The Shackles of Tradition - Franz Boas (1858-1942)Central Television's major documentary series looks at the first anthropologists to stop 'armchair theorising' and go out to live among the peoples who so interested them. In 1883, a young German scientist - Franz Boas - arrived in the Canadian Arctic to map the coastline and indulge in his new interest the study of other cultures. As he charted Baffin Island, he recorded the lives and ideas of the Eskimo who helped him with his work. He became so absorbed by the common features that unite humans everywhere that he made the study of culture his life's work and did fieldwork in both the Arctic and the North West Coast of America among Indian tribes. Considered to be the founding father of American anthropology, Boas taught at Columbia University, encouraging his students to follow his example by actually working in the field.
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Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational FilmsThis link opens in a new windowEthnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
KanopyThis link opens in a new windowKanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
by JD Kotula
Last Updated Jan 31, 2024
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Background Sources
The Last Imaginary Place: a human history of the Arctic world by Robert McGheeThe Arctic of towering icebergs and midnight sun, of flaming auroras and endless winter nights, has long provoked flights of the imagination. Now, in "The Last Imaginary Place," renowned archeologist Robert McGhee lifts the veil to reveal the true Arctic world. Based on thirty years of work with native peoples of the Arctic and travel in the region, McGhee s account dispels notions of the frozen land as an exotic, remote world that exists apart from civilization. Between the frigid reality and lurid fantasy lies McGhee s true interest, the people who throughout human history have called the Arctic home. He paints a vivid portrait of Viking farmers, entrepreneurial Inuit, and Western explorers who have been seduced by the natural wealth and haunting beauty of this land. From lively accounts of fur trading, ivory hunting, and whaling to white-knuckle tales of the first, doomed expeditions, McGhee takes the reader on a whirlwind journey across this disorienting, dreamlike terrain that has fascinated mankind for centuries. In prose infused by his position as curator of Arctic archaeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization which has taken him to sites in several countries McGhee demolishes some persistent illusions about the white North . . . evocative. "Times Literary Supplement" A] compelling account . . . McGhee] believes that the Arctic is not so much a region as a dream what he sees as a dream of a unique, attractive world . . . An archaeologist who has spent thirty years there, the author lets his love for the region shine through on every page. "Booklist " McGhee displays the powerful attractions of the top of the world . . . his] prose . . . sparkles like frost in the midnight sun. "Financial Times" McGhee has written a sensitive, fascinating and extremely important book. "Canadian Geographic""
Location: Mugar Stacks G606 .M39 2007
Publication Date: 2007
Uqalurait: An oral history of Nunavut by John Bennett; Susan Diana Mary RowleyUqalurait, pointed snowdrifts formed by Arctic blizzards, 'would tell us which direction to go in, ' says elder Mariano Aupilarjuk. This oral history, guided by the traditional knowledge of Inuit elders from across Nunavut, also follows the uqalurait, with thousands of quotes from elders on a wide range of subjects
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2004
The Viking Age: a Reader by R. Andrew McDonaldIn assembling, translating, and arranging over a hundred primary source readings, Somerville and McDonald successfully illuminate the Vikings and their world for twenty-first-century students and instructors. The diversity of the Viking Age is brought to life through the range of sources presented, and the geographical and chronological coverage of these readings. The Norse translations, many of them new to this collection, are straightforward and easily accessible, and the chapter introductions contextualize the readings while allowing the sources to speak for themselves. The second edition of this popular reader has been revised and reorganized into fourteen chapters. Nearly twenty sources have been added, including material on children, games and entertainment, and runic inscriptions, as well as new readings on the martyrdom of Alfeah, the life of Saint Findan, and the martyrdom of Saint Edmund.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2014
The Idea of North by Peter DavidsonNorth is the point we look for on a map to orient ourselves. It is also the direction taken throughout history by the adventurous, the curious, the solitary, and the foolhardy. Based in the North himself, Peter Davidson, in The Idea of North, explores the very concept of "north" through its many manifestations in painting, legend, and literature. Tracing a northbound route from rural England—whose mild climate keeps it from being truly northern—to the wind-shorn highlands of Scotland, then through Scandinavia and into the desolate, icebound Arctic Circle, Davidson takes the reader on a journey from the heart of society to its most far-flung outposts. But we never fully leave civilization behind; rather, it is our companion on his alluring ramble through the north in art and story. Davidson presents a north that is haunted by Moomintrolls and the ghosts of long-lost Arctic explorers but at the same time, somehow, home to the fragile beauty of a Baltic midsummer evening. He sets the Icelandic Sagas, Nabokov's snowy fictional kingdom of Zembla, and Hans Christian Andersen's cryptic, forbidding Snow Queen alongside the works of such artists as Eric Ravilious, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Andy Goldsworthy, demonstrating how each illuminates a different facet of humanity's relationship to the earth's most dangerous and austere terrain. Through the lens of Davidson's easy erudition and astonishing range of reference, we come to see that the north is more a goal than a place, receding always before us, just over the horizon, past the last town, off the edge of the map. True north may be unreachable, but The Idea of North brings intrepid readers closer than ever before.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2005-04-15
