Wandering Spirits: Loneliness and Longing in Greenland by Janne Flora (review)

In Wandering Spirits Janne Flora explores the complementary roles of loneliness and longing in a Greenlandic community, effectively demonstrating that anthropology should more fully engage with ideas about loneliness and its role in mediating social relationships. The book begins, appropriately, with a scene from early in the author's fieldwork. She has been invited to a kaffemik (coffee party), a celebration of the birthday of the hostess's daughter, Naja. Awkwardly, still unable to speak much Greenlandic, Flora appears for some time to be the only guest—even the birthday girl is absent, away at school in a larger town. Eventually, other family members arrive to enliven the party and mark the important day. Flora remarks, "[T]hey all celebrated Naja's birthday as if she were there herself. Or perhaps it was because she wasn't there?" (4, emphasis in original).

With this vignette, Flora introduces the key theme of her study, a nuanced consideration of deeply entwined ideas of kinship and relatedness, loneliness and naming, absence and return, suicide and belonging, in a tightly knit community she calls Illorsuit (not the actual Illorsuit, now abandoned) in Qeqertarsuaq Tunua (Disko Bay), Greenland. Such descriptions of interactions and events during her fieldwork serve as counterpoints to concise but wide-ranging discussions of the ways these subjects have been addressed in the anthropological and philosophical literature, drawing her experience into dialogue with these perspectives.

As she describes in the preface, Flora's initial aim for her fieldwork was to understand better the problem of suicide in a culture where this type of death is sometimes described as an epidemic. From the beginning she cast her net broadly, as she writes, "[I] wanted to explore the problem of suicide (not the act of suicide itself) by looking at everything else around it" (ix). Ultimately, guided in part by a thoughtful consideration of her interactions with people in the community, she shifted her research to focus on the tension and relationship between kinship and loneliness. Over the course of the book, Flora deftly develops a compelling argument for anthropologists to broaden their gaze beyond kinship, to include its other side, loneliness. Certainly among Greenlandic Inuit, and by extension other Inuit groups, Flora makes a strong case for interrogating the role of loneliness, or at least its potential, in social interaction.

Following the introductory scene, in Chapter 1, "The Return," Flora introduces the study, providing historical context for the colonial roots of contemporary Greenlandic society and a discussion of the importance of casual visiting (pulaarneq) as a way to maintain social relations. She also highlights the importance of naming, in particular the practice of giving children the name of a recently deceased relative. This act, distinct from reincarnation, establishes significant ties of kinship between the newborn, the deceased, and most significantly, the surviving family of the deceased. The chapter concludes with a brief but significant reconsideration of Mauss's (1979 [1906]) classic Seasonal Variation of the Eskimo, emphasizing the intertwined nature of absence and return, as well as the deep spiritual significance and different but important sociality of summer life on the land in contrast to life in traditional winter villages and modern settlements.

In Chapter 2, "Loneliness," Flora addresses the complex web of ideas around the concept of loneliness, generally neglected in anthropology but grounded in Western philosophy and in Greenlandic thought. Loneliness is linked to both physical and/or social absence of relatives, to travelling or living away from the community, and to absence through death, not a truly permanent absence, but one that is ameliorated when the deceased returns along with their name, newly bestowed on an infant. Flora ends the chapter with a thoughtful discussion of the importance of the land (nuna), and of being on the land. She effectively contrasts the common Western stereotype of the Arctic as a vast empty wilderness, fraught with danger, with the Greenlandic Inuit understanding of the land as a place of beauty, bounty, and healing. Loneliness in that context...