0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Prophecy, Sorcery, and Reincarnation
medical doctors. I hesitate jumping into these debates, if only because
I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian. Rather, I want to explore
Inuit spirituality in light of a renewed faith in God and in the reality
of other mysterious, sacred phenomena. This essay is an attempt to
recover lost opportunities, to revisit a world that I had largely over-
looked and to perhaps provide morale for younger ethnographers: try
to be open and as inquisitive as possible to the mysteries of faith and
belief that we encounter in the field.
The Transformation of My Vocation
When I first went into the field to do my doctoral dissertation research
in 1994 , I was uncomfortable with my religious identity. Baptized into
the Episcopal faith as an infant, and confirmed in the same church as
a young adult, the mysteries of the sacraments and sounds of the lit-
urgy never moved me. I enjoyed serving on Sunday as an acolyte, and
I was proud to carry a torch during the procession and even hold the
Gospel to my chest while the priest read from it in the middle of the
congregation. But I did not believe all the central tenets of Episcopal
belief and was often more mesmerized by the description of other re-
ligious figures and texts, including those of Hindus and Buddhists,
not to mention the many other religions loosely bunched under the
label “traditional” or “polytheistic.”
This ambivalence toward religion began to change when I met my
fiancée in graduate school. She was raised in a large, devout Roman
Catholic family and educated in Roman Catholic schools until her se-
nior year of high school. She has always been fascinated by ritual and
religion, and she chose to major in anthropology several weeks after
enrolling in an Anthropology of Religion course at the University of
Washington. Attracted to the works of Victor Turner and the study of
initiation rites in West Africa, her interest in anthropology was merely
an extension of her interest in the Roman Catholic rites in which she
had participated in school, at Sunday Mass, and elsewhere, including
during a year-long exchange trip to Spain.
In January of 1994 , she joined me for the beginning of my disser-
tation research, and since I had a generous fellowship, I decided to
