Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

The far off settlement of Ammassalik at the other end of the Inuit world, on the east coast of Greenland, was only discovered in 1884. In 1905-6, the ethnologist William Thalbitzer found a male who had been raised as a girl. (25) Then in 1914 Gustav Holm described the inverse: girls raised as boys, so that they could hunt with their fathers, and it appears in fact that at the time of the earliest European settlements in these northern communities, female transvestites were encountered much more often than in Mesoamerica. Obviously, in another setting it would be crucial to study each such variant, but the fundamental similarity of children within these various northern groups who were anointed in their roles by parents, which involve long-term transvestism, and the performance of tasks customary for the opposite sex, can hardly be gainsaid. At the end of our exposition, they will be seen to form one social type, whose similarity to what we have documented to the south, and especially in Meso-, Central and So uth America, is unmistakable.

Let me begin by sketching the characteristics of the berdaches in the Inuit or Eskimo area, to return later to the Aleutian and Western Canadian groups. As noted, the European discovery and missionizing of these Inuit areas only occurred at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which explains why the scientific study of these areas began only a half-century ago. Writing in 1962 on the phenomenon of the sipiniq, an infant who, in the Inuit view, had been a boy as a foetus but became a girl at birth, Bernard Saladin d'Anglure claims pride of place in raising the general question of change of gender among these peoples, followed in 1975 by Rose Dufour. The field work of both these scholars took place on Iglulik Island, northeast of Presqu'ile de Melville in the Northwest Territories. Research soon moved from beliefs about gender bending to its practice. Writing in 1974 and 1991, Jean Briggs says she witnessed actual changes of gender in the Central Arctic and heard of its practice on Baffin Isl and. Finally, and most significant for the questions raised in this paper, is the work of Joelle Robert-Lamblin, who observed this phenomenon extensively in the region of Ammassalik on the east coast of Greenland. In three works dating to 1981 and 1986, the author, as we shall see, directly confronts many of the problems I have raised earlier in the paper, even if she, like previous scholars, never seriously compared what they found in the north to the berdaches further south, not to mention to the historical berdaches of Mesoamerica, who at the time they wrote had not been seriously studied.

Briggs lays out her reading of the phenomenon of the Arctic berdache succinctly in her 1974 article. "If a family has only daughters, a father may decide to bring up one or two daughters as hunters, so that they can help him.... To be sure, they also learn female skills, and eventually they marry and have children, but the masculine training they have received may show itself ... [in being] somewhat bossy toward their husbands." (26) Once Briggs had taken account of Robert-Lamblin's subsequent research, however, she modified her stance, saying in her 1991 article that while cross-gendered upbringing may sometimes end at puberty, in other cases individuals may retain that identity for their entire lives. (27) Thus the key components of these berdaches would seem to be as follows: 1) Different from the berdaches we have studied to the south, these Inuit figures are predominantly biological females gendered male or, as the literature has long named them, female berdaches; in a moment we shall see how predominan t that assigned gender actually was. 2) The fundamental reason for this regendering is task-driven familial demography or balance, identical to one motivation we have encountered at work in Meso- and South America. 3) Upon reaching puberty, these berdaches may or may not reassume their biological gender. That would be quite distinct from the practice to the south, where the assumption of berdache status usually remained for a lifetime. However, we still have to determine if the return to biological gender had always been possible, or if what Briggs described was an adaptation brought on by the European conquest.