Jean Briggs was born in the United States on May 28, 1929. She told (Michael) Conor Cook and me that this day coincides with the blooming of bridal wreath or Spiraea, which is certainly the case in Toronto every year. I first met Jean when I taught linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she was Henrietta Harvey Professor and then later Professor Emerita after teaching anthropology there for over four decades. She was a bit intimidating. No general light talk but probing questions and an expectation that detail and accuracy be central. Later, when I was teaching at the University of Toronto, she asked me to be co-investigator on her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) project to make a dictionary based on the extensive tapes and notes she made during her work with the Utkuhiksalingmiut. These Inuit originated from the Utkuhiksalik region in Nunavut and later moved into settled communities. We started the work in 2000, when we received our first SSHRC grant. Jean received her PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1967. Her thesis supervisor was Cora Du Bois, the second woman ever tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard. When I think of it, Jean’s crusty nature may have been due not solely to growing up in New England, but also to having become a highly successful female academic in those days. Cora Du Bois introduced the techniques and perspectives of psychology into anthropology. Jean’s research centred on patterns of emotion within Inuit culture, e.g., absence of overt anger or “the psychodynamic underpinnings of Inuit culture” as manifested through the play of one child (Briggs 1998, 2). Her approach was subjective; she did not describe things categorically as an outside observer, but instead developed ideas within the context of her own social interactions and observations of details. In 2005 she earned the Lifetime Teaching Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Jean received many other honours to acknowledge her contributions, including being made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2001 and being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bergen in 1996. Her most famous work is the book Never in Anger. I read it while visiting an Inuit community and learning firsthand about the more indirect nature of interpersonal disagreements. Jean had a special interest in the socialization of small children, which led to her book Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old, which won the 1999 Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychoanalytic Anthropology and was also co-winner of the 1999 Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Jean’s research in anthropology and linguistics was primarily based on two locations she visited. One involved extended visits in the mid-1960s to Chantrey Inlet in the Utkuhiksalik region near the mouth of the Back River. The other visits were to a hunting camp in North Baffin near Pangnirtung. Jean resided in these camps at a time when groups of Inuit lived solely on the land, and in later years when they moved into settlements. As I became familiar with her exacting and assiduous methodology, I often thought about the Inuit in the camps on the land where she stayed for lengthy periods. She was not only a Qablunaaq (Caucasian) but also a female Qablunaaq, and one who had little truck for traditional female roles, even in her own society. I think she engaged people intellectually (as she did the rest of us). She learned to speak Utkuhiksalingmiutut by immersion, and subsequently by asking questions in the language, frequently metalinguistic …
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References
- BRIGGS, Jean L. , 1970 Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- BRIGGS, Jean L. , 1998 Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. St John: St. John’s Institute of Social and Economic Research; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- BRIGGS, Jean, Alana JOHNS, and Michael Conor COOK, 2015 Utkuhiksalingmiut Uqauhiitigut: Dictionary of Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut Postbase Suffixes. Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College.