Inuit hunting culture

The traditional Inuit of the Arctic region existed in a delicate balance with their environment. Traditionally they were hunters and fishermen living off of animal life. They hunted for whales, walruses, caribou, seals, polar bears and birds supplementing their diet with seaweed.

Inuit community is recognized around certain social principles and relations of kinship, cooperation and sharing. Hunting activities are organized cooperatively and based on the need of the community as a whole.

The Inuit divided the year into three hunting seasons, each revolving around a single animal: seal, the caribou and the whale.

Understanding the seasonal migratory patterns of animal is central to the Inuit’s subsistence strategy.

Inuit culture is a hunting culture and hunting marine mammals was likely one of the most importance factors in the development and, long-term success of Inuit communities. Marine mammals, such as whales, seals and walruses, provide reliable food security and the fat was a valuable fuel used for heating.

Inuit hunters waited patently sometimes for hours, for a seal to surface and be killed. Seal meat was first shared through reciprocal exchanges within kinship line and then among others in the community to ensure that no one went hungry.

In fall time caribou are hunted for meat for skins to be used as mattresses and for their sinew, which will be used for sewing the bearded sealskin covers on the umiat.

Despite the radical changes to Inuit life over the past century, reliance on Arctic animals remains strong. And in modern Arctic craftsman, women transform caribous antlers, and walrus and narwhal tusk, into carving and jewelry that are sold door to door or in southern Canadian or US stores specializing in ‘native art’.

Seal and caribou skins are also used by women to make wall-hangings depicting scenes of Inuit and these are also sold for income.
Inuit hunting culture

The culture of tattooing practices

In human cultures and human history, tattooing practices varied from rubbing ash, plant dyes and ink into open wounds to create distinctive markings.

The thought that tattoo is capable of expressing so many different concepts, and is therefore a means of communication, is not a new one. Writers, observers, tattooists, and the tattooed have all remarked upon this aspect.

Because the choice of tattoo is personal and reflects the desires and tastes of the wearer in a very permanent way, much of tattoo art tends to provide little insight into the lives of the artist who create it.

Artifacts recovered from archeological sites dating from the Upper Paleolithic era (38,000 to 10,000 BC) in Europe have been interpreted as puncturing tools and pigment reservoirs.

Clay and stone figurines with engraved designs that may represent tattooing have been found.

Ancient Germanic, Scandinavian, Celtic and other tribes often used tattooing for religious significance as well as markers of class. It has long held religious, spiritual and social connotations both in the United States and abroad.

The three most widely recognized religious affiliations with tattooing are Catholicism, Japanese mythology and ‘modern primitivism’.
The culture of tattooing practices

Anthropology in Practice

Anthropology in Practice
Social and cultural anthropology is “the study of common sense.” Yet common sense is, anthropologically speaking, seriously mis-named: it is neither common to all cultures, not is any version of it particularly sensible from the perspective of anyone outside its particular cultural context.

It is the socially acceptable rendition of culture, and is thus as variable as are both cultural forms an social rules – those wins axes that define the formal objects of anthropological theory.

Whether viewed as “self defense” or as “obviousness,” common sense – the everyday understanding of how works – turns out to be extraordinary diverse, maddeningly inconsistent, and highly resistant to skepticism of any kind.

It is embedded in both sensory experience and practical politics – powerful realities that constraint and shape access to knowledge.

How do we know that human beings have really landed on the moon? We are usually convinced of it – but how do we know that our conviction does not rest on some misplaced confidence in the source of our information?

If we have reason to doubt that others are entirely successful in making sense of the world, how do we know – given that we cannot easily step outside our own frame of reference – that we are doing any better?

To be sure, this challenge to what we might call scientific and rational credibility was not what the earliest anthropologists (in any professionally recognizable sense) had in mind.

To the contrary, they were convinced of their own cultural superiority to the people they studied, and would have reacted with astonishment to any suggestion that science could be studied in the same way as “magic.”

Much recent anthropological work has indeed inspected the claims of modern technology, politics and science. Notably, the entire field of medical anthropology has challenged the claims of a crass scientism that – as Nicholas Thomas observes in a somewhat different context – has failed to keep pace with developments in science itself.
Anthropology in Practice