Modalities and networks of belonging

In northwest Greenland, as we will see, language and experience are organised through story-telling, ‘ways of speaking’ and meaningful situational co-presence, but also through the relationship to the environment. The Inugguit relate to their local cosmos through a discourse (almost an ideology) of ecological monistic thinking; a phenomenological embeddedness in their sense of place. The natural environment is not understood as a separate ontological category, but as an extension of the human psyche, expressed through the word hila meaning ‘mind, consciousness, weather and the natural order of things’. In Inuit mythology, Hila (Sila) was the goddess of natural order and thought. When the ‘weather was bad’ hila naammangitsoq which in their terms typically meant when there was mist, fog (pujoq) or low-dense cloud giving a feeling of oppression or closeness, people would often complain of head-aches. Through hila, the hunter is connected with those around him, but as we will see with the example of Ikua, ‘thought’ is not considered a human construct, but is the product of the forces outside of us and these are forces with which the hunter must engage (Carpenter Reference Carpenter1973: 44).

One source for this connection is a shared ‘social memoryscape’ (Nuttall Reference Nuttall1992: 39–40) of the area in which they live. Geographic knowledge is experiential and shared amongst the hunters through story-telling out on the ice and mental images and sounds of remembered places. For the older people, a fjord is more than just a fjord, it is a confluence of historical events tracing their previous peripatetic lifestyle; the high degree of semantic specificity results, as we shall see, in the sense that the language for these geographical features is interwoven into the details of this ‘memoryscape’.

As well as framing a relationship to the local cosmos, ‘belonging’ is also expressed at a level of social interaction. In such small, homogenous societies in very remote locations, the parameters of belonging are so well defined that to be an outsider in some way will soon lead to gossip. Social life is governed by a rigid, unwritten code. The Inugguit are concerned with maintaining what one might call their own dense ‘networks of belonging’. By a ‘network of belonging’, it is meant a network with a few nodes representing branches of an extended family (typically) that constantly reassert their kin links with one another through various modalities and practices of social belonging. These include intensive visiting and various other mechanisms such as naming, celebratory kapvimiks and the toasting of shared birth years.

The geography of Greenland is conducive to what one can call unique networks of belonging because places are ‘bounded’. Greenland's peculiar topography enforces certain patterns of intensive community interaction because it is relatively difficult to leave these thinly populated settlements. On the largest island on earth, 55,000 people live dotted around the edge in small towns and settlements, unconnected by roads. In these remote communities, ontological primacy is assigned to the group, not the individual. Existence is ostensibly relational and in Inugguit society, identity with family and kin provides much needed security (Boas Reference Boas1964 [1888: 170). The objective in such a society is to be rooted in a structuralised whole in which one has an unquestionable place. This whole is the meaning of life. If this place becomes questioned (perhaps because of some activity), the Inugguaq's ontological security is in doubt. ‘Belonging’ is therefore a social imperative. To belong is to be part of the collective consciousness that defines the community that is the permanent and perpetual condition of things.

Social (or familial) connectedness and spatial attachment converge in the notion of ‘belonging’ which is inherently tied to identity and the differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This rootedness in their surroundings creates an existential framework which governs large parts of their lives and their overall philosophy. The Inugguit belong to the landscape around them more than it belongs to them. It is not a relationship expressed in terms of ownership and certainly not in terms of personal ownership. Personal ownership extends to clothing, but not much else. Place identity for the Inugguit does not mean belonging to a specific settlement either. The sense of ‘belonging’ is anchored instead to the nuna (for the occasional one with political ambitions, the inugguit nunaat) and the shared experience of hunting. Nuna is the surrounding physical and spiritual environment including the sea ice, the mountains, the air, the animals, fish and even souls and memories of events and people who lived in the past. Its associations are both spiritual and physical and the nature of the bond reflects this. There is an intimacy with the nuna (‘the local cosmos, the total habitat’). Implicit in nuna is a strong sense of the inter-connectedness of human and natural communities and great pride is taken in this primordial relationship with nature.

