Using archival material and oral testimony collected during workshops in Nunavut between 1996 and 2008, Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten provide a nuanced look at Inuit religion, offering a strong counter narrative to the idea that traditional Inuit culture declined post-contact. They show that setting up a dichotomy between a past identified with traditional culture and a present involving Christianity obscures the continuity and dynamics of Inuit society, which has long borrowed and adapted "outside" elements. They argue that both Shamanism and Christianity are continually changing in the Arctic and ideas of transformation and transition are necessary to understand both how the ideology of a hunting society shaped Inuit Christian cosmology and how Christianity changed Inuit shamanic traditions.

Frédéric B. Laugrand is professor of anthropology at Université Laval and FNRS Fellow at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, and co-author of Inuit Shamanism and Christianity: Transitions and Transformation in the Twentieth Century. Jarich G. Oos

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Jarich G. Oosten (1945–2016) was associate professor of anthropology at Leiden University and the author of numerous books, including Inuit Shamanism and Christianity: Transitions and Transformation in the Twentieth Century with Frédéric B. Laugrand.

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