village of Kangisqaq, which was located to the west of Cap Deinev and disappeared during the Soviet period. The reader is never told that Plover is a small bay on the gulf of Providenie and that Asleq is its Eskimo name. Many more examples canbe found throughout the appendices, but a few words must...
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1030.8197 http://arctic.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/download/1904/1882/ |
| Summary: | village of Kangisqaq, which was located to the west of Cap Deinev and disappeared during the Soviet period. The reader is never told that Plover is a small bay on the gulf of Providenie and that Asleq is its Eskimo name. Many more examples canbe found throughout the appendices, but a few words must be said about the introduction by Jean Malaurie. Malaurie's work is, alas, no better than that of his colleagues. It is not the serious discussion of f lklore among the Asian Eskimos that could have been written by G. Menovshchikov or E. Melet-insky. Instead we find a haphazard collection of bits of informa-tion on the origin of the Eskimo cultures, including the unproven assertions that eastern Siberia is "un des berceaux de l'humanitk " (p. 12), that "lepetitpeupleyuit " is the "berceau des sociktks inuit " (p. 1 l), and that the archaeological site of Ushki is between twenty and thirty thousand years old. (Most contemporary Soviet archaeolo-gists consider the Upper Paleolithic problem of Siberia unre-solved [Chichlo, 19861, and most experts consider the Ushki site to be more recent [Yiand Clark, 19851.) We are subjected to such banalitiesas "l'hommeperdu duns ledksertdeneige " and "cettesociktk essentiellement religieuse et trks ceremonielle. " Malaurie mentions that the "Centre d'Etudes Arctiques a jouk un rdle non negligeable depuis sa fondation, " and it is interesting to note that the sources cited in his bibliography are generally the publications of Malaurie himself or those in which his name appears. Though it contributes little to ur understanding of Eskimo folklore and mythology, we could turn a blind eye to this essay if it did not also contain some important errors. I will not dwell further on the incorrect transliteration of Russian and Eskimo names and terms. Malaurie can be forgiven these inaccuracies, as he does not know either Russian or Yupik, and two of his colleagues, whose competence has already been discussed, acted as his guides. But why does Malaurie tell us that the Eskimossko-russkii slovar ... |
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