Authentic Inuit Art

• Published in: Journal of Material Culture
• Main Author: Graburn, Nelson H. H.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2004
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); Archeology; Anthropology; eskimo*; inuit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183504044369; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1359183504044369

Modern Inuit commercial arts grew out of the desires of multiple non-Inuit agencies and persons active during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Competing visions, of art production as substitute for welfare, art as continuity with pre-modern crafts, art as Canadian national symbol, art as the expression of extreme alterity in the form of an animistic hunter-gatherer people’s world view, brought into being a dynamic new set of creative forms which surpassed all of those views. In Gell’s terms, these new art forms were means of carrying out the will of these competing persons in a complex competition to control social and cultural relationships. Yet this, in some sense, imposed aesthetic category of ‘Eskimo Art’ was in turn appropriated by the Inuit and transformed in both discourse and practice to express their active (rather than passive) relations with the Canadian state. Indeed by the 1970s the Inuit had come to believe that a major component of their identity in the world was that of artists, and they built on this new strength to establish new economic, social and political institutions. This case illustrates the complex way in which indigenous art can simultaneously proclaim difference or distinctiveness from the surrounding nation-state and also express that nation’s identity within the world of nations. Objects, with their multivalent potentials, seem uniquely able to carry out such symbolic projects.