Filming Divination among the Inuit of Nunavut
Echoing an approach that Jean-Guy Goulet has implemented over the years, both with the Wayùu of Colombia and with the Dene Tha of Canada, and in reaction to one of his papers on prayer and the media published in Recherches amérindiennes au Québec, I present the approach of the intergenerational knowledge transmission workshops (ATIS), developed with Jarich Oosten and the Nunavut Arctic College in the early 2000s, and on the use of the camera. Through the example of qilaniq, a divination ritual that the Inuit have practiced since the 16th century, I suggest that the format of the ATIS allows to respond to two great classic criticisms addressed to anthropologists. The first, formulated by J. Fabian, deals with a problem of temporality, the time shared during the meeting between the ethnologist and his participant being different than that of the anthropological narrative. The second concerns the manufacture of anthropological knowledge widely attacked by postmodernists. I argue that by making the context of enunciation more transparent and by favoring an experiential anthropology close to that advocated by Jean-Guy Goulet, the ATIS makes it possible to consider the anthropologist as a participant, and not just a facilitator. In the context of performances recorded on video, “acting as if” opens up new possibilities in terms of experimentation. At the same time it allows Inuit elders to highlight their traditions at a time marked by urgent needs in the field of education and in the transfer of knowledge.