Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old

"Is your mother good?" "Are you good?" "Do you want to come live with me?" Inuit adults often playfully present small children with difficult, even dangerous, choices and then dramatize the consequences of the child's answers. They are enacting in larger-than-life form the plots that drive Inuit social life-testing, acting out problems, entertaining themselves, and, most of all, bringing up their children.

In a riveting narrative, psychological anthropologist Jean L. Briggs takes us through ...