Style and the Double Mind in Inupiat Eskimo Traditional Performance

Style and the Double Mind in InupiatEskimo TraditionalPerformance Edith Turner RECENTLY THERE HAVE been revivals of pre-contact rituals on the North Slope of Alaska. This was a surprise to me, the researcher on the spot, for I had been sunk in the everyday world of the modern Christianized Inupiat on the North Slope studying Eskimo healing, and had settled in my mind that nothing could be revived. Authentic African ritual was surviving, as I have reported in PerformingArts Journal ("Zambia's Kankanga Dances: The Changing Life of Ritual," PAJ 30, 1987), but I had given up hope of Eskimo ritual apart from the whaling festival. Now, as the revivals arose, I began to perceive in them and in the so-called secular dancing an expression of a kind of double mind consisting of the everyday secular mode, which I shall call Order One, and the released or climactic, Order Two. The two showed different forms of consciousness, the latter appearing to spring from what the Eskimos know as the spirit nature of existence. The release has to be invited, conjured by hesitant steps-a process seen in the soft and loud stanzas of the songs and in many episodes of the Messenger Feast, which was the principal of the revived rituals I am discussing. The Inupiat Eskimos are hunters. They contrive to catch whales for their food, seeking these fifty foot monsters in sixteen foot skin boats, knowing the uncertainty of the enterprise, and understanding from their personal experience the need for a collective spirit for its success, and also the need for connectedness not only with each other but in a mystical way 87 with the animal itself The performances of these people speak strongly of such a level of relationship. But the level is not easily won. The forms of performance tell the story of that difficult approach more clearly than words can do. In this article' I attempt merely to give a picture of the performances, hinting (which is the Eskimo way, not the Western way) where we encounter the signs of the other level, the other mind, the double of the ordinary, much as Artaud identified it. Charlie Kinneaveauk was showing me the Kaviatchaq dance of the First Full Moon. I was in his house at Point Hope in a snow storm; it was March 1989. Charlie put on a simple mask made of whale baleen, with walrus ivory eyes and two snowy owl's feathers stuck out in opposite diagonals above his head. "We have a puppet, this big." He indicated a length of about 18 inches. "It goes along the ceiling, see, on those strings, and halfway along is what we have here, something like a seal bladder blown up." He showed a large styrofoam ball. "The puppet needs six strings and twelve men to work it properly. The puppet is an Eskimo person. We made it out of baleen and some thin wood from kerosene boxes. It has its legs jointed with rubber. See, it starts dancing like this." He leaned over wearing the mask. He did nothing for a while. Then he twitched his right foot. He twitched an arm; then his head and both arms, then he jerked his head and whole trunk at an angle to the right, then suddenly to the left, glaring out at nothing with a surprised grin. A comic. (In 1947, the anthropologist Froelich Rainey, in The Whale Hunters of Tigara,described this "slow-getting-quicker" dance.) Normally men would be drumming and singing in the brisk syncopated beat of Eskimo music. Now on the other wall appeared an animal, a marmot-it must have nosed out of a hole in the wall. It was quiescent on the strings. As Charlie sang and manipulated strings it jerked a little forward. Then a little again. It came across in tiny syncopated movements to the rhythm, passing the bladder, arriving at the opposite wall, and then its furry body contorted strangely and it doubled back on itself to take the return journey. Its legs hung down moving with the motion; the legs bore no paws, they consisted merely of hanging fur which moved. Its real animal nose...