The Inupiat Eskimos of northern Alaska are consciously subsistence oriented. Even under present conditions they appear to have an unbreakable grip on subsistence hunting. Such a way of life in the far north has brought about a division of labor, the men catching animals and the women processing them. In the yearly whale festival the villagers find themselves repeating and actually accentuating their female/male divisions. Many other patterned oppositions also may be observed in the festival, which in an earlier anthropological era would have been analyzed according to structuralist theory. Now in the 199gos I argue, following Inupiaq thought, that the principle of honoring the whale overrides any analysis based on structural dichotomies. I also discover in the highly visible patterning and elaboration in the festival a play effect, brought into existence by what the Inupiat call the spirit of the whale. A close-up description of the proceedings is necessary to convey what is going on, and for the close-up, the wider picture is also needed.
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Edith Turner (1993) studied this question.