Canada and the Idea of North by Sherrill E. GraceCanada and the Idea of North examines the ways in which Canadians have defined themselves as a northern people in their literature, art, music, drama, history, geography, politics, and popular culture. From the Franklin Mystery to the comic book superheroine Nelvana, Glenn Gould's documentaries, the paintings of Lawren Harris, and Molson beer ads, the idea of the north has been central to the Canadian imagination. Sherrill Grace argues that Canadians have always used ideas of Canada-as-North to promote a distinct national identity and national unity. In a penultimate chapter - "The North Writes Back" - Grace presents newly emerging northern voices and shows how they view the long tradition of representing the North by southern activists, artists, and scholars. With the recent creation of Nunavut, increasing concern about northern ecosystems and social challenges, and renewed attention to Canada's role as a circumpolar nation, Canada and the Idea of North shows that nordicity still plays an urgent and central role in Canada at the start of the twenty-first century.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2002
The Dream of the North: A Cultural History to 1920 by Peter FjågesundNorthern Europe and North America have dominated the world stage for more than two centuries. Using a wide range of sources, this book provides the first coherent account from a multi-national perspective of the ideas and perceptions that, from the Renaissance onwards, fuelled the North's rise to prominence, and enabled it to rival the traditional cultural and political hegemony of the South. This includes not only the fascinating conquest of the polar regions, but also the religious upheaval of the Reformation, the changing view of nature engendered by Romanticism, and, not least, the revival of ancient Nordic and Celtic culture. Finally, the book offers an indispensable historical background to current events in the Far North, where the past and the future meet in a complex web of dramatic environmental concerns, the exploitation of natural resources, and the strategies of politics and commerce.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2014
Guides to the Literature
Stories in a New Skin: approaches to Inuit literature by Keavy MartinIn an age where southern power-holders look north and see only vacant polar landscapes, isolated communities, and exploitable resources, it is important to note that the Inuit homeland encompasses extensive philosophical, political, and literary traditions. Stories in a New Skin is a seminal text that explores these Arctic literary traditions and, in the process, reveals a pathway into Inuit literary criticism. Author Keavy Martin considers writing, storytelling, and performance from a range of genres and historical periods - the classic stories and songs of Inuit oral traditions, life writing, oral histories, and contemporary fiction, poetry and film - and discusses the ways in which these texts constitute an autonomous literary tradition. She draws attention to the interconnection between language, form and context and illustrates the capacity of Inuit writers, singers and storytellers to instruct diverse audiences in the appreciation of Inuit texts. Although Eurowestern academic contexts and literary terminology are a relatively foreign presence in Inuit territory, Martin builds on the inherent adaptability and resilience of Inuit genres in order to foster greater southern awareness of a tradition whose audience has remained primarily northern.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2012
Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Culture by Renee HulanIn this title, Renee Hulan disputes the notion that the north is a source of distinct collective identity for Canadians. Through a synthesis of critical, historical and theoretical approaches to northern subjects in literary studies, she challenges the epistemology used to support this idea. By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depict northern peoples and places, Hulan provides an account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endura
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2002
Strange Things : the malevolent North in Canadian literature by Margaret AtwoodThe internationally celebrated author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, Margaret Atwood is one of Canada's most esteemed literary figures. She has won many literary awards, her work has been translated into twenty-two languages, her novel The Handmaid's Tale was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter, and her most recent book, The Robber Bride, was on the New York Times bestseller list (in cloth and paper) for months. In Strange Things, Atwood turns to the literary imagination of her native land, as she explores the mystique of the Canadian North and its impact on the work of writers such as Robertson Davies, Alice Munroe, and Michael Ondaatje. Here readers will delight in Atwood's stimulating discussion of stories and storytelling, myths and their recreations, fiction and fact, and the weirdness of nature. In particular, she looks at three legends of the Canadian North. She describes the mystery of the disastrous Franklin expedition in which 135 people disappeared into the uncharted North. She examines the "Grey Owl syndrome" of white writers who turn primitive. And she looks at the terrifying myth of the cannibalistic, ice-hearted Wendigo--the gruesome Canadia snow monster who can spot the ice in your own heart and turn you into a Wendigo. Atwood shows how these myths have fired the literary imagination of her native Canada and have deeply colored essential components of its literature. And in a moving, final chapter, she discusses how a new generation of Canadian women writers have adapted the imagery of the North to explore contemporary themes of gender, the family, and sexuality. Written with the delightful style and narrative grace which will be immediately familiar to all of Atwood's fans, this superbly crafted and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.
