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WORK TITLE: The Man Who Stole Himself
WORK NOTES: trans by Anna Yates
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1949
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Icelandic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%ADsli_P%C3%A1lsson * http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/P/G/au21936308.html * http://starfsfolk.hi.is/en/simaskra/874 * https://ugla.hi.is/pub/hi/simaskra/cv_en/a148c748b983.pdf *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 22, 1949, in Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland.
EDUCATION:University of Iceland, B.A., 1972; University of Manchester, M.A., 1974, Ph.D., 1982.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. University of Iceland, lecturer, 1982-87, senior lecturer, 1987-92, Institute of Anthropology director, 1998-2001;University of Oslo, Professor II, 2002-04; University of Iceland, Professor, 1992-2011, Professor Emeritus, 2011—.
University of Iceland, lecturer (part-time), 1975-82; University of Iowa, visiting professor, 1987; University of California, Berkeley, visiting professor, 2001; University of California, Los Angeles, visiting professor, 2008; University of Vienna, visiting professor, 2008; European Science Foundation, Mapping Interfaces: The Future of Knowledge Chair, 2008-10; Humanities under the European Science Foundation, Standing Committee Representative, 2008-11; University of Miami, adjunct professor, 2009-12; Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth, vice-chair, 2009-12; King’s College, London, visiting professor, 2013-16.
MEMBER:American Anthropological Association, European Association of Social Anthropologists, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, European Association of Social Anthropologists (executive committee, 2007-10).
AWARDS:British Council fellow, 1980; Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences fellow, 1995; Cultural Prize, 1997, for research; Rosenstiel Award, University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, 2000, for contributions to oceanographic science; University of Iceland Award, 2001, for research; Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland honorary fellow, 2006; Asa Wright Award, 2014, for research; Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Center for Advanced Study fellow, 2015; grants from Icelandic Science Foundation, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1984, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999-2009, 2013-16, University of Iceland, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988-2015, Nordic African Institute, 1983, Fulbright scholarship, 1987, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1990, Nordic Cultural Fund, 1991, Nordic Committee for Social Science Research, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1999-2002, Nordic Environmental Research Programme, 1993-95, 1996-97, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, 2000, United States National Science Foundation, 2000.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Skirnir, Journal of Anthropological Research, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Nordic Journal of Political Economy, Trends in Biotechnology, and International Journal of the Commons.
Also contributor to books, including The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, From Sagas to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, The Anthropology of Friendship: Beyond the Community of Kinship, Proceedings of the International Congress on the History of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Region, and Weather, Climate, Culture.
Member of the editorial board for North Atlantic Studies, Social Anthropology, Ethnos, Acta Borealia, Maritime Anthropological Studies, International Journal of Water, Nordic Journal of African Studies, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, and Environmental Humanities.
SIDELIGHTS
Gísli Pálsson has devoted the entirety of his academic career to the study of anthropology. He conducted the majority of his professional work through the University of Iceland, where he is Professor Emeritus. He has published a large body of work, including numerous books.
The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan was released in 2016 and follows the case of Icelandic ex-slave Hans Jonathan. Born in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Jonathan began life as a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies. Once he and his master arrived in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, however, Jonathan slowly gained an increased amount of freedom. Eventually, Jonathan went on the run and, in the face of legal opposition, arrived in Iceland. There he started a family, developed a trade, and crafted a legacy within Icelandic history. A Publishers Weekly reviewer calls The Man Who Stole Himself an “engaging tale of one man’s attempts to find a home as a man of color in nineteenth-century Scandinavia.” In an issue of Library Journal, Ingrid Levin called the book a “well-researched, incisive, and revealing narrative.”
Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson chronicles the lesser known facets of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s legacy. Stefansson made his mark on Canadian history through his anthropological work. While his efforts are his predominant claim to fame, his travels produced far more. Pálsson devotes the book specifically to Stefansson’s romantic entanglements and the lineage left behind. According to Pálsson’s findings, Stefansson’s affairs unfolded over the course of his expeditions through the arctic region of the country. Stefansson sired several children as a result, whose descendants offer their own input on Stefansson and his legacy throughout the book. Pálsson also details numerous other pieces of writing related to Stefansson’s romantic history. “Pálsson’s interviews with Stefansson’s unacknowledged grandchildren, hurt, mystified and angry even in their old age, are the highlight of Travelling Passions,” remarked Heather Robertson in an issue of Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History, “and their memories of their father, Alex Stefansson, and grandmother, Pannigabluk, open a window into Inuit culture at the Mackenzie River delta one hundred years ago.” Manitoba History reviewer Christopher Trott commented: “The scholarship is thorough and original and the book is illustrated with numerous wonderful black and white pictures.” He further added: “Pálsson’s account provides sufficient background for those who are not familiar with the Stefansson story, but at the same time moves into new territory in both anthropological and historiographic research methods.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, August, 2015, A.E. Leykam, review of Gambling Debt: Iceland’s Rise and Fall in the Global Economy, p. 2065.
Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History, April-May, 2006, Heather Robertson, “The Stefansson Enigma,” review of Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, p. 48.
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Ingrid Levin, review of The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan, p. 108.
Manitoba History, February, 2006, Christopher Trott, review of Travelling Passions, p. 46.
Publishers Weekly, August 22, 2016, review of The Man Who Stole Himself, p. 103.
ONLINE
King’s College London Web site, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ (June 13, 2017), author profile.
University of Iceland Web site, http://starfsfolk.hi.is/ (June 13, 2017), author profile.*
Gísli Pálsson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an Icelandic name. The last name is a patronymic, not a family name; this person is referred to by the given name Gísli.
Gísli Pálsson (born 1949 Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland) is a professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland.[1] He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of V. Stefansson (2001), The Textual Life of Savants: Ethnography, Iceland, and the Linguistic Turn (1995), and Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. He is currently (as of April 2014) working on a biography of the first person of colour to live in Iceland, Hans Jonatan.[2]
Gísli was awarded the Rosenstiel Award in Oceanographic Science at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami in 2000. He is a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Gísli Pálsson
Háskóli Íslands
Professor
Háskóli Íslands
Position
Professor of Anthropology
Unit
School of Social Sciences - Faculty of Social and Human Sciences
Location
Oddi / O-314
Website
http://hi.academia.edu/G%C3%ADsliP%C3%A1lsson
Phone
525 - 4253
Gsm
6157762
Email
gpals [at] hi.is
Published work
Gísli Pálsson - published work
Curriculum Vitae
Gísli Pálsson - Curriculum Vitae
Courses
Education
Education
Year Degree Institute Studies
1982 Ph.D. Manchester Metropolitan University Anthropology
CV: https://notendur.hi.is/gpals/gpcv.html
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Visiting Professors
Gísli Pálsson
Gísli Pálsson(Ph.D., University of Manchester, 1982) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland and (formerly) the University of Oslo. He is Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. In 2000 he received the Rosenstiel Award in Oceanographic Science from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Science of the University of Miami. He has written over 100 articles in scientific journals and books and authored or edited 20 academic books. Among his recent books are Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (2013, co-edited with Tim Ingold) and Anthropology and the New Genetics (2007), both of which are published by Cambridge University Press. His latest book, Hans Jonathan: The Man Who Stole Himself (in Icelandic), the biography of an 18th century runaway slave from the Virgin Islands, will be published in 2014. Palsson has done anthropological fieldwork in Iceland, the Canadian Arctic, The Republic of Cape Verde, and the Virgin Islands. Currently, his research focuses on the history of Danish slavery, environmental change, the social implications of biotechnology, and genetic history. Recently, he launched a new project together with Dr. Barbara Prainsack, King’s College, “Biosocial Relations and Hierarchies”, funded by the Icelandic Research Fund for the next three years. The basic premise of the project which will address several biomedical sites in the UK and Iceland is that attending to biosocial relations and hierarchies will both facilitate sensitivity to differences and similarities in the reconfiguring of life and usefully inform biogovernance and biopolitics.
