The Patterning of Recent Cultural Change in a Siberian Eskimo Village.

This paper deals with a change in self-definition among a group of Siberian Eskimo. Such a change, which has begun over the last generation,may be traced to a concomitant series of conditions which has affected the group. In the years between 1940 and 1955 the Eskimo people living in the small Bering Sea coastal village of Gambell have come into intensive contact of both a personal and impersonal nature with the white world; they have been given opportunities for jobs and new forms of satisfaction of basic wants; they have been subjected to many "stressor agents" of different types; and they have continued to observe and draw reasoned conclusions about conditions which affect their lives. These factors have combined to bring about a change in the function of the mainland with reference to themselves. The mainland no longer supplies only material goods; it now also supplies basic criteria of choice and models for the identification of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]