Research Catalog

Title

Writing on ice : the ethnographic notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson / edited and introduced by Gísli Pálsson.

Author

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 1879-1962.

Publication

Hanover, NH : University Press of New England, ©2001.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Gísli Pálsson, 1949-

Description

xiv, 351 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), color maps; 24 cm

Summary

• "Between 1906 and 1918, anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson went on three long expeditions to the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. He wrote voluminously about his travels and observations, as did others. Stefansson's fame was partly fueled by a series of controversies involving envious competitors in the race for public recognition. While many anthropological works refer to his writings, and he continues to be cited in ethnographic and historical works on indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic, particularly the Inuit, his successes in exploration (the discovery and mapping of some of the last remaining uncharted land on earth) have overshadowed his anthropological work.
• Writing on Ice utilizes his extensive fieldwork diaries, now in Dartmouth College's Special Collections, and contemporary photographs and sketches, some never before published, to bring to life the anthropology of the Arctic explorer. Gisli Palsson situates the diaries in the context of that era's anthropological practice, early 20th-century expeditionary power relations, and the North American community surrounding Stefansson. He also examines the tension between the rhetoric of ethnography and exploration (the notion of the "friendly Arctic") and the reality of fieldwork and exploration, partly with reference to Stefansson's silence about his Inuit family."--Jacket.

Subject

• Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 1879-1962
• Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 1879-1962
• Stefansson, Vilhjalmur
• Geschichte 1906-1912
• Inuit > Social life and customs
• Ethnology > Fieldwork
• Volkskunde
• Quelle
• Tagebuch
• Eskimo

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [331]-336) and index.

Contents

Historical Background -- Stefansson's Expeditions -- Reflections of Fieldwork -- The Expedition Diaries and the Present Edition -- Relations with the Inuit: "An Eskimo to the Skin" -- Stefansson's Inuit Family -- The Intimate Arctic: The Diaries -- Race, Gender, and Ethnicity -- Arcticality -- Stefansson's Ethnographic Diaries -- The Anglo-American Polar Expedition (1906-1907) -- The Stefansson-Anderson Expedition (1908-1912).

ISBN

• 1584651199
• 9781584651192

LCCN

2001001365

OCLC

• ocm46402424
• 46402424
• SCSB-1228573

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library