A Woman's Vapor: Yupik Bodily Powers in Southwest Alaska

Abstract

Menstrual pollution is represented as a repressive ideology that particularly restricts women. Menstrual traditions among Yupik Eskimos of southwest Alaska challenge this model. Here, menstrual practices are understood within a set of social rules applied to persons (including men) in various states, and do not signal gender-based social-structural ambiguity. Anthropologists should not assume that menstrual restrictions are everywhere understood or experienced as rigidly inhibiting, implying regulation of the person, or indexing a primary concern with gender. (Menstrual traditions, gender, Alaska Native/Native American, Central Yupik) ********** Among the Malemut, and southward from the Lower Yukon and adjacent districts, when a girl reaches the age of puberty she is considered unclean for forty days; she must therefore live by herself in a corner of the house with her face to the wall, and always keep her hood over her head, with her hair hanging disheveled over her eyes.... The same custom formerly prevailed among the Unalit, but at present the girl is secluded behind a grass mat in one corner of the room for the period of only four days, during which time she is said to be a-gu-lin-g'a-guk [aglenrraq], meaning she becomes a woman, and is considered unclean. A peculiar atmosphere is supposed to surround her at this time, and if a young man should come near enough for it to touch him it would render him visible to every animal he might hunt, so that his success as a hunter would be gone. (Nelson 1983 [1899]:291) At the beginning of a Yupik Eskimo (1) story told around 1980, the half-human/ half-animal beings called ircinrraat are hosting a ceremony and, we are told, have explicitly forbidden the attendance of aglenrrat (those who are starting to bleed). A boy is getting ready to go to the ceremony, and his grandmother instructs him to accept and bring home all gifts that the ircinrraat offer him, even if they appear to be nothing but grass and weeds. He heads off to the festivities. The girl who has just had her first period is overcome with curiosity (a typical prelude to trouble in Yupik Eskimo stories) and goes to the hill where the ircinrraat are holding the ceremony. She can see into the hillside, which is magically open. People are laughing and dancing inside, but she is unable to climb the riverbank to get there. Like Sisyphus, she keeps sliding back all night, eventually wearing out the knees of her thigh-high skin boots. The boy, on the other hand, has a wonderful time and (unlike all the other guests) does not discard the seemingly worthless plants that the ircinrraat distribute. He and his wise grandmother are happy when the refuse turns into valuable furs on his return. Although restrictions have been relaxed in the past 40 years, Yupiit (literally, real people; sing., Yupik) are familiar with the long list of prohibitions surrounding menstruation in Yupik Eskimo society. As in many other hunting cultures, a menstruating woman is thought to offend and repel fish and game and to adversely affect a man's hunting ability. In this story, the menarcheal woman was unable to attend ceremonial activities. Menstruating women today, at least in Russian Orthodox communities, do not attend church services. A young woman's behavior was once strictly regulated not only during menarche, but also for a full year afterwards. From then on, she was expected to observe certain constraints each menstrual period. These facts alone might argue for a pollution model to explain Yupik attitudes toward menstruation. Ideas of danger, uncleanness, and behavior hedged with prohibitions appear in connection with menstruation throughout the ethnographic literature on Inuit, in Alaska and elsewhere. Yet a closer look suggests that we need to understand menstruation within a complex of ideas and behaviors concerning behavioral restrictions in general, and the social and cosmic powers of bodily substances and emanations in particular. …