It is the spiritual value of the nuna which their ancestors have occupied. This identity is also socially constructed through the identification of certain characteristics seen as particular to that region and embedded in the nuna. These would include hunting practices (hunting narwhal from kayaks using harpoons), eating of certain traditional foods which are peculiar to the outer settlements (polar bear, narwhal and kiviat, ‘fermented little auk’, in particular) and of course their language whose aberrant phonology makes it inaccessible to most Greenlanders. Eating this food is a way of reinforcing the oneness of the group and the sense of relatedness, connecting oneself historically to a specific cultural landscape inhabited by one's forefathers and to the shared culture of hunting. Hunters share game amongst one another according to complex rules depending on the hunter's level of involvement in the catch. No hunter is left without in a society where there is a clear disdain for unshared, individual wealth. The Inugguit subscribe to an egalitarian ideology and are reluctant, in a place where criticism is not tolerated, to make moral judgements on other people which might be seen as individual criticisms.

Modalities of ‘belonging’ are practised through various mechanisms, but principally through networks of pulaar. The word pulaar means ‘visit’, and the Inugguit spend their days going from one hut to another, sometimes visiting the same family member four or five times in the same day, even if there is absolutely nothing to say, no news, no gossip. Much of the time was simply spent discussing who had been visiting whom. The Inugguit are the ultimate social beings. The number of visits an outsider receives is the barometer for how well his efforts at integrating into the community are succeeding. Boas (Reference Boas1964 [1888]: 166) writing in 1888, describes nomadic inter-settlement visiting patterns for the Central Eskimo; with a much more sedentary lifestyle, these visiting patterns have now been superimposed onto an intra-settlement framework. The pulaar, a ritualised process, is the most defining social institution in this part of the Arctic and in the smaller settlements this intensive socializing can become overwhelming. The smaller the place, the stricter are the parameters of belonging, the more suffocating these reaffirmations of belonging can become. In the settlement of Savissivik, social integration took on a fascinating dynamic as out of the 40 inhabitants, no fewer than 16 were bachelors or angutsuduk, and thus a bachelor might receive any number of visits during the course of the day.

After having spent the entire day ice-fishing with Qaaqutsiaq and having exhausted all channels of conversation, the moment I got back to the hut, he would come and visit. Apparently, the Inugguit never need time to themselves. Pulaar is a kind of formalised way of sharing. Once one begins pulaar relationships, there is an unsaid obligation to maintain this reciprocal arrangement. The purpose of these visits is co-presence which is essential and underpins Inugguit social organisation. In particular, there is a need for very regular face-to-face contact between members of bilaterally extended families where there is a high degree of mutual assistance and which are the cultural and social units of production.

It is in these most remote autonomous communities with one cultural setting where there is a particularly strong tendency for people to monitor each other's sociability. Every member is closely acquainted with everybody else's personality and behaviour; public opinion is an effective guardian of social morality. Personalities loom large in a small place: identities were publicly allocated to families as well as individuals. The Dunneqs were considered ‘aggressive’ and ‘confrontational’; the Qaerngaqs ‘introspective’ and ‘philosophical’; the Qujaukitsoqs ‘successful’ and ‘outward-looking’, and thus treated with suspicion by some. The behaviour shown towards certain members of the Qujaukitsoq family was very much reminiscent of the Scandiavian Jantelov. The Jantelov has an important role to play in north-west Greenland where individual success is frowned upon, as it is believed that this can and should only be achieved collectively.

Close observation of each other's behaviour is facilitated by the spatial arrangement of houses dotted around the shore. Movement in such a place is constantly recorded and reported first hand, or more commonly second or third hand in encounters in subsequent days. With constant use of the ablative, allative and locative cases, conversations are framed in spatio-temporal terms with an agent always coming from somewhere or moving towards something. Indeed, the case system serves almost entirely to describe spatial relationships. An encounter with somebody in the settlement will typically begin with the question, kinamut? (literally: ‘to whom are you going?, with the –mut affix marking the allative case) followed by a demonstrative to confirm the location of the house. All the houses face the frozen sea and thus these visits are in public view and one is seldom granted privacy of any kind. With binoculars sitting on every window-sill and with 24 hour daylight for four months of the year, any form of clandestine socialising would be more or less impossible in this treeless environment. It is in this context that a small, but intense social world develops fuelled by incessant gossip often insinuating sexual relations between local people, obscene jokes and ridicule. The Inugguit take comfort in the localness and total familiarity of their lifeworld where everybody knows everything about his neighbour. Locally criticized emotions such as anger and jealousy which play an important role in Inugguit society, are negative ‘emotions of place’. They are sentiments that people do not want strongly associated with the local environment (but that is not to say that they are not). Evaluations of others’ emotional dispositions are assessments of others’ positions in societal space, of others’ connectedness to the community. Those who are not ‘accepted’ into the settlement communities would normally leave. Others who had left the community and tried to move back many years later were not accepted.

