amuletsTupilaqᑐᐱᓚᒃ

said TOO-pee-lak; plural tupilait

also: tupilak · tupilait

amuletSiberia and the ArcticNorth AmericaGreenland Canada

This one is not fully ours to publish

The making of a tupilaq was done in secret, at night, alone. Published ethnography describes the procedure; this atlas prints the fact of the secrecy and not the procedure, and does not reconstruct it from scattered sources. — Inge Kleivan and B. Sonne, Eskimos: Greenland and Canada (1985), and Knud Rasmussen's Greenland records, as summarised in the cited source, which states that tupilaq were made in secret and in isolated places

The atlas prints the restriction and stops. Why.

Two different things share this name, and a reader should hold them apart. The first is what the word originally named in Greenland: an avenging creature assembled by an angakkuq from animal parts — bone, skin, hair, sinew — and, in the accounts, from parts taken from the bodies of children, brought to life by chants and sent into the sea after a named enemy. None survive; they were made in secret, in isolated places, out of materials that rot. The second is the carved figure: a small grotesque cut from sperm whale tooth, and today from narwhal and walrus tusk, wood and caribou antler, a few centimetres high, made to be looked at and bought.

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When

undated at its start; the carved form is still made still carried cited

Period	Greenlandic Inuit practice; carved figures from the period of early European contact
How the date is known	ethnographic — somebody recorded it being used, on a date
Note	The cited source dates neither the practice nor the first carved figure, saying only that early European visitors prompted the carvings. living refers to the carving, which continues; the sending of a tupilaq is not claimed here to be current.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Figurine
Made of	Bone and ivory · Tooth, tusk and claw · Wood · Skin
Goes	In a pocket or a bag · At the till
Made by	an angakkuq, for the older object; Greenlandic Inuit carvers, for the figures sold today
Retired	yes — it is replaced rather than kept
Note	single_use applies to the older object, which was sent once. The carved figure is a work of art and is not consumed. No published measurement was read.

The story

The second object exists because of the first. Early European visitors to Greenland were fascinated by the accounts they heard and wanted to see what a tupilaq looked like, so Inuit began carving representations of them out of sperm whale teeth. That carving is now an important part of Greenlandic Inuit art and is prized by collectors. It is a picture of a thing, made for an audience that had asked. That is not the same as the thing.

The first object came with a risk attached. Sending a tupilaq at somebody with greater power than the maker could turn it back on its maker — and the escape from that was public confession of the deed. The published ethnography places this inside a wider Greenlandic logic in which concealment carries magical consequences and confession neutralises them: a concealed miscarriage or infanticide could produce a monster called an anngiaq, a concealed breach of taboo could bring harm on the whole community, and angakkuit resolved a taboo breach by getting the breacher to confess in public. A young hunter's first kill was neutralised the same way, by making every adult share in it.

The word also does not mean the same thing across the Arctic. At Igloolik a tupilaq was an invisible ghost, the restless soul of a dead person whose death taboo had been breached, visible only to the angakkuq, and it drove the game away until the angakkuq scared it off with a knife. Among the Kivallirmiut it was an invisible chimera with a human head and parts of different animals, dangerous to the settlement, which the angakkuq fought and devoured with helping spirits. Among the Copper Inuit, the Inuinnait, tupilak came to mean something close to the Christian devil. Only in Greenland is it primarily a physical, human-made object.

Inference — the tupilaq is the clearest case in this atlas of a word that a museum label flattens. A tray of carved tupilait in a gift shop in Nuuk and a sentence in Knud Rasmussen's notebooks are not describing the same category, and the difference is not one of quality.

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How it is made and carried

The carved figure is cut from tusk, tooth, antler or wood with hand tools and polished; it is signed and sold. How the older object was made is not printed here. See the note below.

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Now

Carved tupilait are made in many shapes and sizes in Greenland from narwhal and walrus tusk, wood and caribou antler, form an important part of Greenlandic Inuit art, and are highly prized as collectibles. This project has read no dated price and names no living carver.

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