Seasonal Affective Order: Rhythmanalysis and Mesology of Circumpolar Religion

Abstract

It has long been acknowledged that in Inuit society, there exists an alternation or rhythm between an intense collective religious life in the winter and a comparatively profane summer marked by smaller scale social encounters. In this way, changes in the natural world are bound together with alterations in social and affective life. This relationship between natural conditions and social-cultural distributions is discussed in Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s classic study of seasonal variations among the Inuit.  Using the ethnographic material available to them, Mauss and Beuchat demonstrate a strong connection, but not a causal one, between the extreme natural seasonal changes and the patterns of social and religious circumpolar life. Focusing in particular on how this mediation between the space-time of a community and its material substratum manifests itself in religious life, this paper offers some slight revisions to Mauss and Beuchat’s idea of social morphology, by reconsidering it in light of more recent ethnographic and historical literature, on the one hand, and the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre and Augustin Berque, on the other. Taken together, Lefebvre and Berque model a way of thinking about how physical changes in the environment take on meaning and affective tonalities for communities and individuals.