Life in the settlements is characterised by this very small scale of life, constantly reaffirming family inter-connectedness through a discourse of kinship and relatedness. This is a place where one might expect to encounter a strong sense of belonging, but perhaps not the apparent need to reaffirm it. The conversation at these ‘visits’ turned invariably at some point to kinship and the complex familial genealogies which are recited to the visitor in great detail. The mutual familiarity and inter-connectedness is a matter of pride. By making kinship the key subject matter for conversation, the sense of relatedness is constantly reinforced and the need to be part of this familial web is overwhelming. Close kin provides the most reliable support network and ideally one should be surrounded by close kin all the time. ‘Strangership’ (Nuttall Reference Nuttall1992: 101–117) is something unsettling and would represent for the Inugguit isolating individualism. Those who left the community for other parts of Greenland spoke of how uncomfortable they felt to be surrounded by ‘strangers’, that is people with whom they did not have any kin connection.

Belonging can connect, but also exclude. If one were made a social outcast for any reason, one might have previously become a qivittoq. Nowadays, a qivittoq is a metaphor for a mysterious, supernatural wanderer who has been perhaps shamed or rejected by the community and leaves the settlement for often a hidden cave on the shoreline, unable to live any longer in society. Before I arrived in the community, a man whose wife had left him moved out of the town and lived down by the shore alone in a tent before he hanged himself from a light-fitting in an empty hut. He had lost face and become an object of contempt, a metaphor of rejection. People thought he had become like what one might call a modern day, pseudo-qivittoq. And it is perhaps significant that the word for ‘commits suicide’ imminortoq means literally somebody ‘who goes in to oneself’ (and thus breaks the bond of belonging).

If one is not part of the kinship network, the barriers of ‘belonging’ can be insurmountable. The Inugguit have forged an exclusive identity for themselves in a society that is implosive in this regard. People were introduced to me by the kinship term, more often than by name. Communal and familial identity precedes any sense of individual identity. Those who were not originally from northwest Greenland were highlighted in discussions. There was also a distinction between those who could claim a Canadian (Baffin Island) heritage, and those who could not.

To an outsider, the use of some of these kinship terms can be quite puzzling, such as when a boy is named after a dead relative, another means of maintaining the continuity of the sense of belonging, but this time between the living and the dead, the people and the nuna where the deceased are buried. The name (ateq) is the most important cultural identity marker of the Inugguit, connecting the inuk to ancestors, and the cycles of the living and the dead (Bodenhorn Reference Bodenhorn and Vom Bruck2006: 139–157). It is clear from every encounter that the ateq has a very special significance in this society. It is believed that a child does not become a person until he or she receives a name. The name is the link to the soul (tarneq) (Alia Reference Alia2007: 21) and the namesake name can be recycled lots of different times, creating lots of different embodiments of the same ancestor. As Alia (Reference Alia2007: 35) explains, the naming procedure is part of the grieving process and creates a whole new web of bonds when a mother embraces her child and calls her ‘mother’ or when a child gets a new sibling because the new arrival is named after the sister of the ancestor for whom her older sister is named. To an outsider, the complexity of these kin relations, which are as much socio-cultural as they are biological, can be rather challenging especially so as the link between name-soul and identity is so intimate that new names seldom develop. In addition to the recycling of names and multiple usage of kinship terms which conjure up previous socialities, the Inugguit tend to have six names as well as nicknames. These names aside, if the ateq is not passed on, the soul wanders around with nowhere to rest. It is taboo to mention the name of a dead person until the name has been recycled. Name avoidance rules are strong as I discovered subsequently when there were suicides in the town. Names of people who had committed suicide tended to be recycled quite quickly. There was no particular stigma attached to a person who shared a name with somebody who had committed suicide, and it did not appear to affect the bearer in any way.

Story-telling is key to understanding the conjunction of ‘ways of speaking’ and ‘ways of belonging’ for the telling of stories takes the listener to places which are diachronic testaments of the Inugguit interaction with nuna. The landscape for the Arctic hunters is mnemonic, a trigger for the telling and preservation of the stories, and memory is a way of articulating the relationship between community and landscape (Basso Reference Basso1996: 106–109). From the stories, one can infer that for the Inugguit, land and kinship are the most important attachment points for memory. Stories tie families together by evoking kin relations and genealogies that are situated in a landscape which is full of the personality traits associated with the people that lived and travelled through there: a microcosm for human sociality in such a thinly populated place.

