Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson

by Gísli Pálsson (Editor), Gísli Pálsson (Editor)

Between 1906 and 1918, anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson went on three long expeditions to the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. He wrote voluminously about his travels and observations, as did others. Stefansson's fame was partly fueled by a series of controversies involving envious competitors in the race for public recognition. While many anthropological works refer to his writings and he continues to be cited in ethnographic and historical works on indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic, particularly the Inuit, his successes in exploration (the discovery and mapping of some of the last remaining land on earth) have overshadowed his anthropological work.


Writing on Ice utilizes his extensive fieldwork diaries, now in Dartmouth's Special Collections, and contemporary photographs and sketches, some never before published, to bring to life the anthropology of the Arctic explorer.

Gisli Palsson situates the diaries in the context of that era's anthropological practice, early 20th-century expeditionary power relations, and the North American community surrounding Stefansson. He also examines the tension between the rhetoric of ethnography and exploration (the notion of the "friendly Arctic") and the reality of fieldwork and exploration, partly with reference to Stefansson's silence about his Inuit family.

393 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

Gísli Pálsson is a professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be truthful I am only reading this because of a rather delicious affair with an author, Keith Ross Leckie whose book Coppermine was about these people and this time. I wanted to know where he was coming from, also what the film from the book will be based on. Anyway I've given up both the affair and the book. Sad? For one but not the other.

These diaries of the Inuit of Alaska date from the early part of the 20th century before our Western culture cut into their traditional way of life. Unfortunately after trying for some months to get past the several introductions and forewords to the actual meat of the story I haven't managed it. Then there are the notes.... Is there ever going to be any story?