"Strange Things Happen to Non-Christian People": Human-Animal Transformation among the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska

• Main Author: Cassady, Joslyn
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2008
• Subjects: Christian cosmology integration; human animal hybridity intepretation; human-animal relation missionization; Christianized animals; Arctic; eskimo*; inuit; Alaska
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76k7686w

Inuit myths, folklore, and material culture are filled with examples of people who turn into animals. Margaret Lantis, a well-known Eskimologist of the mid-twentieth century, once commented that human-animal transformation in Inuit mythology had an “immediacy and a reality” that was unknown in other parts of the world. It is hard to discern from more contemporary ethnography, however, whether transformation still occupies a meaningful place in Inuit life. This article examines present-day Iñupiaq understandings of, and experiences with, human-animal transformation. I offer conventional wisdom on this topic, how such metamorphosis is accomplished, and the cosmological forces that still are believed to operate behind the scenes. This article departs from the customary preoccupation with shamanistic practices and instead focuses on how everyday Iñupiat explain the social and moral significance of turning into an animal. Through this discursive lens, I argue, one may appreciate how different generations of Iñupiat have integrated Christian cosmology and deities into their interpretations of both animals and human animal hybridity. Attention to animality in the context of transformation, rather than during the hunt (the context in which the majority of theories on Inuit-nature relations are generated), provides a unique perspective on how missionization has shaped Iñupiaq conceptions of human-animal relations. This research allows one to consider how today’s “Christianized” animals contrast with the “nonhuman persons” that populate anthropological literature and joins a broader anthropological concern with how indigenous religious practice coexists with world religions.