Manufacturing reality: Inuit harvesting depictions and the domestication of human-animal relations

Summary

Schematic harvesting scenes incised on tools are a stock variety of both precontact and historic Inuit graphic art. They sometimes seem to depict historically specific events, which they effectively commemorate, and have real (sometimes precise) informational content that must have been important for the dissemination of technical harvesting knowledge among a hunter’s peers, and its inter-generational transfer. However, the harvesting setups – such as a boatload of hunters on the verge of harpooning a whale - are rather conventional, even repetitive, suggesting that these depictions also acted to discursively stabilize particular sorts of relations among people, things, the environment, and nonhuman animals. This may have been an intended function, along the lines of a hunting amulet, or it may have been an unconscious effect achieved through the eidetic citation of an idealized turn of events. Although scenes of harvesting walrus, caribou, birds, fish and other species occur in this idiom, bowhead whaling was clearly the object of a special fascination. Whaling scenes are the most conventional of all, condensing these various functions - historical, educational, symbolic – as they engaged whales in a discourse on human-animal relations that embraced ritual, belief, memory, social relations, technology and economy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 12145