The rich, descriptive imagery of Inugguit place names found in the stories and mental maps inform one of land and sea use through their semantic transparency and embeds the inuk in the ‘memoryscape’. So, a metonymic toponym such as qammavik means the ‘place where hunters lie in wait for sea mammals’, Haviggivik, ‘the place where one finds iron’ or ukalerhalik ‘a place where one finds Arctic Hares’. Such place-names are what Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Bakhtin and Holquist1981:7) calls ‘chronotopes’: places where time and space fuse, charged with symbolic significance for the community. The name of the geographical feature and the events that the stories and place-names situate merge in the consciousness of those travelling through the ‘memoryscape’. In any one locality, an individual is surrounded by a relational network of marked places that identify potential resources, stored supplies, stories and historical events in the record of the land. Place-names can become active agents of identity, creating contextualised feelings of ‘attachment’ and showing how the Inugguit and their kin have belonged to the nuna.

Ways of speaking a structurally complex language

We have seen how storytelling punctuates and is punctuated by landscape memories. This link between storytelling and practices of belonging takes us into a more specific investigation of the particular features of Polar Eskimo language that allow this connection. Polar Eskimo is a language of glottal stops and outsiders have described it as not sounding like a language at all, but as a series of sighs, heavy breathing and broken, jerky sounds. Impressionistically, this is a language that comes from the stomach or the middle of the body. Outsiders wishing to learn the language are told that as a first step they have to learn to make the sounds of a polar bear; and the Inugguit have a remarkable aptitude and love for this kind of mimicry.

The Inugguit have clear views about what is ‘their language’ and what is not. Certain phonemes have particular salience, acting as identifying agents. If one cannot get certain basic sounds right, it cannot be considered that one is speaking the language irrespective of how good one's vocabulary is. One such sound is the uvular plosive. If one does not articulate this sound with the innermost organs, it can result in the substitution of /k/ for /q/. Initially, this was an error that I made frequently and was labelled kutaatoq for making this mistake (this is a contemptuous expression that grouped me with young children who have not yet mastered this sound). Polar Eskimo uses a small phonemic inventory and word-play is common. With such a ribald sense of humour, the Inugguit invite the stranger to confuse a plethora of near-homonyms such as: anaq (‘excrement’); arnaq (‘woman’); aniq (‘woman's older brother’); aanaq (‘grandmother’)’; amiq (‘skin, hide’); amauq (‘great grand-parent’) etc. The Inugguit take great pleasure in reciting constantly the various names for male and female genitalia (and words for anus), all of which are almost homonymic.

The structure of the language endows a so-called ‘phonological word’ with considerable expressive power. The concept of a ‘word’ is ambiguous in this language, but a word can at least be identified by its prosodic contour. A polysynthetic language such as Polar Eskimo with highly productive morphological patterns presents new grammatical algorithms all the time. As it is an agglutinative language, words are formed by gluing lots of segmentable affixes together to create what would be sentences in English. With a high degree of morpho-semantic plasticity, the language is, as identified in the discussion of local belonging, alive with an ontological dimension and open to new shades of meaning through the addition of potentially several hundred independent affixes, and several thousand affix combinations. This means that language has the ability to surprise, perhaps through the unusual compounding of affixes (including derivational and inflectional suffixes). Not exactly neologisms as new words are not being ‘coined’ in any way, these lexical innovations which are based on stems and affixes already used in the language conjure up elaborate images through concise morphological packaging. The combination of stem and multiple affixes is poetic as the meaning is so densely packaged, there is a sense of improvisation, and the emphasis is on the focus of expression. One can communicate a lot by not saying very much because there is relatively little grammatical and morphological redundancy.

The Inugguit tend to speak in very emphatic, hyperbolic terms. This manifests itself in the morphology in which they have a distinct predilection for using the long drawn out and onomatopoeically apt emphasiser affix –torruaq (‘much, very much’) and the colloquial, reduplicative adverbial affix -pa..pa..pa meaning ‘a lot of’. Everything seems to be ‘very’ big, ‘very’ hot, ‘very’ cold etc. As an example, a conversation proceeded along the following lines in November, a time when it was unseasonably mild and when the sea ice was still struggling to form. Two hunters wander into my hut, remove their shoes and sit down at the table silently. After a long silence, a hunter leans out of the window and beckons the lead sledge dog over by making a clicking noise from vibrating his tongue against his lower lip. I offer my guests coffee (kapvihorrgamahutin?) and both hunters sit in silence, but raise their eyebrows. After approximately 10 minutes of no talk, Hunter A exclaims: kiak ‘hot, it is hot’; Hunter B responds: kiatorruaq ‘it is very hot’; Hunter A: iih, kiatorruaq ‘yes, it is very hot’ and Hunter B: iih, aggurruaq ‘yes, very much so’.

