TASKS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH IN ESKIMO 



CULTURE* 



Knud Rasmussen 



Every scientist who has had occasion to occupy himself with the 

 Eskimos must soon have reahzed that there is hardly a primitive 

 people in the world whose history is so interesting and so complex. 

 Scattered about throughout half the Arctic circumference of the 

 globe, the Eskimos have, under the most widely different conditions, 

 managed to adapt themselves to the requirements of nature and have 

 carried on their struggle for existence in regions which one would 

 hardly believe could offer any possibility of maintaining human life. 

 But it is just this resistance, the opposition encountered in their 

 surroundings, that has hardened and developed their minds, un^til 

 we find among them what is relatively a surprisingly high degree of 

 culture, material and spiritual alike. 



The Eskimos are like no other people in the world; and, despite 

 the fact that they have been studied now for over two hundred years, 

 despite the fact that expeditions with up-to-date equipment, in 

 Greenland, Canada, and Alaska, have specialized in that study, 

 there are still many problems awaiting the ethnographer. The 

 more we learn the more we desire to know about them, and each 

 new expedition, achieving new aims, seems to leave in its wake a 

 series of fresh problems to be solved. 



Here, then, despite the voluminous works already written about 

 this people, there seems to be a gold mine for those who will under- 

 take the search; and it may console the younger generation of sci- 

 entists, now ready and waiting to take a hand, thus to be assured 

 that there is work for them enough and to spare. 



Study of Barren Grounds Inland Eskimo Culture 

 As Possible Survival 



On the Fifth Thule Expedition, from Greenland to the Pacific, 

 where we succeeded in visiting all the Eskimo tribes with the excep- 

 tion of those living south of the Yukon on the shores of Bristol Bay, 

 our main object was to procure material illustrating the origin of 

 the Eskimos, their routes of migration between Siberia, Alaska, 

 Canada, and Greenland, and, finally, to collect folklore from as 



♦Translated by W. Worster, Worthing, Sussex, England, from the Danish original written for 



the present volume. 



177 



