"Is your mother good?" "Are you good?" "Do you want to come live with me?" Inuit adults often playfully present small children with difficult, even dangerous, choices and then dramatize the consequences of the child's answers. They are enacting in larger-than-life form the plots that drive Inuit social life-testing, acting out problems, entertaining themselves, and, most of all, bringing up their children. In a riveting narrative, psychological anthropologist Jean L. Briggs takes us through six months of dramatic interactions in the life of Chubby Maata, a three-year-old girl growing up in a...
"Is your mother good?" "Are you good?" "Do you want to come live with me?" Inuit adults often playfully present small children with difficult, even da...
Anthropologist Jean L. Briggs spent seventeen months living on a remote Arctic shore as the "adopted daughter" of an Eskimo family. Through vignettes of daily life she unfolds a warm and perceptive tale of the behavioral patterns of the Utku, their way of training children, and their handling of deviations from desired behavior.
Anthropologist Jean L. Briggs spent seventeen months living on a remote Arctic shore as the "adopted daughter" of an Eskimo family. Through vignettes ...