The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan
263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p103.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan
Gisli Palsson, trans. from the Icelandic by Anna Yates. Univ. of Chicago, $25 (264p) ISBN 978-0-226-31328-3
Scandinavia and slavery are rarely connected in the public imagination, but in this intriguing work of microhistory, Palsson, professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland, reminds readers that Denmark possessed Caribbean sugar plantation colonies as he shares the tale of Hans Jonathan, a mixed-race man born into slavery on St. Croix in 1784. Jonathan was brought to Copenhagen in 1792 and treated humanely by the standards of the era, being taught to read and write and allowed to spend his evenings out of the house with friends. But when his owner, Henriette von Schimmelmann, refused to allow him to fight against the attacking English in 1801, Jonathan ran away. Schimmelmann won a court case confirming ownership of the young man, but Jonathan was allowed to depart Denmark and head to Iceland, where he established himself as a farmer and businessman, married a local woman, and founded a family line that persists in Iceland today. Through this engaging tale of one man's attempts to find a home as a man of color in 19th-century Scandinavia, Palsson uses Jonathan's previously obscure but picaresque life as a lens through which to examine questions of imperialism, slavery, race, and cultural identity. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 103+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609348&it=r&asid=db9f41756c3dc5a92be502543114a219. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461609348
Palsson, Gisli. The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan
Ingrid Levin
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p108.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Palsson, Gisli. The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Univ. of Chicago. Sept. 2016. 264p. illus. maps, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780226313283. $25. HIST
Palsson (anthropology, Univ. of Iceland; Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life) presents a biography of Hans Jonathan (1784-1827), a former slave who eventually escaped to freedom in Iceland in 1805. Jonathan was born into slavery at a plantation in St. Croix and was then taken to his owner's home country of Denmark as a young man. After joining the Danish Navy against his owner's will and taking part in the Battle of Copenhagen, Jonathan later pursued and eventually lost a legal case for his freedom in the Danish courts. Jonathan fled to the relative safety of Iceland, where he was accepted by the community and established himself as a freedman, working as a store manager and farmer and later starting a family. Palsson's well-researched, incisive, and revealing narrative deftly utilizes Jonathan's rich story to examine broader issues including the history of the Danish slave trade, the slow progress of abolition, and 19th-century views on skin color and mixed-race identity. VERDICT Best suited to history fans and researchers interested in the history of slavery, the lived experience of slaves and freedmen, colonialism, and racism.--Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI
Levin, Ingrid
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levin, Ingrid. "Palsson, Gisli. The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 108. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805088&it=r&asid=b63f82c08bddfd41a9b9dbbc35c4c789. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459805088
The Stefansson enigma
Heather Robertson
86.2 (April-May 2006): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Canada's National History Society
http://www.beavermagazine.ca
Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson by Gisli Palsson University of Manitoba Press, 2005 374 pp., illus., $39.95 hardcover
The Making of an Explorer: George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1916 by Stuart E. Jenness McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004 418 pp., illus., $49-95 hardcover
They haunt us still, those brave, brilliant, vainglorious, cruel, foolhardy European and North American explorers who ventured into the icy wastes of what is now the Canadian Arctic. These two books fuel the continuing controversy over one of them--early 20th-century explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Gisli Palsson, an Icelandic anthropologist, investigates Stefansson's relationships with women, especially his Inuit "country wife," Pannigabluk. Smart E. Jenness uses the diaries and photographs of one of Stefansson's colleagues, Australian George Hubert Wilkins, to give detailed, often acerbic, insights into the conduct of all members of Stefansson's 1913-1916 Arctic expedition.
The key issue with Stefansson's reputation is honesty, and he does not fare well in either of these portraits. Palsson states bluntly that recent genetic research proves Stefansson's sensational claim to have discovered "blond Eskimos," descendants of Norse migrants, was wrong, and with little effort he tracks down the Inuit family Stefansson fathered but pretended did not exist. Palsson's interviews with Stefansson's unacknowledged grandchildren, hurt, mystified and angry even in their old age, are the highlight of Travelling Passions, and their memories of their father, Alex Stefansson, and grandmother, Pannigabluk, open a window into Inuit culture at the Mackenzie River delta 100 years ago. Pannigabluk, strong-minded and self-supporting, may not have wanted to join Vilhjalmur in New York City, had he asked, but then he may have feared that his tall, strapping "seamstress" would steal his show.
