Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. Jean L. Briggs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 275 pp.

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With an increasingly diverse school population, it is important to be sensitive to alternative ways of knowing and learning, as well as different kinds of experiential awareness, among individuals and cultures. Jean Briggs promotes such sensitivity with her description of an Inuit approach to child rearing. The Inuit in her study live in the small hunting camp of Qipisa on Baffin Island in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

Through informal playful sequences of emotionally charged interactions, Inuit adults educate their children, especially those between the ages of two and four, by provoking them to think about powerful problems that they could not ignore. The adults ask a question born of potential danger for the child being questioned and dramatize the procedures and consequences of various answers. For example, "Why don’t you kill your baby brother?" "Why don’t you die so I can have your nice new shirt?" The questions tend to focus on a child’s crises, such as weaning, adoption, birth of a sibling, and competition over resources.

Adults engaging in this socialization see themselves as good humored, benign, and playful, although children do not at first know this. Briggs puts it this way: "It is the identity between playful and serious selves that makes it possible for the play to serve as an announcement of self, for the audience reaction to create awareness of self, and for negative audience reactions to someday strike home and bring about a change" (p. 68).

Briggs attempts to take us into the mind of a three-year-old Inuit on the bases of about 30 years of research on the Inuit and a background in psychology. She explains the use of psychodynamic thinking in her fieldwork exploring informal education. In presenting a story of approximately six months in the life of a girl she calls Chubby Maata, Briggs’s concern is the processes through which a child conceives and creates her life in a particular society. What are its purposes and goals, dangers and desires, fears and loves?

Of course, children’s perceptions vary as they develop, and an adult of another culture is at some distance from how a child perceives what is going on. The validity of applying a Western psychological theory to the Inuit remains to be demonstrated. Briggs admits, "The best I can hope for is to provide a glimpse of some of the important themes in Chubby Maata’s . . . life and some of the patterns they form" (p. 88).

She describes moment-to-moment interactions between the girl and other people in what she calls "dramas." Each grows spontaneously out of naturally occurring incidents in daily life and is slightly different because the child’s experiences and understanding continually accumulate. In addition, new concerns develop as Chubby Maata grows. Briggs offers several nuanced possible interpretations of the dramas, proffering many instances of "may," "it’s just possible," and "it’s probable."

"Because you’re a baby?" "Are you a baby?"—these questions occur several times a day during the period of Chubby Maata’s life that Briggs observed. What does it mean to be a baby, what privileges are lost by becoming a child, and what it is to be an adult? As do other Inuit women, Chubby Maata’s mother elicits answers as she encourages negative behavior, silliness, and lack of understanding, to criticize it, and tells her child how to respond to fights with a sibling or a mother’s interaction with the sibling. In becoming a child, Chubby Maata must negotiate and take responsibility for relationships in an increasingly larger world and find her place in it. Lessons include fearing others a little so as not to impose on them, dangers of alliances, and problems of uncontrolled aggression. There are negative and positive consequences of a particular identity in terms of the way people treat Chubby Maata.

Briggs raises questions relevant to all children and cultures. What is the role of play in social communities? How are emotions born, shaped, and given meaning in social life? What do young children understand about these phenomena? What kinds of generalizations can a study of one individual generate?

Some of Briggs’s interpretations seem limited. Why does she not address Inuit attitudes toward pets when Chubby Maata’s mother tells her to hurt her pet dog and watches her do so without comment, even if it is, as Briggs suggests, a substitution of the child’s aggressive attack on the anthropologist whom she at first fears (pp. 136 ff.)?

Briggs provides the reader with an awareness that social interactions between adults and young children often dismissed as prosaic and meaningless are the "meat and potatoes" of socialization to think and feel like members of the group. Her study calls our attention to the importance of play as a safe space in which to try out new behavior; her work sparks our imaginations.

© 2000 American Anthropological Association, cited in the September 2000 issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly (31:3).

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