A kind of proximity to nature, the spirit world, the absence of boundaries where the human and the animal engaged one another in various guises of transference and inhabiting the physical body. Combinations of profound science fiction with ancient pagan ritual. Enough to give Baruch Spinoza wet dreams and Jean Jacques Rousseau a fresh spear for which to skewer Voltaire. Alternately romanticized as sophisticated noble decent folk “just trying to make a living” and brutal primitives unencumbered by the soft cushion of normative religion and ready to use your immediate family as whale bait should you fall under the evil gaze. Unfathomable violence mixed with infinite complexity; insane superstition mixed infinite spiritual wisdom. Not exactly docile little cuddlies to be sold a bag of ice cubes.
As in most hunter-gather societies, patriarchy is predominant and the woman is war booty, barterable, lended and rented, sold and sometimes left on an ice floe to meet the great polar bear in the sky….
Chin stripes served multiple purposes in social contexts. Most notably, they were tattooed on the chin as part of the ritual of social maturity, a signal to men that a woman had reached puberty. Chin patterns also served to protect women during enemy raids. For example, fighting among the Siberians and St. Lawrence Islanders took place in close quarters, namely in various forms of semi-subterranean dwellings called nenglu. Raiding parties usually attacked in the early morning hours, at or before first light, hoping to catch their enemies while asleep. Women, valued as important “commodities” during these times, were highly prized for their many abilities. Not being distinguishable from the men by their clothing in the dim light of the nenglu, their chin patterns made them more recognizable as females and their lives would be spared. Once captured, however, they were bartered off as slaves….
…More generally, the chin stripe aesthetic was important to the Diomede Islanders living in Bering Strait. Ideally, thin lines tattooed onto the chin were valuable indicators for choosing a wife, according to anthropologist Sergei Bogojavlensky :
It was believed that a girl who smiled and laughed too much would cause the lines to spread and get thick. A girl with a full set of lines on the chin, all of them thin, was considered to be a good prospect as a wife, for she was clearly serious and hard working.Read More:http://www.larskrutak.com/articles/Arctic/
And women as bait both sexual and animal: A full set of lines was not only a powerful physical statement of the ability to endure great pain, but also an attestation to a woman’s powers of “animal” attraction. For example, in the St. Lawrence and Siberian Yupik area of the early 20th century, women paint-ed and tattooed their faces in ritual ceremonies in order to imitate, venerate, honor, and/or attract those animals that “will bring good fortune” to the family. And in an odd twist at least with respect to Heineken’s sexist beer advertisement on the hunted: Waldemar Bogoras added, “[i]t is a mistake to think that women are weaker than men in hunting-pursuits,” since as a man wanders in vain about the wilderness, searching, women “that sit by the lamp are really strong, for they know how to call the game to the shore.”
…Moreover, it was through the performance of domestic activities – butchering, cooking (turning hunted meat into edible “food”) and sewing (creating sturdy and beautiful clothing that attracted game) – that a woman’s ritual position as “wife the hunter” became solidified in Arctic culture ….
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