A Stone-Age Winter

Stone-Age Winter

KABLOONA--Gontran de Poncins--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

Gontran de Poncins is a French ethnographer who can also draw, make photographs and write. A highly civilized man, he felt in 1938 a need for simplification, and removed himself to King William Land, an island not far from the Magnetic Pole. There he spent fall, winter and spring among a people withdrawn some 20,000 years from civilization, a stone-age remnant: the Netsilik Eskimos. Kabloona (Eskimo for white man), written in collaboration with Lewis Galantiere, is his description of that strange year.

Eskimo life, the most difficult and the poorest on earth, is utterly concentrated upon getting enough food. Their food is seal, caribou, tea, above all, raw frozen fish. They like rotten food even better (it is spicier) but there are few limits to what they will swallow. They eat enormously--50 lb. of meat per day for a family and its dogs--and belch and hawk and cough and spit continuously when indoors.

Eskimo property is private but is constantly pooled. Straight gifts are regarded as amoral. Wives are habitually exchanged by the night, but any attempt at a permanent steal is liable to bring on a murder. They have no moral objection to murder, kill always from behind. The old are kindly treated until they are too much of a burden; then, with their own consent, they are left on the ice. Eskimos respect each other's privacy so much that they can watch an unhappy old man strangle himself, feel they have no right to prevent him. Sometimes the old, losing the will to live, die quietly of that alone.

Eskimos are incapable of thought as such, of generalization, of "moods." They can attend to just one thing at a time, cannot concentrate for more than 20 minutes. They have no sense of time or hurry, none of providing against the future. In the spring they undergo physical mutations. The eyes intensify, the skin becomes red-glowing purple; they gather in frenzy at the trading posts and copulate day & night "in a sort of delirium, in exhaustible and insatiable." In summer they wander miserably, plagued with insomnia, sleep where they drop from exhaustion. To the "severely magnificent winter months" and their terrific hardships they are perfectly adapted. Then they become the most cheerful, convivial people de Poncins had ever known.

They, their stenches, their minds and their diet repelled and depressed him at first. He came deeply to like and admire them. In the months of reading with them the Arctic's "Book of Silence," he lost haste, worry, rebelliousness, egoism. By spring he was so much one of them that he was painfully ill at ease--and bored--at sight of a white man.

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