, known as "The Sodom of the Arctic". Many of the European explorers and travelers who passed through here and elsewhere in the Arctic had native wives or concubines, including Peter Freuchen, Knud Rasmussen, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

One of the characteristics of the colonial era in the early stages was the relative absence of women in the colonies. This invited complex problems both at home and abroad. What rules should be applied to the intimate and the "private"? Often, the dark sides of colonialism—the tension between races, the problems of orphanage, and illegitimacy—were barely noticed. The mixed-blood children of colonial servants and native women posed a particular classification problem, a problem that usually was simply ignored. Stoler describes the silencing of emotions and passions and their consequences as "stubborn colonial aphasia" (2002: 14). Nevertheless, these were important issues in the biographies and histories of the colonial world. In some of the colonies, including the Dutch ones, European children were strictly forbidden to play with the children of servants of another race. Their moral strength, it was assumed, would be eroded if they began to babble in the native language. In the long run, this would lead to racial mixture that, in turn, would lead to the degeneration of the white race. Stoler's work seeks to outline the "microphysics of colonial rule" (p. 7) through a colonial reading of Foucault, exploring "what cultural distinctions went into the making of class in the colonies, what class distinctions went into the making of race, and how the management of sex shaped the making of both" (p. 16).

Much of what Stoler has to say about empires, gender, race, and intimacy applies to the society of Herschel Island at the beginning of the last century. In particular, European women were rarely part of the teams of whalers and explorers. The likelihood of women visiting the Arctic in the early stage of colonizing was minimal, much less than in the case of the Tropics. The fiancées, wives, and children of European travelers invariably stayed behind, usually on the grounds that the environment and the tasks ahead were too tough for them. Native seamstresses on the other hand had an important role to play in exploration parties. Beside sewing warm clothes, preparing food, and taking care of camps, they provided company and sexual pleasures. Often guests and natives formed intimate relations and occasionally the guests married and decided to stay for good.

"The Top Notch of Manhood"

Euro-American colonialism in the north was for a long time limited by the tree line (Van Kirk 1980, White 1991). Few southerners could imagine settling in Inuit territories because of the cold and, moreover, hunting, whaling and mining were seen to be uneconomical, given the level of technology and means of transport. Beyond the tree line, as a result, treaties were seen to be irrelevant. Canada, for instance, had little interest in the Inuit until 1953 when it was pressured into forming an Eskimo Branch in the Department of Indian Affairs and Natural Resources. Nevertheless, some of the implications of an emerging empire were felt much earlier in the Arctic, through the presence of whalers, missionaries, anthropologists, and explorers. The western Arctic came into contact with American whalers almost exclusively out of San Francisco. The whalers followed the bowhead whale from Alaska to its spring feeding ground on the Mackenzie Delta.

In the course of Euro-American exploration of the Arctic, the lives of Inuit women were radically altered. The impact of Robert E. Peary's expeditions (1890-1902) on the Inughuit women of Ellesmere Island and Northern Greenland ("Polar Eskimo") is one illustration. Not only was there a shift in production from a family-oriented focus to the production of food and clothes for the expedition team, some members of Peary's team became involved in sexual relations with local women. These relations were complicated by differences in power and sometimes they disrupted existing spousal relations of Inughuit men and women. Peary, as Dick points out (2001: 381), had an instrumentalist view of the sexual role of indigenous women, dispensing with them to his employees as if they were his personal property. Peary's vision of the exploration party was metaphorically rendered in terms of the male body, "the physical structure of a tough, hardy man":

[O]ne intelligent white man would represent the head, two other white men selected solely for their courage, determination, physical strength, and devotion to the leader would represent the arms, and the driver and the natives the body and legs (cited in Dick 2001: 382).

Significantly, the exploration "body" had no room for women. For Peary, however, the presence of women was essential, "an absolute necessity to render the men contented". "Feminine companionship", he went on, "not only causes greater contentment but as a matter of both physical and mental health and the retention of the top notch of manhood it is a necessity" (see Dick 2001: 382).

