Edmund Searles
Becoming more familiar with this scholarship propelled me into
an even greater appreciation for religion’s role in shaping experience,
pushing me away from a wholly disenchanted view of the world, one
in which the secular self is the dominant source of meaning and agency.
Although I am not completely convinced about the reality of mysti-
cal presences, I do pray every day in some form or another, and I feel
I have much to learn in terms of my understanding of the world’s re-
ligions and the role of sacraments, mystery, and the ineffable in ev-
eryday life. My deepening curiosity about the nature of the divine as
embodied in the sacraments, about the complexity of religious faith,
and about the enormous variety of religious experience has resulted
in a new set of questions and new interests about the nature of mys-
tic presence and extraordinary experience in the Arctic.
Name-Souls and Mystic PresenceMuch has been written about Inuit naming practices (e.g., Frederik-
sen 1968 , Kublu and Oosten 1999 , M. Nuttall 1994 , and William-
son 1988 ). Anthropologists who study the circulation of names and
its overarching cosmology are drawn to the sociological, psycholog-
ical, and mystical aspects of the practice (Guemple 1994 , M. Nuttall
1994 ; for a counterexample, see most of the essays in Mills and Slo-
bodin 1994 ). Lee Guemple treats naming as a window into Inuit cos-
mology and patterns of social relations, including how persons are
constituted through their material (saunik or bone) ties to other in-
dividuals in the community, living and deceased. The name confers
much more than a label, however. It provides the building blocks of
one’s personality, of one’s psychological and cognitive matrix (Guem-
ple 1994 , 111 ). The name or “atik embodies who the individual ‘re-
ally is’; and it is from this acquisition that one’s social relationships,
peculiarities—even skills which a child can manifest throughout its
corporeal existence—are acquired” (Guemple 1994 , 112 ).
Mark Nuttall identifies naming as a practice that provides a sense
of continuity, sociability, and community, and notes that a person’s
name “is a vital link in an overall chain of social, psychological, and