Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old

In a riveting narrative, psychological anthropologist Jean L. Briggs takes us through six months of dramatic interactions in the life of Chubby Maata, a three-year-old girl growing up in a Baffin Island hunting camp.

The book examines the issues that engaged the child -- belonging, possession, love -- and shows the process of her growing. Briggs questions the nature of sharedness in culture and assumptions about how culture is transmitted. She suggests that both cultural meaning and strong personal commitment to one's world can be (and perhaps must be) acquired not by straightforwardly learning attitudes, rules, and habits in a dependent mode but by experiencing oneself as an agent engaged in productive conflict in emotionally problematic situations. Briggs finds that dramatic play is an essential force in Inuit social life. It creates and supports values; engenders and manages attachments and conflicts; and teaches and maintains an alert, experimental, constantly testing approach to social relationships.

Co-published with Yale University Press.

Jean L Briggs is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Memorial University. Her first book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, was published in 1970 by Harvard University Press. The book was one of the first ethnographies to be written as a personal narrative, recounting the life Briggs lived for 17 months (1963-65) as an adopted daughter in an Inuit family in a small Central Arctic camp. It was also one of the first accounts of the social importance of emotional values. Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old, was published in 1998, by Yale University Press and ISER Books, Memorial University. This book was laid in a Baffin Island camp, and again focussed on the emotional values underlying social life. It analyzed 40 dramatic interactions between one little girl and her caretakers, showing how these interrogations taught the 3-year-old about the emotionally complex situations she would meet in her everyday life: what dangers to watch out for, and how to defuse them. Briggs taught at Memorial University, and did Arctic research, from 1966-1997.