When making a statement in conversation, interlocutor B will often respond to interlocutor A's comment by repeating the noun and then adding such an emphasiser affix, as in this example. Similarly, the affix, –huaq ‘big’, is added to almost every noun and reflected in their own demonym, Inugguit (‘the big or great people’). There is a constant appeal to this kind of emphasis, and this is reflected in shared exaggerated gestures; frantic hand pushing the air to refer to something hamani ‘down there’, implying it is in the far distance even if the referent is a hut at the bottom of the settlement. Such statements and gestures are typically followed by the speaker seeking constant agreement through the repeated tag question ain? ‘isn't that so?’ Consensus orientated discourse and ‘congenial fellowship’ (Liberman Reference Liberman1985: 5–12) in a small, remote society with a ‘high intimacy’ (Haugen Reference Haugen1987: 95) language is a social imperative; losing ‘face’ is potentially dangerous as it might result in social exclusion in a place where there are few exit options. It is such ‘recurrent tonalities and conventionalised modes of expression (and gesture) that bear the stamp of a common cast of mind’ (Basso Reference Basso1996: 73).

The use of multiple affixes facilitates lexical semantic precision and a degree of specificity that shuns generic words; a way of speaking that has significant value in a pseudo hunter-gatherer society in which the animal has to be located using as few words as possible. Hunters navigate their way between these places using an elaborate system of demonstrative adverbs which are used to direct the listener's attention quickly to the nature and location of an object.

As an example of this tendency towards a high degree of lexemic semantic specificity, there is no generic word for seal, but the word ippigaqtoq refers to a ‘seal that dips its head down while the rest of its body remains on the surface’. In such a society, there is a premium on specific knowledge and less need for abstract concepts. Subsistence hunting must have influenced Inugguit ‘ways of speaking’. Elderly people told me in plain, matter-of-fact fashion: ‘there was not much need for language in the olden days’. By this, they meant that language was used directionally, ‘I am going out hunting’, ‘I am doing this or that’, but there was little debate or discussion about anything. Fifty years ago, they were just trying to survive. Today, the Inugguaq has more free time and with the radio, there is now more willingness to discuss and debate things.

In a context of affixation where a basic stem is qualified semantically and grammatically in very complex ways, the language is structurally far from static, allowing one to create new words that have never been uttered before and that could never be found in a dictionary (even if there were one), moulding organically words to precise thoughts through the use of highly productive morphological patterns. For example, one could add 7 derivational and inflectional affixes alongside a clitic to the verbal stem haag- to create the 60 letter word:

This was a word that a storyteller used when trying to account for the suicide of a friend.

Like the ice, the spoken word with its complex morphological form is always changing in unpredictable ways, and thus its meanings are seldom commoditised. The same meaning can sometimes be expressed in 12 different ways. As such, in Polar Eskimo, one does not just take down words unthinkingly from the mental shelf and reproduce them. Instead, one thinks about ‘the realities we talk about’ to quote Austin (Reference Austin, Urmson and Sbisà1962: 182).

As an example of this, in the months of May and June 2011, I was living in Siorapaluk, the northern most permanently inhabited settlement in the world with a population of 59. During my stay in the settlement, I spent many an afternoon talking to a Japanese man who had come to northwest Greenland as part of a scientific expedition forty years ago. Ikua Oshima was in his twenties at the time and he decided there and then not to return to his homeland, choosing instead the life of an Arctic hunter. One afternoon, he came round with a gift of some fresh musk-oxen meat and over a cup of coffee, I asked him why he chose to stay. He looked out of the window, eyes fixed on his dog team skulking on the sea ice and after an unfeasibly long silence, Ikua uttered one word with a great sense of purpose, ihumaninahorjamahunga. This word comprises the stem, ihumani, meaning ‘thought’ followed by 3 derivational affixes and 1 inflectional affix, -na- means ‘in order to’, -hor- ‘open to’, -jama- means ‘want’ and -hunga, the first person singular indicative.

