ABSTRACT
The anthropological study of Inuit kinship has not been without controversy. While anthropologists have generally agreed that kinship is the very foundation of Inuit social organisation, most have produced conflicting accounts that have provided a rich source for academic debate and argument. Some suggest that Inuit social organisation is either rigidly structured, or formless and flexible. Others emphasise that kinship is biologically prescribed and the primary means of regulating interpersonal relations, while some take an opposing view and, rejecting the idea that kinship is the underlying framework for Inuit social life, stress instead the importance of locality and negotiation, and argue that kinship is merely a rhetorical language for social relations. Such debates have done little to dispel the general feeling amongst anthropologists who do not specialise in the cultures of the Arctic, that Inuit studies have contributed little to general anthropological theory precisely because Inuit social life and social organisation is hard to categorise. If anything, Inuit social organisation is hard to categorise because there is no homogeneous Inuit culturealthough ‘Eskimo’ and ‘Inuit’ have been used as terms in both academic and popular literature as if they were descriptive of a single cultural group. However, if there is unity in diversity in Inuit societies across the Arctic it is to be found in the importance of kinship for constituting and framing social interaction, rather than the existence of an ‘Inuit type’ kinship system.