Many arctic travelers had children with indigenous women and usually the existences of their Inuit families were carefully guarded secrets outside the Arctic, in the world of whites. The shame and guilt this engendered often weighed like nightmares on the brain of their descendants and their families outside the Arctic. Sometimes, however, there was no secrecy. One of the images in Peary's book Northward over the "Great Ice"—"a conventional pinup image . . . in which an odalisque pose is used to indicate sexual availability" (Bloom 1993: 104)—shows a young Inughuit girl, Allakasingwah, Peary's mistress and mother of his son Karree. In 1998, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on "explornography", focusing on wealthy, successful people risking their lives on adventurous expeditions (see Ortner 1999: 282). Peary's writings, perhaps more than anything else, justify such a label.

Stefansson: The Inuit Connection

Stefansson's first expedition (1906-1907) was brief. He was determined, however, to return to the Arctic for a second expedition (1908-1912). In the Arctic, guests from the south usually placed themselves higher up on the social ladder than the Inuit, and Stefansson was no exception. About three months after he left "civilization" for his second expedition, Stefansson encountered and hired Fanny Pannigabluk who traveled with him for most of the expedition. Their son Alex Stefansson was born in the middle of the expedition, on 10 March 1910. During Stefansson's third expedition (1913-1918) with the fatal sinking of his ship The Karluk, he somewhat unexpectedly renewed his relationship with his wife and child; Pannigabluk became again a member of the Stefansson party. Stefansson had not seen his son for a couple of years or so. Now he taught him to read and write and Alex quickly became bilingual.

Apparently it was during this expedition that the first photographs were taken of Stefansson's Inuit family. The oldest picture of Pannigabluk and Alex that has been preserved is from 1913, around the time when Stefansson renewed his relationship with his family. Pannigabluk looks rather shy, avoiding the gaze of the photographer, G.H. Wilkins (see Photo 2), perhaps observing Inuit manners requiring that a woman look down, not directly at another adult, especially a man.

Stefansson at Herschel Island
Photo 1 Stefansson at Herschel Island, 1906. (Dartmouth College Library).

Pannigabluk, the 'common-law wife' 
of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and their son Alex Stefansson
Photo 2 Pannigabluk, the "common-law wife" of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and their son Alex Stefansson, 1913. (Public Works and Government Services Canada and Geological Survey of Canada).

Judging from Stefansson's field diaries Pannigabluk had a much more important role than Stefansson's publications indicate. Her name appears quite often in Stefansson's diaries. Pannigabluk was not just a seamstress who made fine clothes from animal skins, she would also act as interpreter and narrator. In effect, she was Stefansson's closest ethnographic collaborator—his "key informant". Like most of his contemporaries, Stefansson was unable to acknowledge the intellectual role of his indigenous collaborators, in particular women. While Stefansson praises the qualities and contributions of some of his indigenous male collaborators, including Roxy Memogana and Natkusiak (Billy Banksland), he rarely mentions his female sources.

Stefansson seems to have prepared his son for a trip to Seattle or Vancouver at the end of the last expedition and then to the east coast of the United States, where Alex would presumably adapt to the world of whites. If this was the case, Pannigabluk who was almost fifty at this point and with two relationships behind her must have refused to let her son go. After all, he was her only security in old age. Stefansson wrote in his diary during the third expedition (22 Desember 1916) that several years before he met Pannigabluk she had twins, both boys, with her late husband Alahuk. One of the boys was left to die on the ice, according to the demands of the husband and "all the others", probably for fear of famine. The other died at the age of ten. Perhaps this helps to explain why Pannigabluk would not accept losing Alex.

Whatever Stefansson thought of Pannigabluk, their Inuit companions regarded them as husband and wife. Their conjugal relationship is underlined in church records from Herschel Island marked as "Eskimos: Baptisms, marriages, and funerals". On 15 August 1915, in the middle of Stefansson's third expedition, Reverend Whittaker baptized Pannigabluk, "Stefansson's wife", and "their five-year-old son (Alex) Alik Alahuk". Stefansson never returned to his Inuit family, but some evidence indicates that he paid their bills at the Hudson Bay store in Aklavik long after he left. Significantly, perhaps, Stefansson did not marry until Pannigabluk had died, the same year in fact, more than two decades after he left the field.

