SALADIN D’ANGLURE, Bernard, 2006 Être et renaître inuit: homme, femme ou chamane, Paris, Gallimard, 429 pages.

For those who have followed Bernard Saladin d’Anglure’s (BSA) distinguished career in Inuit studies, this book is the long awaited magnum opus that brings together in one place his many writings, ideas and theories that have emerged over the years. In addition, this text provides the systematic exposition of his collaboration with Iqallijuq, Ujarak, and Kupaaq of Igloolik. The book is essentially a careful structural analysis of a large body of Inuit mythical (and other) texts through close reading of each of the segments of the stories and grounding them in other ethnographic materials. Igloolik has proved to be a rich ground for the compilation of “classic” Inuit texts ever since Rasmussen (1929, 1930) conducted his work there in 1921. BSA’s collection of stories, for the most part from the extraordinarily competent Kupaaq, provides a third major collection of stories from Igloolik including those provided by John MacDonald (1998). For the comparative scholar, three sets of texts from one region over a 60 year period is an invaluable source of data. BSA’s careful and extensive scholarship provides comparisons to both Rasmussen’s and MacDonald’s texts as well as with other Eastern Arctic collections such as those by Boas and his own work from Nunavik. What is remarkable about many of the texts is how similar they are across time, providing virtually the same details in the major stories well known from the entire Inuit area. On the other hand, there are a number of important stories here that are much more detailed and carefully elaborated than the earlier versions available to scholars. In particular, the Arnaqtaaqtuq story is presented here in a much longer version than previously recorded allowing for more careful and extensive analysis. BSA also presents a long and elaborate version of the Itijjuaq story which has not previously appeared in many collections—a fact that BSA attributes to the Victorian sensibilities of the earlier collectors. Initially, I found it annoying that BSA set out the Inuit texts in small sections, interspersing his analysis and commentary between each of these paragraphs. I had wanted to get the full richness of the story before moving on to the commentary. However, especially in the longer accounts, I came to realise that the placing of the commentary enriched my further reading of the text, having provided the necessary clues to move on to the next section. In his earlier work, BSA had usually provided the entire text and then his complex, interwoven commentary continually referring back to the text itself. While this neatly brought together the analysis he was trying to advance, it often made it difficult to follow with too many interconnections between the text and other ethnographic materials for the reader to keep track of. The exposition in Être et renaître Inuit is by far the clearest that I have seen and most useful in keeping track of the complex relationships among the texts and the ethnographic material. The real strength of the book is the dialogues between BSA, Iqallijuq and Ujarak that provide insights into many of the stories provided by Kupaaq. Indeed, by the end of Chapter 4, on the Sun and the Moon story, this dialogue reaches a three-way commentary on the story almost equally divided among the three expositors. Where anthropologists have been criticised for placing their own analyses over indigenous explanations of the same story, BSA’s technique here puts Iqallijuq’s and Ujarak’s comments on the same plane as his own, providing one of the first Inuit commentaries on their own texts. The corpus of materials in this book derives primarily from Igloolik with one notable exception. …