Mud and Blubber

Voyage to Greenland: A Personal Initiation into Anthropology By Frederica de Laguna Norton, 285 pp., $9.95 Frederica de Laguna’s father was to write her in 1929 about her fiancé, D.: “You must not forget that his career must necessarily take precedence over yours. It is he who will have the responsibility of supporting the family and with that responsibility go some clearly defined rights. Of course it is his duty to consider your interests and your happiness in this and every other decision and no doubt he will do so. But the ultimate responsibility in the matter is up to him.”

How quaint that sounds in the Liberated Seventies. Yet the daughter to whom that concerned father was writing was even then—with his permission —spending the summer with a middle-aged Danish anthropologist and a handful of Eskimos on a godforsaken island above the Arctic Circle in Greenland, trying through digs there to establish a connection between the Eskimos in Arctic Canada and the great Thule culture of northwest Greenland.

PL

About the Author

Priscilla L. Buckley

Featured Tags

Voyage to Greenland: A Personal Initiation into Anthropology By Frederica de Laguna Norton, 285 pp., $9.95 Frederica de Laguna’s father was to write her in 1929 about her fiancé, D.: “You must not forget that his career must necessarily take precedence over yours. It is he who will have the responsibility of supporting the family and with that responsibility go some clearly defined rights. Of course it is his duty to consider your interests and your happiness in this and every other decision and no doubt he will do so. But the ultimate responsibility in the matter is up to him.”

How quaint that sounds in the Liberated Seventies. Yet the daughter to whom that concerned father was writing was even then—with his permission —spending the summer with a middle-aged Danish anthropologist and a handful of Eskimos on a godforsaken island above the Arctic Circle in Greenland, trying through digs there to establish a connection between the Eskimos in Arctic Canada and the great Thule culture of northwest Greenland.