Coming Out

While Stefansson seems to have had a close relationship to his Inuit wife and son when in the field, once he was "out" he never publicly acknowledged his Inuit family. His denial, no doubt, is one example of a fairly common imperial response. At the time, white guests simply did not acknowledge intimate realtions with indigenous people if they had serious ambitions outside the colony. Not only did Stefansson's Inuit connection defy prevailing attitudes toward "race mixing", his prior engagement to a woman he met while in Boston, Orpha Cecil Smith, a Canadian student of drama (see Pálsson 2005), made things rather complicated. Stefansson, it seems, was anxious not to tell Smith about his Inuit son. Her father was religious and middle-class, a salesman of Canadian Mennonite background, and disapproving of his daughter's relationship to Stefansson, a man who seemed destined for pointless and risky adventures among savages in the Arctic. Smith and Stefansson were engaged at the time Alex Stefansson was born. Inevitably, the long separation was taxing for their relationship. In Smith's memory, Stefansson disappeared out of sight when he left for the Arctic although they were to meet again. They exchanged intimate letters throughout the three expeditions, to the extent this was possible due to the logistics of the expeditions and the sporadic nature of the postal service at the time.

We do not know what Stefansson thought of his relationship with Pannigabluk and Alex as he doesn't mention either a partner or a child in any of his writings. Some of his diary entries, however, indicate a rupture in his relationship to Pannigabluk (see Pálsson 2005: 88). On December 27 in 1911 he writes that Pannigabluk is leaving "permanently" (see Photo 3). He appears to have added something more to this, but later crossed it out carefully. Was it out of frustration? Could it be that Pannigabluk was leaving Stefansson for another man? Late in his career, Stefansson married a young woman in New York. His widow Evelyn (now Stefansson Nef) has sometimes attributed his silence on Alex Stefansson to the possibility that Pannigabluk may have been involved in sexual relations with another member of Stefansson's expedition (Andersen). While such a claim may have relieved Stefansson and his widow of any responsibility with respect to his son and his six grandchildren, it seems unconvincing (see Pálsson 2005); many Inuit, including his grandchildren, suggest it was just an excuse. A recent article by Vanast (2007) turns the gaze onto Stefansson himself.

Stefansson's diary entry about Pannigabluk's departure
Photo 3 Stefansson's diary entry about Pannigabluk's departure. (Dartmouth College Library).

Vanast suggests that Pannigabluk may have left the camp in an angry mood, jealous because of Stefansson's sexual liaisons with other women; while the evidence may be indirect, he argues, "comments by whites (when combined with dates on which one finds Stefansson in the company of certain wives) make for strong suspicion" (2007: 93). Prior to Pannigabluk's departure, Vanast speculates, Stefansson had been involved with a woman named Mamayauk and her twelve-year-old daughter Nogasak. Stefansson had last seen Pannigabluk in March 1911 when he left for the Copper Inuit and when he returned in June "she was not there, but he did find Ilavinirk, his wife Mamayauk, their young daughter Nogasak, and another male. In July the men left for Baillie Island. ... Stefansson was alone with Maayauk and Nogasak until, a fortnight later, Pannigabluk appeared . . .. That winter . . . Stefansson spent much time with Mamayauk (whose husband had returned) and little with Pannigabluk, who left the camp for good . . ." (Vanast 2007: 108, n. 13).

It seems that Stefansson sometimes arranged to have access to women other than Pannigabluk. Not only did he admit that he hired males who contributed little because he needed their wives as seamstresses, at one point he would spend time "drawing from his employees the names of the prettiest women in the Delta region" (Vanast 2007: 93). Whites claimed that he "chose men whose partners were renowned for their beauty, even 'crazy' men" (Vanast 2007: 93). One of the women in Stefansson's entourage in 1915-1917 was a woman in her twenties, the wife of Walter Pikaluk who worked for Stefansson when 40-42 years old. Vanast continues in a footnote: "In mission records her name appeared as Bessie Poochimuk, Puchimuk, or Puchimirk . . .. It may be entirely unfair to Stefansson to note that he referred to her in his diary . . . as Pussimirk" (2007: 109, n. 14). There is a long tradition of Stefansson-bashing in Canadian academic circles. It may be tempting to see Vanast's commentary as just one more example in this genre, echoing earlier debates about Stefansson's flamboyant style, waste of public money, lack of judgment, and irresponsible behavior. Although the evidence discussed by Vanast is anecdotal and circumstantial and he may overstate his case, he nevertheless seems to have a point. It is quite likely that Stefansson's silence about his Inuit wife and son had something to do with his complex involvements with other women in and out of the field.

