MAIN Assignment
For this session, you will watch a portion of the film "Nanook of the North," a silent film by Robert Flaherty considered the first great anthropological film. Though by today's standards, the film is considered to be an overly romanticized and caricatured version of Inuit (preferred term for Eskimo) life, because the film makes Nanook more of a childlike character than a fully adult male, it is nonetheless a film classic and a valuable document of a lifestyle that was being lost even as the film was being made.
This is where your forum assignment for the week comes in: considering that you read about cultural change, I want you to think about what parts of Inuit life have likely changed since Nanook's day, and what has been gained or lost in the process. This is not a research paper, but an exercise in your imagination. How do you imagine Inuit life to be today compared to Nanook's time (1920's), and are the changes overall for the better?
Remember, please answer this prompt with 350 words. Feel free to write more, if you would like. Also, please note that you need to respond to one classmate with at least a 150-word response.
MOIVE LINK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoUafjAH0cg
CLASSMATE WRITING
I have never put much thought into how the Inuit people live. This film was very informing in the telling of the harsh lifestyle those people took part in. They would go days and weeks without food, their hunting was a complicated venture, children were cared for in odd ways - there is no telling how these people were so happy go lucky in such a brutal lifestyle. I wondered why anyone would want that lifestyle, but it must be because they did not know better and wanted to maintain the culture. However, now the Inuit people must know better and be aware of a more promising lifestyles around the world. As a result, the Inuit culture may be very small now, but whoever did stay true to the culture lives a little more easily than Nanook did. Since the 1920s, tools for survival have greatly advanced. With that in mind, the Inuit people probably have better access to food because of more advanced tools for hunting. I imagine that the boats and canoes they use are a bit bigger and better, maybe even motorized. Also, the Inuit people may have better access to hygiene products for themselves and their children (I hope). The advancements in the Inuit culture that may exist is not only due to advancement in society, but also within the Inuit people after almost of 100 years of learning and improving their survival skills.