“Sealfie”, “Phoque you” and “Animism”: The Canadian Inuit Answer to the United-States Anti-sealing Activism

Abstract

A corpus made by online Canadian newspaper articles, coming from the archives of CBC News, Vice Canada and Huffington Post Canada, and related multimedia contents such us audio interviews, videos and especially links to images and comments shared on Twitter, allows us to reconstruct the debate on the seal hunt that involved Canadian media in 2014. In specific, we propose an interpretation of the pro-sealing discourse by Canadian Inuit and Newfoundlanders as an ironic and incisive answer to the serious United States animal rights activists discourse, explaining how these two different points of view on animals come from a different experience of the environment and a different conception of nature. The image of the seal became the friction point between Western naturalism against Inuit animism: a multinaturalist (Descola in Beyond nature and culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013) clash in the North America post-colonial situation. A clash solved by people as Tanya Tagaq and other Inuit artists that belong to these two different semiospheres (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1990) and thanks to their border placement can allow a dialog between Inuit and North American cultures traducing aesthetic forms, values and meanings. To study the structures of meaning at the base of this clash and iconoclash (Latour, in Weibel, Latour (eds) Iconoclash. Beyond the image-wars in science, religion and art, pp 14–37, ZKM and MIT Press, Boston, 2002) on the artic seal between opposite cultures, it has been necessary to use the socio-semiotic approach (Greimas and Courtes in Semiotics and language: an analytical dictionary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, Marrone in Corpi sociali. Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo, Einaudi, Torino, 2001) with the help of semiotics of culture tools (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, Culture and explosion. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2009].