He was telling me that he chose to live in the Arctic because he wanted his mind ‘to be open to thoughts’. This is a whole sentence in English, but one word in Polar Eskimo and the meaning was explained morpheme-by-morpheme, a difficult undertaking for the informant. In this case, it was, however, possible. Being a native speaker of Japanese, Ikua had, like me, to learn their language and had attempted to do so by learning the stems and affixes in the way that I had. He was able to conceptualise the form and meaning of the individual affixes because large parts of the language comprise compounds which collectively represent what Sapir (Reference Sapir and Seligman1934: 492–495) called ‘condensation symbols’. These are richly packed with non-arbitrary meanings, as opposed to ‘referential symbols’ which characterise many non-polysynthetic languages whose form-meaning relationship tends to be more arbitrary and conventionalised. For example, a word such as nerrivik ‘table’ comprises the stem neri- ‘to eat’ and the suffix –vik meaning ‘place of’, and thus a table is the ‘place where one eats’. The word in English (and other European languages) is indivisible into root and suffix.

The man-nature interdependence that appealed to Ikua could be captured in the morphology of their language. Arguably, words reflect through their mere form the deeper structure of the Inugguit worldview. If one takes the word for ‘sun’, heqineq, it is made up of the base heqi- (‘to splatter, to splash outward’) plus the affix –neq meaning the ‘action of’. Maclean (1990) noted that this kind of word formation expresses a way of thinking akin to the modern theory of ‘Big Bang’ which postulates a universe generated by an initial explosion and unceasing expansion. There is a clear holistic, organic approach to language and language acquisition, and the Inugguit like to remind you that their words are meaningless without context.

It is clear that there used to be an isomorphism between language and landscape in a place where ‘words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing from the general formlessness of the outside’ (Carpenter Reference Carpenter1973: 43). As in many societies (Parkin Reference Parkin2007: 39–53), wind, air and breath were intertwined semantically. Language was seen as ‘shaped breath’ (the words for ‘breath’, ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’ all come from the same stem, aniri-) (Carpenter Reference Carpenter1973: 50) and ‘breath’ was seen as synonymous with life because the souls of both animals and humans (anerhaaq) were equated with anuri (Merkur Reference Merkur1991: 35). In the first half of the twentieth century, when such animist thinking, taboo beliefs and shamanic language still prevailed, and when the bond to nature was even closer, the role of language would have been more evocative than it is today because it was inherent to a traditional belief system that was still just about in tact. Speaking would have thus indexed representations of nature and landscape central to the practice of shamanism, but this is no longer the case. Voice has resonance, but words have now lost their inherent, magical power evoked by Knud Rasmussen 100 years ago when words could be ‘traded’. Kleivan and Sonne (Reference Kleivan and Sonne1985: 9) report that it was possible to buy a ‘formula’ which was a string of words used for example in polar bear hunting. The formula increased the hunter's powers of observation.

The experience of sound

Even if shamanic and ritual language have long disappeared, words are for a group that is hyper-sensitive to sound, still as much sound as they are meaning, and the experience of the sound is important in itself. The old word for ‘November’ is tuhaartut which means ‘hearing news from the other camps’ and is a reference to the time when the sea ice used to form, the highway that connected all the Inugguit settlements along the coast. The significance of sound and hearing is obvious upon entering an Inugguaq home where one finds invariably the radio on for much of the day. Due to the size and inter-connectedness of the community, the voices on Kap York radio which broadcasts in Polar Eskimo do not appear as disembodied to the listeners. The familiar voice of the broadcaster and the nicknames of the radio personalities are indicative of linguistic intimacy, consciousness and presence; to have voice is to have agency (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs2003). The spoken words uttered in the dulcet, resonant voice of the broadcaster connote a sense of actuality. The local radio is a ‘circuit of kinship’ (Bessire and Fisher Reference Bessire and Fisher2012: 34) and the voice is a powerful metaphor because it can embody iconic properties and indicate particular subjectivities. Knowing the person behind the broadcaster's voice, the sound of the voice alone conjures up thoughts of kinship and belonging. His voice links dispersed listeners and the Inugguit take comfort in that sense of local intimacy and boundedness. It represents authenticity, immediacy and transparency which are assumed to inhere in the voice. The immediacy is important as a radio broadcaster must talk as if his listeners were sitting in the same room. They must conjure up the image of listeners when speaking. It is self-constructed talk projected under the gaze of the hearers (Goffmann Reference Goffman1981: 306–320).

