เครื่องรางทูปิลักTupilaqᑐᐱᓚᒃ

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.

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.

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.