Malaurie, Jean

New York. 1982. Dutton. 1st Printing. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0525030522. 608 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Mary Gale Moyes. keywords: Eskimo Greenland Anthropology. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In 1950, Jean Malaurie was granted permission to conduct an expedition around the North Pole. There he would be living among the northernmost people of the world, the Polar Eskimos of Thule, Greenland. The men of Thule were a race apart. Through geographical isolation and the social planning of Greenlandic Eskimo explorer Knud Rasmussen, they had managed for decades to maintain an advanced, self-sufficient Inuit culture independent of their colonial masters, the Danes. They were truly kings: strong individualists, heroic hunters. Yet they continued to maintain a form of pure communalism, sharing food, property, labor - even offspring and sexual mates. Thievery was practically unknown among them. In all of Greenland there was no jail. This is the society into which Jean Malaurie was granted intimate entry for one historic year. His experience was the last of a kind, for at the end of that year the U.S. government built a huge military base in the middle of Thule Eskimo territory. The isolation was over: the modern world bad won. Rarely has a book come to the English-speaking public with such advance status: translated into sixteen languages. with encomiums from adventurers, naturalists, and scholars alike, with worldwide sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Some readers have hailed the anecdotal side of Eskimo life depicted here; others the harrowing adventures such as the crossing to Canada by dogsled; still others the profound understanding of the Inuit character or the stirring account of Eskimo regeneration in the seventies and eighties. Jean Malaurie's portrait is not only a lesson and inspiration for the 100,000 Eskimos in the United States. Canada, Greenland, and the USSR but a human model for all mankind. inventory #8547 ISBN: 0525030522.