"Accelerated Metabolism"

An early article by Stefansson—"Temperature Factor in Determining the Age of Maturity Among the Eskimos" (1920), a "bizarre" article, in Vanast's view (2007: 109, N.13)—may provide important clues about his troubled relation to intimacy. While Stefansson's article has the appearance of a scientific discussion of the factors affecting maturity and the problems of evidence, there may be a personal undertone relating to his own involvement with the Inuit. It is worth citing Stefansson at some length.

For one thing, Stefansson observes that "it is seldom possible to get a reliable estimate of how old a person is unless his birth can be checked up by comparison with some known visit of an explorer or whaling vessel or some event of that sort" (1920: 669). The Inuit themselves, he suggests, do not take any interest in their own age and, as a result, the only reliable records are those assembled by missionaries. He adds, though, that he himself has "had a chance to observe a considerable number of Eskimos through a period of ten years, and in many cases . . . it has been possible to check up the age correctly . . ." (1920: 669).

Having outlined the problems of ascertaining age, Stefansson goes on to explore women's reproduction: it is "not rare among Eskimo women that they have their first child at the age of 12; and children born before the mothers were 11 have been recorded in places where the age of the mother can be in no doubt, because of the fact that her birth had been recorded by a resident missionary" (1920: 669). To Stefansson this is surprising given current assumptions about the correlation between environmental conditions and maturity: "If it be supposed that early maturity in such a country as Sicily is due to the direct effect of heat upon the body, in some such way as when heat brings early maturity to flies cultivated under experimental conditions, then we see that on this theory the Eskimo has every reason to mature about as early as the Sicilian" (1920: 669-670). Why, then, would Inuit girls growing up in the cold and barren arctic mature at the speed of Italian women and experimental flies exposed to extreme heat?

The answer to the apparent puzzle is relatively simple. On the one hand, Inuit clothing provides solid insulation, much like, perhaps, the outfits of astronauts traveling in outer space: "When an Eskimo is well dressed, his two layers of fur clothing imprison the body heat so effectively that the air in actual contact with his skin is always at the temperature of a tropical summer" (1920: 669). On the other hand, Inuit dwellings provide conditions comparable to southern contexts: ". . . to all intents and purposes the typical Eskimo in the country known to me lives under tropical or subtropical conditions. During the winter of 1906-1907 I recorded the estimate that the average temperature within doors of the Eskimo house in which I lived at the mouth of the Mackenzie River was a good deal above 80 F., and frequently rose to 90 F." (Stefansson 1920: 669). Sometimes, Stefansson goes on, Inuit dwellings are too hot for clothing: "When an Eskimo comes into such a house as the one in which I lived in 1906-1907, he strips off all clothing immediately on entering, except his knee breeches, and sits naked from the waist up and from knee down" (1920: 670). Stefansson suggests there is a gender difference in terms of maturity: "The effect of the overheated houses is more direct among the Eskimos on the women than on the men, for they remain indoors a larger part of the winter" (1920: 670).

Stefansson thus concludes that Inuit contexts produce "locally within doors the same conditions that may be supposed to accelerate the metabolism of a dweller under the tropical sun" (1920: 670). Drawing, again, upon the parallel of laboratory experiments, he continues: "When flies are being experimented on in an incubator, the same results would presumably be arrived at in Africa and Norway if the temperature within both incubators is kept between 80 and 90 F. . . . Why may not the same apply to human beings, the incubators in the case of the flies being replaced by the houses and cold-proof clothes in the case of the Eskimo?" (1920: 670). In sum, Stefansson's subtext seems to be that, given the conditions of the "friendly Arctic" he liked to talk about (1921), Inuit girls were by nature sexually available from an early age, much earlier than normally proclaimed in the contemporary West. Assuming that Vanast's reading of the circumstantial evidence he amasses to underline Stefansson's intimate involvement with the young Nogasak is a valid one, Stefansson's developmental speculations, while "scientific" in tone, may have helped to suppress his own guilt.

