a people inhabiting the region that extends from the eastern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula to Greenland. According to a 1975 estimate, the Eskimo number 90,000. They speak Eskimo and are classed as members of the Arctic Mongoloid race.
The Eskimo were formed as a people approximately 4,000–5,000 years ago in the Bering Sea region; they spread eastward to Greenland, arriving there long before the beginning of the Common Era. The Eskimo adapted with remarkable success to life in the arctic; they created the toggle harpoon for hunting marine animals, a special boat known as the kayak, the snowhouse known as the igloo, and fur pullover clothing.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Eskimo economy was based on the hunting of caribou and marine animals. The social organization was characterized by territorial communes and by substantial vestiges of primitive collectivist norms in the distributions of the catch. Religion consisted in the worship of spirits and of some animals. In the 19th century the Eskimo did not have a clan organization or a highly developed tribal organization.
With the arrival of outsiders, the life of the Eskimo outside Russia underwent fundamental changes. Considerable numbers switched from marine hunting and fishing to hunting for arctic fox and, in Greenland, commercial fishing. Some Eskimo, especially those in Greenland, worked as hired laborers. In Greenland, a small, local bourgeoisie emerged. The Eskimo of western Greenland form a separate people: the Greenlandic Eskimo. In Labrador the Eskimo have, to a considerable extent, intermingled with the long-established indigenous population, which is of European descent. The remnants of traditional Eskimo culture are rapidly disappearing everywhere.
In the USSR the Eskimo constitute a small ethnic group of 1,510 persons (1979 census) that lives with, or in close proximity to, the Chukchi in a number of settlements along the eastern coast of the Chukchi Peninsula and on Vrangel’ Island. Their traditional occupation was hunting marine animals. Under Soviet power radical changes have occurred in the economy and way of life of the Eskimo, who are being resettled from yarangas (portable dwellings) to houses with modern conveniences. On kolkhozes, whose members generally include both Eskimo and Chukchi, a diversified and mechanized economy is being developed; it is based largely on reindeer raising and on hunting, including the hunting of marine animals. Illiteracy has been eliminated, and an intelligentsia has formed.
L. A. FAINBERG
The Eskimo created a distinctive decorative, applied, and representational art. Excavations have uncovered artifacts dating from the end of the first millennium B.C. and from the first millennium of the Common Era. These finds include bone harpoon heads and arrowheads; “winged objects,” thought to be decorations for the bows of boats; miniature stylized figures of humans and animals; models of kayaks that are decorated with representations of men and animals; and intricate ornamental carving. The characteristic Eskimo art of the 18th to 20th centuries is represented by figures carved of walrus tusk or, sometimes, soapstone, by wood carvings, by applique work, and by embroidery that consists of patterns of reindeer fur and skin that are used to decorate clothing and articles for everyday use.
the language of the Eskimo, who live in the USSR in the Chukchi Autonomous Okrug (formerly Chukchi National Okrug) and in Greenland, Alaska, and Canada. According to a 1975 estimate, the Eskimo number 90,000, including 1,300 Siberian Eskimo (1970 census).
Eskimo, an Eskimo-Aleut language, has 20 dialects, which, having developed in isolation of one another, are widely divergent; many are virtually independent languages. Among the Siberian Eskimo, three principal dialects are distinguished: Chaplin, on which the written language is based; Naukan; and the dialect of the Sirenik Eskimo, which is becoming extinct. A Latin writing system was devised for the Siberian Eskimo in 1932; in 1937 it was replaced by a Cyrillic alphabet. Among the Eskimo outside the USSR; the Greenlandic Eskimo have a writing system.
I. TSVETKOVSKII