In his pathbreaking 1996 article, Michael Bravo called for greater attention to non-Western knowledge systems and how Western actors have tried to render these systems commensurate with Western science. This paper heeds Bravo’s call by examining this process of creating commensurability in the career of twentieth-century Arctic explorer, ethnographer, and former HSS president (1945-46), Vilhjálmur Stefánsson.
Having lived with Inuit communities, Stefánsson was an advocate for the superiority of Inuit technology, especially clothing, for Arctic life, and a critic of Canadian and U.S. government treatment of native Arctic peoples. But during the Cold War, he championed American military intervention in the Arctic and promoted Inuit-style dress for soldiers. He positioned himself as a clothing consultant for the military and military contractors, collaborating with the DuPont corporation to replicate Inuit garb in Western-style fabrics that could be mass-produced for troops. Stefánsson’s seemingly contradictory projects were as much about respect for indigenous knowledge as they were about positioning himself as the consummate expert on Arctic life in a changing technocratic America: keeping his own expertise, made during an earlier era of science, relevant for the modern world. Drawing on materials from Stefánsson’s archives, this paper will demonstrate the importance of understanding the specific ways in which indigenous knowledge has been appropriated and made commensurate via twentieth-century science, including as part of scientific self-fashioning, and argue that notions of “bioprospecting” should be applied to a greater range of activities than just the development of contemporary pharmaceuticals.