Conclusions

In Foucault's classic discussion of the "care of the self", sexuality is a "dense transfer point of power" (1988: 103). Foucault, however, has been criticized for taking a much too narrow, Occidental view of sexual politics, ignoring larger imperial contexts. Indeed, the history of Europe's discourses on sexuality cannot be exclusively explored at home (Stoler 2002). The passions were seen to be unavoidable, in the colonies as elsewhere, but they had to be channeled into a proper direction, in accordance with the moral obligations posed by the empire and the church. Sexual intercourse between European males and native women—whether they be wives, concubines, or prostitutes—was considered a "necessary evil", a protection against carnal relations among males. As for Stefansson, his Inuit wife and family posed problems similar to those witnessed by Euro-Americans in many other zones of culture clash. One indication is Stefansson's reluctance throughout his life to discuss his Inuit wife and son with even his closest friends.

At the time of Stefansson's expeditions, most of the Inuit of the Western Arctic were outside, or at the margin of, the world system, hunting and gathering according to schedules more or less of their own. Through their arctic journeys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Stefansson and his fellow travelers would expand the frontiers of Euro-American empires, paving the way for traders and colonialists. Despite Canadian dominion there was no urgency for decades to appropriate and control and, indeed, the Arctic remained isolated until the 1970s. Over time, however, the Inuit were encapsulated by southern empires which radically altered the terms of trade. With the expansion and enforcement of the Canadian state, the Inuit gradually became dependent on southern goods and permanent settlements, subject to civilizing missions and appropriation of land and resources. Inuit children were sent to boarding schools and English became the dominant language.

In recent years, historians and cultural critics have dissected the ideology and rhetoric of geographical explorations (Bloom 1993). With the works of Stefansson, I suggest, the Arctic Zone was established, if not invented, as a fertile but somewhat slippery discursive space, as a relatively demarcated and monotonous site useful for the exploration of particular themes in contrast to the temperate Euro-American world. Stefansson's arctic practice and representation may be summed up by the notion of "arcticality" (Pálsson 2003). Much of his work characterizes the Arctic as both the home of howling, exotic wilderness (the source of "strange" knowledge and ancient wisdom) and a semi-domestic, "friendly" space. Although Stefansson showed little respect for other guests in the Arctic, criticizing them for introducing "civilization", with all of its consequences, into the ethnographic museum of the Arctic, he was, after all, one of them, driven by projects different from those of his hosts and bound to "come out" at some point. Much like his fellow visitors he represented an empire that was busily modernizing at home and creating its own space abroad in competition with other empires for power and resources.

Acknowledgements:

The main arguments presented here have been developed in greater detail in my biographical work on Stefansson, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (2005, University of Manitoba Press and University Press of New England, 2005), and my article "Race and the Intimate in Arctic Exploration" (2004).

References:

Bloom, Lisa 1993, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dick, Lyle 2001, Muskox Land: Ellesmere Island in the Age of Contact. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

Foucault, Michel 1988, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3. New York: Random House.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1999, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pálsson, Gísli 2001, Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.

—— 2002, Arcticality: Gender, Race, and Geography in the Writings of V. Stefansson. In Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Scientific Practice, 1800-1940, edited by M. Bravo and S. Sörlin. Mass.: Science History Publications. Pp. 275-309.

—— 2004, Race and the Intimate in Arctic Exploration, Ethnos 69(3): 363-386.

—— 2005, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Translated by Keneva Kunz. University of Manitoba Press and University Press of New England.

—— 2008, Genomic Anthropology: Coming in From the Cold? Current Anthropology (In Press).

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur 1913, My Life with the Eskimo. New York: The Macmillan Company.

—— 1920, Temperature Factor in Determining the Age of Maturity Among the Eskimos. Journal of the American Medical Association 4: 669-670.

—— 1921, The Friendly Arctic. New York: Macmillan.

Stoler, Ann Laura 2002, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Kirk, Sylvia 1980, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Vanast, Walter 2007, The Bad Side to The Good Story: Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Christian Conversion in the Mackenzie Delta 1906-1925. Religious Studies and Theology: 77-114.

White, Richard 1991, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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