Searles (Reference Searles2000: 248) does not consider the value of words or the role of radio, but describes Inuit society as consisting of monologues, commands and co-present periods of silence and shared experience that enable individuals to develop meaningful, complex relationships. With reference to ‘monologues’, he surely has in mind ‘storytelling’. Stories are related with eyes lowered and told using a distinctive ‘way of speaking’, an earthy, creaky voice that speaks in a slow, steady rhythm in an authoritative, un-interruptible tone. Faudree (Reference Faudree2014: 295) talks of how the ‘social potency of Mazatec is rooted in its musical properties’, its tonal structure and whistled register. If one were to identify the Inugguit linguistic source of social potency, it would be in the properties of the voice: the storyteller or the radio broadcaster. Listening to stories, sound becomes ‘an existential phenomenon in and of itself again’ (Stoller Reference Stoller1984: 569) because words are ‘events’ in a pseudo-oral-aural culture (Ong Reference Ong1967: 113). The reason for this is the written form is a different, codified language (standard West Greenlandic) and for the Inugguit the eye is subservient to the ear. The voice corresponds therefore to acoustic space alone, and not a string of linear morphemes running through the mind. For such a tiny, inter-related community, the breathy, aspirated voice embodies a special authority and synthesises feelings of belonging because it is known to and heard by all the members of the community, but perhaps also because hearing ‘registers force’ in a hunting community (Ong Reference Ong1967: 112).

Storytelling requires a mastery of the language's paralinguistic features; in the case of Polar Eskimo, a rich and never random repertoire of sighs and groans and a specific mix of intonation patterns and gestures accompanying particular words and phrases. Certain bundles of these features are used when one listens to a story being told: the particle ijaii has no specific lexical meaning, but is a back-channelling cue to the story-teller that the listener is engrossed in the story and that he should continue; a very soft, breathy and drawn out hunaa is a mild expression of surprise and a certain two-pitched low-high groan means ‘oh, I see. Is that the case?’ Storytellers are ‘memory systems’, but in storytelling it is the act of speaking in a ‘storied’ way that is as important as the content. According to Willerslev (Reference Willerslev2007: 165), storytelling is a ‘social, humanising occasion’ and in this society, the familiar heavy, nasal voice brings people together after the hunt. The storyteller's voice conjures up the Arctic environment outside from which the hunters are seeking refuge, sitting together and enjoying the warmth and the coziness of the hut.

The use of verbal and non-verbal language

On such occasions, it is the spoken word, but also the ‘non-talk’ in the pauses that represents the sense of a basic, communal, perceptual experience; the spoken word takes on meaning through local oral narratives and shared experience, but to understand this world requires a negotiation of the spoken and the unspoken. Two hunters meeting on the sea ice might say next to nothing to each other, brew a cup of tea and only then begin to exchange the news. Out hunting on the sea ice, standing at seal breathing holes or sitting in kayaks waiting for pods of narwhals, hunters would remain completely motionless and silent for 30 minutes or longer. A father will construct a sledge in silence with his son watching, but will not tell him how to do it. Children are seldom instructed to do anything and coercion of any kind appears not to exist. Knowledge is encoded in non-linguistic modes of Being-in-the-world (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1990). Engagement with things or beings produces knowledge, not language alone. Polar Eskimo is a metaphorically weak language with almost no proverbs, and is a community where ways of learning and knowledge are experiential. There is opposition to spoken instruction and like the western Apache (Basso, Reference Basso, Basso and Opler1971:159), the Inugguit shun words in disputes in which tension, ambiguity and danger are heightened; in such a situation, the Inugguit subscribe to the Wittgensteinian belief that linguistic constructs place boundaries on thinking. As we might remember, Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Translators Pears and McGuinness1978: 5.6) said: ‘The limits of my language means the limits of my world’. ‘Loose’ talk might also be equated with drunkenness.

Silence does not appear to be structured or ‘regulated’ as it is in Athabaskan communities where every person has the potential to have power, and because that power might be used against one another, members of the community wish to avoid offending anyone (Black-Rogers Reference Black-Rogers, Darnell and Foster1988: 45). In northwest Greenland, social values and norms are closely tied to the amount of talk vs. silence that is prescribed and the long silences which characterise so many Inugguit encounters do not tend to indicate tension or disapproval, but represent instead the opposite: positive co-presence. But, silence is ambiguous axiologically; in a context of male-male banter for instance, hunters might become frustrated if I were silent, Stiffi nipaitsoq, naung-ajoq ‘what a shame that Stiffi (my nickname) is silent (literally without voice)’. An outsider has to learn quickly when to talk and when to remain silent, and in such situations a male stranger is expected to contribute to the repartee. A person with good verbal skills was seen as somebody who could bring a sense of light amusement to the conversation. Laughter is at the centre of any male-male encounter where mockery, teasing and sexual innuendo might be used to enforce social solidarity. Humour strategies amongst the Inugguit are very personal in orientation, often explicitly so. As with the Gbaya of the Central African Republic, silence for the Inugguit is considered to be as effective as speech, but that does not make them a taciturn people (Samarin Reference Samarin1965: 117).