Photographs of Pannigabluk and Alex in Travelling Passions were taken by G.H. Wilkins, official photographer with the Arctic expedition. But Jenness's biography of Wilkins, The Making of an Explorer, is not, as I had expected, a book of photographs. Most of Wilkins's camera equipment was left behind on the flagship Kaduk when it became trapped in the ice, and he suffered chronic loss and breakage with the cameras and film he could obtain. At best, his skills were marginal and his photos amateurish. Facing failure, Wilkins invented a new role as Stefansson's indispensable factotum. He organized a support network of ships, sleds, base camps and imported provisions that enabled Stefansson to trek off across the ice in search of new land.
Drawn from Wilkins's extensive diaries, The Making of an Explorer documents the arrival in the Arctic of the Age of Technology: gasoline engines, kerosene stoves, canned "pemmican," dried fruit and vegetables, Winchester rifles and, for dancing Inuit, a gramophone. Stefansson bought everything he wanted, including Inuit guides and hunters, with limitless Canadian taxpayers' cash. Wilkins, like everyone, thought Stefansson "had an ego of such fragility that he could tolerate no questioning of his instructions, authority, actions or knowledge." Wilkins survived, but his diaries note several deaths, including a cook's suicide. The wreck of the Karluk, which Stefansson was accused of deserting, cost 11 lives.
Wilkins travelled for three years with the Inuit, among them an engaging young hunter, Natkusiak, but his perceptions of his Inuit companions, as well as Stefansson's ragtag crew, remained peripheral to his own egocentricity. Wilkins, a callow, priggish young man of 25 when this journey began, went on to become Sir Hubert Wilkins, a daredevil adventurer who in 1931 proposed to navigate the Northwest Passage by submarine.
Did Wilkins remember too vividly sledding across dangerous Arctic ice through darkness, fog and blizzards? In The Making of an Explorer, the minute details of his long, repetitive trips become tedious, and Jenness relates Wilkins's exciting adventures with an Inuit shaman and Natkusiak's abducted wife in the same flat, clopping tone. Jenness has chosen the raw material for his story from the diaries, but he shies away from giving it perspective, interpretation and drama.
Travelling Passions explores too many detours in Stefansson's love life: Palsson buries Pannigabluk's story within an irrelevant youthful romance that petered out, an affair with a forgotten novelist, a late-life marriage. He adds an interesting Icelandic perspective--Stefansson was born in Manitoba to Icelandic immigrant parents who moved to North Dakota two years later--but, like Jenness, he nervously skirts the itchy question: was Stefansson a fraud, coward, megalomaniac, deadbeat dad or Great Man? Let's hear from the Inuit, women first.
Reviewed by Heather Robertson, a writer from King City, Ontario. She is currently working on a book about Canadian explorer and geographer J.B. Tyrrell.
Robertson, Heather
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Robertson, Heather. "The Stefansson enigma." The Beaver: Exploring Canada's History, Apr.-May 2006, p. 48+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA143919186&it=r&asid=b071162c33b7ae4caab735fd5ce12fe3. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A143919186
Gambling debt: Iceland's rise and fall in the global economy
A.E. Leykam
52.12 (Aug. 2015): p2065.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Gambling debt: Iceland's rise and fall in the global economy, ed. by E. Paul Durrenberger and Gisli Palsson. University Press of Colorado, 2014. 284p bibl index afp ISBN 9781607323341 pbk, $19.95
52-6487
HC360
2014-12194 CIP
This book of essays edited by Durrenberger (emer., anthropology, Univ. of Iowa) and Palsson (Univ. of Iceland) is an impressive collection that blends the writings of authors from diverse disciplines to address Iceland's 2008 financial collapse. Historians, anthropologists, economists, poets, and key local participants come together to explore, explain, and--most important--warn readers of the neoliberal policies (mainly the privatization of banks and fishery resources) that helped lead up to the country's financial collapse. The book is a must read for anyone interested in economics, business, politics, or the worldwide economic stage in general; readers interested in Iceland's involvement in the crisis and the fallout the country faced as a result will also be intrigued by the book's contents and approach. Taken as a whole, the book is an honest, entertaining, and informative work that explores the changing distribution of wealth and the impact of privatization as well as the historical identity of Iceland and the numerous factors that came together to help produce such an economic meltdown. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.--A. E. Leykam, College of Staten Island (CUNY)
Leykam, A.E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leykam, A.E. "Gambling debt: Iceland's rise and fall in the global economy." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2015, p. 2065. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA424530547&it=r&asid=f54afb4b07eacc48775d5721c47bc820. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A424530547
Gisli Palsson, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Christopher Trott
.51 (Feb. 2006): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Manitoba Historical Society
http://www.mhs.mb.ca/info/pubs/mb_history/index.shtml
Gisli Palsson, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson Translated from the Icelandic by Keneva Kunz Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005, 374 pages. ISBN: 0887551793, $39.95 (hardcover)
In recent years, the work of Vilhjalmur Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913-1918) has become a veritable publishing industry. In 1991, the diaries of anthropologist Diamond Jenness were published (Jenness 1991), in 2001 the diaries of Vilhjamur Stefannson (Palsson, 2001), in 2004 a biography of George Wilkins (photographer) based on his diaries (Jenness, 2004). Now Gisli Palsson has brought us a further biography of Stefansson. Why this continued fascination with this expedition and its enigmatic and charismatic leader?
