Saladin D’Anglure, Bernard

Saladin D’Anglure, Bernard (1936– ) – French-born professor of anthropology at the Université Laval in Canada. Since 1956, Saladin d’Anglure has been particularly interested in the traditional and contemporary lives of the peoples of the Arctic of North America. A fluent speaker of Inuktitut (the language of the Inuit), he pioneered dialogical methods in the 1970s, involving Inuit in his research and handing them the data gathered among them (e.g., land use maps, genealogies). Saladin d’Anglure founded Études Inuit and has organized significant international conferences concerned with Arctic issues. In an article entitled “Rethinking Inuit Shamanism through the Concept of ‘Third Gender’” (1990), he presents a “threedimensional holistic model” that demonstrates the integration of “kinship, social organization, economics and technology, mythology and worldview, the system of dictates/prohibitions, and rituals and shamanism.” Shamans are able to mediate between other persons (humans or other-than-human persons) because they are, in one way or another, “in between” people. While much of Inuit culture is divided in a binary manner (men and women have distinct roles, winter tools and summer tools are distinct, and sea and land mammals are distinguished), and while these distinctions are maintained by taboos, it is only the mediating role provided in a ternary model that makes sense of the culture’s dynamics.

SOURCE:

Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007

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