Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24

Knud Rasmussen's Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921 to 1924, published by Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag in Copenhagen, is the primary published record of Rasmussen's ethnographic fieldwork among Inuit communities across Arctic North America, including his direct interviews with the shamans Aua and Igjugarjuk. Rasmussen was himself part Greenlandic Inuit, fluent in the language, and traveled the route by dog sled rather than through an intermediary, which gives the interviews an access rarely matched by outside observers of the period. Its strength is that direct, first person fieldwork record, naming who spoke and under what circumstances. Its limit is that it is a product of its own decade, an early twentieth century ethnography whose translation and framing reflect Rasmussen's own interests and a European readership's expectations, so a claim resting on a specific passage should be checked against how later Arctic ethnographers have read the same material.