Location: Mugar Stacks PR9185.2 .A95 1995
Publication Date: 1996
Death in a Cold Climate: a guide to Scandinavian crime fiction by Barry ForshawBarry Forshaw, the UK's principal crime fiction expert,presents a celebration and analysis ofthe Scandinavian crime genre, from Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Martin Beck series through Henning Mankell's Wallander to Stieg Larsson's demolition of the Swedish Social Democratic ideal in the publishing phenomenon The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo .
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2012
Literary Biography
Contemporary AuthorsThis link opens in a new windowA bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields.
Biography (Gale in Context)This link opens in a new windowBiography In Context offers biographical information about historically significant figures as well as present-day newsmakers. It includes reference content alongside magazine and journal articles, primary sources, videos, audio podcasts, and images.
Writing Arctic disaster : authorship and exploration by Adriana CraciunHow did the Victorian fixation on the disastrous John Franklin expedition transform our understanding of the Northwest Passage and the Arctic? Today we still tend to see the Arctic and the Northwest Passage through nineteenth-century perspectives, which focused on the discoveries of individual explorers, their illustrated books, visual culture, imperial ambitions, and high-profile disasters. However, the farther back one looks, the more striking the differences appear in how Arctic exploration was envisioned. Writing Arctic Disaster uncovers a wide range of exploration cultures: from the manuscripts of secretive corporations like the Hudson's Bay Company, to the nationalist Admiralty and its innovative illustrated books, to the searches for and exhibits of disaster relics in the Victorian era. This innovative study reveals the dangerous afterlife of this Victorian conflation of exploration and disaster, in the geopolitical significance accruing around the 2014 discovery of Franklin's ship Erebus in the Northwest Passage.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2016
This Cold Heaven: seven seasons in Greenland by Gretel EhrlichFor the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine. Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.” This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.
Location: Mugar Stacks G743 .E47 2003
Publication Date: 2003
The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage by Andrew LambertAndrew Lambert, a leading authority on naval history, reexamines the life of Sir John Franklin and his final, doomed Arctic voyage. Franklin was a man of his time, fascinated, even obsessed with, the need to explore the world; he had already mapped nearly two-thirds of the northern coastline of North America when he undertook his third Arctic voyage in 1845, at the age of fifty-nine. His two ships were fitted with the latest equipment; steam engines enabled them to navigate the pack ice, and he and his crew had a three-year supply of preserved and tinned food and more than one thousand books. Despite these preparations, the voyage ended in catastrophe: the ships became imprisoned in the ice, and the men were wracked by disease and ultimately wiped out by hypothermia, scurvy, and cannibalism. Franklin’s mission was ostensibly to find the elusive North West Passage, a viable sea route between Europe and Asia reputed to lie north of the American continent. Lambert shows for the first time that there were other scientific goals for the voyage and that the disaster can only be understood by reconsidering the original objectives of the mission. Franklin, commonly dismissed as a bumbling fool, emerges as a more important and impressive figure, in fact, a hero of navigational science.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2009
I May Be Some Time : Ice and the English Imagination by Francis SpuffordFrancis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination..." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional history of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of the polar explorers as they headed toward destinies like Terra Nova. Serving up a heady brew of Captain Perry, Jane Eyre, gastronomic obsessions with iced deserts, and the daily lives of the Eskimos, Spufford treats the reader to one of the most satisfying and imaginative contemporary works dealing with exploration and human need.
Location: Mugar Stacks G580 .S66 1997
Publication Date: 1997
Martin Frobisher : Elizabethan privateer by James McDermottAdventurous and wilful, the swashbuckling Martin Frobisher was both a brave sea-commander who served Elizabeth I with distinction and a privateer who single-mindedly pursued his own interests. This highly entertaining biography provides the first complete picture of the life and exploits of Frobisher, from his voyages in search of the fabled Northwest Passage to his courageous resistance to the Spanish Armada and his activities as privateer and sometime pirate. The book explores Frobisher's vigorous personality and its manifestation in the turbulence of his career and his impact on others. It also illuminates the robust world of maritime enterprise in the sixteenth century, when the shifting objectives of the Elizabethan age brought together felons, merchants, and great officers of state. James McDermott, a leading authority on Martin Frobisher and the Northwest Passage, offers a riveting account of the explorer, based on all extant manuscript and documentary sources. McDermott sets aside the distortions of Frobisher's popular reputation as a hero and offers instead a richly detailed portrait of a fascinating but flawed man whose ceaseless search for wealth and fame defined his ext