The Effects of Eskimo Seasonal Variations
by Marcel Mauss.
Yet the best evidence of genuine kinship among members of the same settlement is the custom of exchanging women. This is reported in almost all Eskimo societies. These exchanges take place in winter between all the men and all the women of the settlement. In some cases, in western Greenland for example, the exchange was formerly restricted to married couples. Generally, however, all nubile individuals take part….At a certain time, the lamps are put out and actual orgies take place.
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We should add that these different festivities are always and everywhere accompanied, quite significantly, by the phenomenon of sexual licence, a subject to which we will return when we come to discuss personal status.20 Communal sex is a form of communion, perhaps the most intimate form there is. When it occurs, it produces a fusion of individual personalities – something which we can see is far removed from the state of individualization and isolation in which small family groups live dispersed, during the summer, along enormous extents of coast.
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Yet the best evidence of genuine kinship among members of the same settlement is the custom of exchanging women. 88 This is reported in almost all Eskimo societies. These exchanges take place in winter between all the men and all the women of the settlement. In some cases, in western Greenland for example, the exchange was formerly restricted to married couples. 89 Generally, however, all nubile individuals take part….
At a certain time, the lamps are put out and actual orgies take place.91 But we have very little information on whether particular women are assigned to particular men,92 except for two cases that are quite typical. In the masked festivities at Cumberland Sound93 that we have already mentioned, one of the masked figures representing the goddess Sedna pairs men and women solely according to their names, without taking into account their kinship relations.
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the men who make these exchanges become brothers by adoption; the women who are exchanged are considered to be each other’s sisters; and the same applies to all the children born from these unions.104 Relations formed in this way are, in all respects, identical to those that derive from natural kinship relations.105 This is, therefore, further evidence that the groups who practise communal sex are groups of kinsmen, since when such exchanges occur among strangers, they create bonds of kinship.
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The winter family also has an effect on the summer family and the morals of the one affect the other. In the long-house an Eskimo does not wear clothes, nor does he wear clothes in his tent, even when it is cold. A feeling of shame at this is simply unknown.158
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