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was born in Arnes, Manitoba (where there is a monument to him today), the son of one of the early Icelandic settlers to Manitoba. While he was a child, the family moved to North Dakota and Stefansson lived for most of the rest of his life in the United States. He became well known as an Arctic explorer and anthropologist, working in the Western Arctic among the Inupiat of Alaska, the Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie Delta region, and most famously for "discovering" the so-called "blonde Eskimos", now known as the Copper Inuit of Dolphin and Union Straits and Victoria Island. In the days before extensive public support of research, Stefansson had to fund his work through selling articles and giving lectures. In this, Stefansson was a brilliant publicist and promoter, grabbing international headlines with his work. He undertook three expeditions to the Western Arctic, the first in 1906-1907 as the anthropologist on the Anglo-American Polar Expedition, the second in 1908-1912 on the Stefansson-Anderson Expedition, and the third in 1913-1918 as the leader of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Originally, the Canadian Arctic Expedition was funded by American museums, but the Canadian government of the day perceived a threat to Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic islands and agreed to pay for the entire expedition itself. After the 1913-1918 Expedition, Stefansson became a well known writer and consultant promoting the idea of the "friendly arctic", arguing that with appropriate preparation, Europeans could comfortably live in the Arctic and take advantage of the many resources available there. He inundated Ottawa with schemes to exploit the arctic (such as polar route air service and submarine exploration under the arctic ice cap), most of which were far-fetched in his day, but oddly enough, have since been realized.
Stefansson was a shameless self-promoter who was clearly an engaging and dynamic speaker and a wonderfully clear and lucid writer. Such self-promotion was born of the necessity to make a living out of his work, but in the process the quality and credibility of his work suffered. His "scientific" anthropological output is slim: one report for the American Museum of Natural History which was never finished and had to be completed for him by the museum director (he was away on another expedition at the time) and the rather peculiar ethnography, My Life with the Eskimo (1913), which reads more like a travelogue than an ethnographic report. His claim to have found "blonde Eskimos" (he hypothesized that they were descended from the Vikings that had settled in the arctic) was never substantiated. The Canadian Arctic Expedition was fraught with problems, not the least of which was the sinking of the ship, Karluk, with some of the crew and scientists on board. Stefansson's own responsibility in the disaster has never been clearly established. Stefansson left the ship on a hunting expedition in the fall of 1913 while it was trapped in ice and never returned as the vessel began to drift westward in the ice towards Siberia. Further, there was an early dispute between the scientists on the expedition and Stefansson over the rights to each person's diaries and field notes. Stefansson argued that he, as leader of the expedition, had all rights to the material and could determine when and where it would be published. Naturally, the scientists demurred, probably fearing that this would limit their own publications and careers.
Palsson's account does not pretend to be a definitive biography of Stefansson because, as he admits, there are already a number of fine biographies (and an autobiography) available. Rather, Palsson brings new evidence to light that may help us to better understand this complex man. Palsson is writing in the context of contemporary anthropology, which has been reviewing the work of the founders of the discipline and asking just how and in what context did they collect the data that make up the classical ethnographies within the discipline? This approach questions the intellectual and social upbringing of anthropologists to unearth the assumptions they may have brought to their work. In addition, it examines closely the relationships these anthropologists had in the field to determine exactly from whom and in what context they collected their data. Historically, anthropologists have claimed an objective neutrality in the collection of their field material, however, more recent thought emphasizes the influence of the researcher themselves on the collection of such material. While this is the context in which Palsson initially wrote the book, its scope is actually far wider.