Having said that, the Inugguit ‘way of speaking’ is also characterised by what Searles (Reference Searles2000: 248) calls ‘anti-conversation’. Questions by ‘outsiders’ are typically ignored, direct eye contact is very minimal and meaning is created through gestures, silence and situational co-presence, as is the case with the Athabaskans in the Yukon (Cruickshank Reference Cruickshank1998: 70). Traditionally, it was believed that a stare or even a glance could penetrate another, instilling there, for good or evil, some alien spirit (Carpenter, Reference Carpenter1973: 131).

The Inugguit norms of face-to-face engagement (Goffman Reference Goffman1966: 193) and approach to co-presence are diametrically opposed to the western ones and can make ethnographic encounters problematic. Silence is not seen as ‘negation’ or ‘non-talk’ (Samarin Reference Samarin1965: 115), but instead it is non-verbal communication just as gesture is. As with the Amish (Jaworski Reference Jaworski1992: 23), silence takes over some functions of verbal formulas; silence replaces speech in the most verbal act of greeting and is sometimes used when meeting strangers. Hostetler (Reference Hostetler1993: 389) shows how silence in Amish society is an active force, not a sign of introspection. For them ‘absolutes do not exist in words’.

After an hour or so and with very few words spoken, hunters might suddenly get up at the same time (as if there had been a non-conversational, paranormal prompt) and go down to the shore to their boats. These ‘signifiers’ which are not expressed verbally can act as a form of conversation. The same might be said of ‘dream-sharing’ which used to have a strong collective and social dimension in Inugguit society (Tedlock Reference Tedlock and Tedlock1987: 105–132).

In most encounters, speech is used in a careful, measured way because it is believed that words can do harm, and it is easier to undo silence than it is words. A local healer told me that ‘spoken language is a prison’, oqauheq parnaerussiviuho; (literally ‘spoken language locks up’), (Fortescue and others Reference Fortescue, Jacobson and Kaplan2010: 274): a Wittgensteinian description once again by which he meant that verbalising limits thought and potentially complicates unnecessarily a situation. Their antiessentialist philosophy dictates that some things cannot be known, that one cannot arrive at a final definition (not through words at least) and thus the response to most questions is nalorhorruiga (‘I do not know’). Words are not used as tools of debate or as a means to talk around things. Instead, words indicate a speaker's intentionality and possess agency of their own. Up until seventy years ago, conflicts were settled via drum-duels or satirical singing matches, a form of public ridicule based on words, where the loser was the one who was most insulted (Birket-Smith Reference Birket-Smith1924: 398; Kleivan and Sonne 1995: 5; Rink 1875: 36). Although they have no role to play in conflict resolution, today, on the winter solstice, disguised Epiphanic figures, mitaartut who are effectively symbolic ‘strangers’, enter people's homes and are to remain silent. They symbolise the potential threat posed by strangers and supernatural figures. If they speak, they risk making fools of themselves. Words are shunned, and aggressive gestures are used instead.

It is imperative to understand the dynamics of this ‘non-talk’ in which gesture plays an important part. Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty and Smith2002: 213) said that language is gesture and that could be no more true than in this community in which it is facial gesture and voice quality that lend the spoken utterance its ‘illocutionary force’ (Austin Reference Austin, Urmson and Sbisà1962: 100). Raised eyebrows means ‘yes’, pinching one's nose at the top means ‘no’, the ubiquitous shrug of the shoulders means simply ‘maybe’. The tightening of the lower lip against the bottom row of teeth so that the tops of the teeth are showing with the jaw moving back and forth laterally in a quick, rolling motion expresses ‘I am teasing you’. Non-verbal conversation is characterised by a distinct commonality of facial expressions. As well as these ‘culture specific gestural substitutes for language’ (Haviland Reference Hostetler2004: 198), gestures are used constantly to show navigation routes, to mime geographical features and ice formations, to summon dogs and to describe a woman's body shape.