ABSTRACT
In the Western traditions, darkness has since long been deeply, although not exclusively, associated to evil, bad deeds and thoughts, even today in the most secularised societies. The dualistic opposition that exists between both pairs—darkness/evil and light/good—remains indeed strong and operational in common thinking and categorisation. In the eastern Canadian Arctic, the author’s fieldwork among North Baffin Inuit, shows that they also tend to adhere to such a binary perception. However, this chapter suggests that this adhesion is for a large part the outcome of their conversion to Christianity and that it was not anchored in pre-Christian animist beliefs. This contribution reviews several major ethnographic elements demonstrating that northern Inuit did not connote darkness negatively, in strict antagonism to light.
