เครื่องรางเครื่องรางชาวอินูอิตInuit amulet

Two numbers in the ethnographic record say more about this practice than any description of an object does.

The first is 80. Wikipedia's summary of the published ethnography of Inuit religion records that the Netsilik used a great many amulets — even dogs could have them — and gives one recorded instance of a young boy who had eighty, so many that he could hardly play. The second is 17: one man carried seventeen names taken from his ancestors, and the names were themselves intended to protect him. Beside that sits the Iglulik, who used few.

Amulets sit inside a system with other parts. Inuit religion holds that human illness can be caused by offending the spirits, and that fear of retribution produces caution; to avoid giving offence, people have observed rules and taboos, offered prayers and songs, worn amulets, and consulted the angakkuit, the ritual specialists who mediate between people and spirits. An amulet might be made by an angakkuq, but lay people made them too.

Inference — an eighty-amulet child and a seventeen-name man describe a practice where protection is cumulative rather than singular, which is a different logic from the one-charm-one-neck traditions that fill most of this atlas. This project states that as its own reading of the published record and not as anybody's account of their own practice.

This record prints what published ethnography and Inuit and Greenlandic institutions have made public, and no more. It does not reconstruct which animal answers which spirit, and it does not fill the gaps from a neighbouring tradition.

Selected and attached: sewn to a parka, hung at the neck, set into a hood. An amulet corresponds to a spirit, and the rest of the making is not printed here. Names function alongside objects — a name taken from an ancestor is described in the ethnography as protective in itself.

Inuit amulet practice is documented by twentieth-century ethnographers working in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland; Inuit religious practice continues alongside Christianity across the Arctic. This project has read no dated present-day account it can cite, so no claim is made here about what any community carries in 2026.