Palsson is able to bring two new sets of evidence to the discussion. The first is the fortuitous discovery of a collection of letters (albeit incomplete) from Stefansson to his fiancee, Cecil Smith (of Toronto), and the second is a series of interviews that Palsson himself conducted with Stefansson's grandchildren in Inuvik. Together, this evidence provides profound insight into Stefansson's work. To balance the account, Palsson also looks at Stefansson's long term affair with novelist Fannie Hurst and his marriage late in life to Evelyn Nef (of less interest to this reviewer).
Palsson establishes that while he was engaged to Cecil Smith, Stefansson had an intimate relationship with an Inuvialuit woman, Pannigabluk; intimate enough that the couple had a son, Alex. While Stefansson's relationship was well known in the North both to Inuvialuit (their cultural mores provide no reason to deny it) and northern administrators (Alex always used Stefansson as his last name), Stefansson himself consistently denied any such relationship. Pannigabluk is virtually erased from Stefansson's published accounts, and while she appears frequently in his diaries, no mention is made of any relationship between the two. A critical entry that may provide insight into the relationship is crossed out in such a way that even Vatican palaeography experts cannot decipher it (p. 109)! Stefansson is listed as Alex's father in the Anglican baptismal records of the time. Palsson goes into careful detail to explore whether, at any time or to any person, Stefansson may have actually admitted the existence of his son in the North. The evidence is largely negative. This is despite the fact that he might have continued to support both Pannigabluk and Alex through a Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) account, although there are no HBC records to support this.
Why should we care about the sexual adventures of an anthropologist one hundred years ago? It is precisely because it is now clear that Pannigabluk acted as Stefansson's primary cultural and linguistic interpreter, and that much of the data in Stefansson's ethnography comes from Pannigabluk and her (evidently very strong) opinions. This means that the information that has been constituted as the baseline data on the Mackenzie Inuit is limited in scope, and raises the critical question of who was Pannigabluk and what was her position in Inuvialuit society? This is a much more difficult question to answer, but it now challenges researchers in the field to take into account this bias and re-read Stefansson's work with new lenses.
Not only did Stefansson leave an important intellectual legacy in the south, he left an ongoing legacy in the North through his descendants there. Palsson is the first researcher to approach Stefansson's grandchildren and ask them what they know of their grandfather, and to explore Pannigabluk and Alex's life after Stefansson left the north for good. The interviews with the Stefansson family reveal a great deal of bitterness over their lack of recognition and support, and especially over the way that Stefansson relied so heavily on Pannigabluk to survive in the arctic, all the while claiming in his written work that it was his own common sense that prevailed. More importantly, this is a good case study where the subjects of anthropological research are able to talk back to the Western intellectual tradition and provide a commentary on how anthropology has been conducted.
Palsson's book was originally published in Icelandic and has been translated into English. The Icelandic text included a great deal of geographic and historical information about Canada, which would be unfamiliar to Icelanders. Most of this information has been edited out of the Canadian edition, but occasionally there are comments in the text that would seem painfully obvious to many Canadian readers. At times, the text is stilted and pedantic (perhaps a function of the translation) and some readers may find the detail overwhelming.
Nevertheless, Travelling Passions is scholarship at its most fun. There is nothing like a little sex and intrigue mixed in with exploration and adventure to make a good read. The scholarship is thorough and original and the book is illustrated with numerous wonderful black and white pictures. Palsson's account provides sufficient background for those who are not familiar with the Stefansson story, but at the same time moves into new territory in both anthropological and historiographic research methods.
Christopher Trott
St. John's College, University of Manitoba
Trott, Christopher
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Trott, Christopher. "Gisli Palsson, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson." Manitoba History, no. 51, 2006, p. 46+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA144151420&it=r&asid=5f4609c331f437ecf08f0d0942430bcb. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A144151420