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"This book offers a portrait of early ethnographic work in the American Arctic, with a focus on understanding the mutual constitution of the Inuit and their early ethnographers. It draws mainly on a rich repository of written testimonies from the early twentieth century, the 'great ethnographic period' when new scholarly interest in the region took off. Supplementing the movements and observations of whalers, traders, and missionaries, the early chroniclers offered new knowledge of Inuit life. Although their descriptions of the Inuit bear the marks of their time, the texts have left a deep mark on later developments and contributed to a long-lasting view of human life in the Arctic. The chapters show the infiltration of lives and landscapes, of thoughts and materials, of Inuit and ethnographers. The book will be relevant to anthropologists as well as historians, geographers, and others with an interest the Arctic region and Indigenous studies"--

The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage to Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates in Europe

Cultural diversity, as expressed for instance in different normative orders or legal cultures, poses both a practical and a theoretical challenge to the idea of universal human rights. In the present volume, the authors seek to address and contain this challenge with a view to the changing nature of the global society. While 'culture' is sometimes signposted as an obstacle to human rights on the ground, this volume suggests that in so far as the global 'culture of human rights' is primarily seen as a formal and institutional order based on a particular view of equal human worth, local cultures cannot trump it. The main point is that the culture of human rights is inclusive of all and must maintain a standard by which all peoples and cultures can measure their own performances. Further, and as demonstrated in the present volume from a range of disciplines such as law, literature, history and anthropology, culture is not a mental prison but a particular outlook upon the world, for ever changing in response to new experiences and insights

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Chapter I The Quest for Universality: An Introduction -- Chapter II Conviction and Critique: Addressing the Sceptic -- Chapter III Legal and Functional Universality -- Chapter IV To Follow a Rule: Rights and Responsibilities Revisited -- Chapter V Universal Human Rights: Between the Local and the Global -- Chapter VI Instant Paradigm Shifts: Globalising Human Rights -- Chapter VII The African Charter: Contextual Universality -- Chapter VIII Legal Pluralism in the Human Rights Universe -- Chapter IX Limits to Universality: Questions from Asia -- Chapter X World Religions, World Values: In Dialogue with the Bible -- Chapter XI Universal Human Rights: An Unfinished Project -- List of Contributors -- Index.

Located in Northwest Greenland, the Thule region is a remarkable frontier zone. This article focusses on the undecided nature of the frontier in both time and space. The article explores the unstable ground upon which 'resources' emerge as such. The case is made in three analytical parts: The first discusses the notion of commons and the implicit issue of spatiality. The second shows how the region's living resources were perceived and poses a question of sustainability. The third centres on the Arctic as a 'contact zone'; a place for colonial encounters and a meeting ground between human and nonhuman agents.

AbstractIn 2009, Greenland obtained self-government, terminating Danish supremacy, which had taken many forms over the centuries. This article analyses significant moments in Greenlandic-Danish relations by unpacking distinct contact zones that have emerged through the many encounters between locals and newcomers. Contact zones are always emplaced and create their own logic, which is not always easily readable as "colonialism" in the sense of appropriating lands and extracting surplus. While wrongs may have been perpetrated and ill-informed actions towards the inhabitants taken, relations between Greenland and Denmark illustrate how "colonialism" is neither uniform nor scalable. The analytical focus on colonial moments stresses the nonlinearity of colonial relations and allows for a subtler understanding of the postcolonial remains.