The Polar North
The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging Stephan Pax Leonard Francis Boutle Publishers, London. 2014. £20. Reviewed by Genevieve LeMoine Stephen Pax Leonard's book The Polar North joins a long line of popular accounts by travellers to the far north who seek to experience and learn from traditional "primitive" culture before it disappears. Leonard spent a year among the Inughuit (in his spelling, Inugguit) conducting linguistic research, concerned about the impending loss of oral traditions, and indeed Inughuit culture as whole, in the face of rapid cultural and climatic change. His background is as a linguist of Scandinavian languages and this was his first experience in the far north. His approach is phenomenological, concerned with the spoken word, as well as gestures; language not as “a disembodied, purely formal set of grammatical and syntactic relations” but as a part of “the totality of human experience” (p. 28). Leonard discusses this aspect of his r