The Eskimos: A Study in Adaptation to Environment...A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University, in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
New Haven: 1930. [5],494 leaves, plus various additions and insertions. Large quarto. Contemporary black buckram, gilt titles to front cover and spine. Moderate edge wear and rubbing to boards, minor soiling. Very good. Item #4178
An impressive production on the adaptation of Inuit peoples in Alaska and other Arctic regions by Edward Moffat Weyer, Jr. of Yale University, being a working typescript of his graduate dissertation submitted in 1930. A pencil note on the front free endpaper notes it as a duplicate, but it is very likely a unique draft of Weyer's thesis. The text includes numerous original manuscript edits, portions of new text pasted over or pinned over certain sections, updated pages paper-clipped to bound portions of the same text, and sometimes with sections of the work struck through and replaced with inserted typed pages. The work is presented in thirteen chapters ranging from "Position of Eskimos Among Peoples of the World" to studies of the Inuit habitat, diet, natural resources, "Intertribal Relations," communalism, property rights, and more. Two chapters of the work detail the "Influence of Geographical Conditions on Mode of Life" and one focuses on "bodily adjustments" of the Inuits to factors such as the weather and climate. This latter focus on climate conditions on the Inuit peoples provide an interesting opportunity to study climate change in the region as presented in 1930. The text is supplemented with numerous maps, charts, diagrams, and tables of data.
Edward Moffat Weyer, Jr. was a pioneering anthropologist who studied indigenous peoples in Alaska, the Arctic, Brazil, and Mexico. Dr. Weyer went on to become director of the School of American Research, specializing in the research of indigenous populations in the Arctic and American tropics; he also edited Natural History magazine and is credited as being the first outsider to visit the Chavante (or Shavante) Indians. Weyer published numerous books on indigenous peoples, including the present work. In a naturally somewhat different form, the present work was published as The Eskimos: Their Environment and Folkways by Yale in 1932. As such, the present thesis provides a chance not only to study Weyer's work on the Inuit peoples, but compare versions of his text up to and including the published edition.
As with his groundbreaking visit to the Chavante peoples, Weyer was no armchair anthropologist. According to the opening paragraph of Weyer's "Digest of Conclusions" which opens the present text: "This dissertation differs from all previous studies of the Eskimos in that it embraces all the groups or tribes. In it are combined the findings of all investigators, including the information gathered by the author as Anthropologist of the Stoll-McCracken Arctic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History." The Stoll-McCracken Arctic Expedition visited the Aleutian Islands, Bering Strait, and other Arctic regions in 1928. Writing in The New York Times prior to their departure, expedition leader Harold McCracken said their mission would take them "into the Arctic from the West Coast of America in search of mummies, believed to be remnants of the first men who emigrated from Asia to the North American Continent. This quest will take the expedition to Alaska and through the chain of the Aleutian Islands, the stepping stones by which it is supposed the first human beings crossed over from their Asiatic homes to the unpeopled shores of America." The expedition was a great success, with contemporary newspapers reporting "the find of the Stoll-McCracken sub-polar expedition, which reached Winnipeg this morning from Prince Rupert rivals the tomb of Tut-ankh-amen." (The Calgary Herald, October 16, 1928).
In the title and throughout the work, Weyer refers to the subjects of his study as "Eskimos," the common term among Western nations at the time for the indigenous peoples of the northern circumpolar region stretching from eastern Siberia through Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland. While the exact etymology of the term remains uncertain, it is regarded by many Inuit and Yupik people as offensive and colonialist given that it has never been used by either peoples to refer to themselves and homogenizes several distinct cultural and ethnic groups. The term is still in common though diminishing use throughout Alaska, where "Alaska Native" is gaining prominence as a means to refer to the Iñupiat (Alaskan Inuit), Yupik, Aleut, and other groups. Greenland's Inuit population are officially designated as Greenlanders or Greenlandic Inuit, which includes the Kalaallit, Inughuit, and Tunumiit. Yale holds two archival copies of Weyer's thesis, but their online catalogue lists the work as 497 leaves; we assume this is the final printed version of Weyer's final draft.
Price: $1,250.00