Representing Tuurngait
Memory and History in Nunavut Volume One
Description
Tuurngait was the most common word used to describe the helping spirits of an angakkuq (shaman). Tuurngait could take any form but were most commonly humans, animals, or animal bodies with a human head. This book collects descriptions and drawings of 347 tuurngait as described to ethnographers Edmund James Peck and Knud Rasmussen in the late 1800s and early 1900s.