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Originally Posted by Tape Reader
I read that in the Eskimo culture, in-laws sometimes fill in for a natural need, when someone loses a partner. Anyone know more about this?
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Many American and European perceptions of Eskimo culture come from the novel
Top of the World by Hans Ruesch. In the novel Eskimos are represented as practicing infanticide as a matter of necessity. If food is scarce the children are allowed to starve, the logic being that if the adults starve then the children will follow anyway. If a woman's first born child is female it is abandoned. The result is a scarcity of adult women. A man fortunate enough to have a wife is expected to share.
The thing is that Hans Ruesch was not an expert on Eskimo culture. In his youth he was a race car driver and later he was a novelist. How much of his novel is accurate and how much he made up I do not know.
There's a rather amusing story about Christian missionaries who arrived in Canada to convert the Eskimos. The decided to build a church. There being no trees and thus no wood in Inuit territory they brought in the materials by ship at great expense. When the church was completed, and with a nice furnace installed, they invited the Eskimos to services. The Eskimos had never been so warm. They stripped naked, men and women. What the missionaries had not realized was that the Eskimos were nudists. The only reason they wore clothes was because it was cold outside.
