Inuit, Values, Anthropology, Inuit children, Play 

"In Inuit society a great deal of the serious business of life is conducted in the playful mode, and this play contains processes essential to the creation, maintenance, and internalization of the central values of that society. Play helps Inuit to manage interpersonal and value conflicts and thus to maintain smooth human relationships. Paradoxically, it does this by creating mistrust as well as trust. Play also creates values and contributes to their internalization by charging them with emotional content. Inuit engage in many little interpersonal games or rituals, which are spontaneous but at the same time strikingly recurrent, not only within one group at one period of time, but also across groups and across time. These games present problems -- often in the form of value conflicts -- and dramatize them, so that they are made conceptually clear and emotionally vivid; they involve the child by making him solve the problems and by making the latter of dangerous -- thus, crucial -- importance. In this way they charge each value with complex emotional meaning, such that motivations -- commitments -- intrinsic to each are created."--page iii. 

v, 63 pages ; 28 cm.