"Besides that specific identity as Christians, Greenlanders maintained their European identity in many other ways, including their importation of European bronze candlesticks, glass buttons, and gold rings. Over the centuries of their colony´s existence, the Greenlanders followed and adopted changing European customs in detail. One well documented set of exemples involves burial customs, as revealed by excavations of bodies of Scandinavian and Greenland churchyards. Medieval Norwegians buried infants and stillborns around a church's east gable; so did the Greenlanders. Early medieval Norwegians buried bodies in coffins, with women on the south side of the churchyards and men on the north side; later Norwegians dispensed with coffins, just wrapped bodies in clothing or a shroud, and mingled the sexes in the churchyard.Greenlanders made those same shifts with time. In continental European cemeteries throughout the Middle Ages, bodies were laid out on their backs with the head towards the west and the feet towards the east (so that the deceased could "face" east), but the position of the arms changed with time: until 1250 the arms were arranged to extend parallel to the sides, then around 1250 they were bent slightly over the pelvis, later bent further to rest over the stomach, and finally in the late Middle Ages folded tightly over the chest. Even those shifts in arm positions are observed in Greenland cemeteries.
Greenland church construction similarly followed Norwegian European models and their changes with time. Any tourist accustomed to European cathedrals, with their long nave, west-facing main entrance, chancel, and north and south transepts, will immediately recognize all those features in the stone ruins of Gardar Cathedral today. Hvalsey Church so closely resembles Eidfjord Church in Norway that we can conclude that Greenlanders must either have brought over the same architect or else copied the blueprints. Between 1200 and 1225, Norwegian builders abandoned their previous unit of linear measurement (the so-called international Roman foot) and adopted the shorter Greek foot; Greenland builders followed suit.
Imitation of European models extended to homely details like combs and clothes. Norwegian combs were single-sided, with the tines on just one side of the shaft, until around 1200, when those combs went out of fashion and were replaced by two-sided models with sets of tines projecting in opposite directions; Greenlanders followed that switch in comb styles. (That calls to mind Henry Thoreau's comment, in his book Walden, about people who slavishly adopt the latest style of fashion designers in a distant land: "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.") The excellent preservation of garments wrapped around the corpses buried in the permafrost at Herjolfsnes Churchyard from the final decades of the Greenland colony's existence shows us that Greenland clothes followed smart European fashions, even though they seem far less appropriate to Greenland's cold climate than the Inuit onepiece tailored parka with fitted sleeves and attached hood. Those clothes of the last Greenland Norse included: for women, a long, low-necked gown with a narrow waist; for men, a sporty coat called a houpelande, which was a long loose outer garment held in by a belt at the waist and with loose sleeves up which the wind could whistle; jackets buttoned up the front; and tall cylindrical caps.
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, "We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit." Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe's most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on "We are Europeans" becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland's climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders' clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive." pp. 245-247
Mucho foda indeed, faça um favor pro seu cérebro e leia o livro. Aqui tem um pdf pra quem güenta na tela, mas deve ser fácil de achar em qualquer lugar, o livro é de 2005.
Greenland church construction similarly followed Norwegian European models and their changes with time. Any tourist accustomed to European cathedrals, with their long nave, west-facing main entrance, chancel, and north and south transepts, will immediately recognize all those features in the stone ruins of Gardar Cathedral today. Hvalsey Church so closely resembles Eidfjord Church in Norway that we can conclude that Greenlanders must either have brought over the same architect or else copied the blueprints. Between 1200 and 1225, Norwegian builders abandoned their previous unit of linear measurement (the so-called international Roman foot) and adopted the shorter Greek foot; Greenland builders followed suit.
Imitation of European models extended to homely details like combs and clothes. Norwegian combs were single-sided, with the tines on just one side of the shaft, until around 1200, when those combs went out of fashion and were replaced by two-sided models with sets of tines projecting in opposite directions; Greenlanders followed that switch in comb styles. (That calls to mind Henry Thoreau's comment, in his book Walden, about people who slavishly adopt the latest style of fashion designers in a distant land: "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.") The excellent preservation of garments wrapped around the corpses buried in the permafrost at Herjolfsnes Churchyard from the final decades of the Greenland colony's existence shows us that Greenland clothes followed smart European fashions, even though they seem far less appropriate to Greenland's cold climate than the Inuit onepiece tailored parka with fitted sleeves and attached hood. Those clothes of the last Greenland Norse included: for women, a long, low-necked gown with a narrow waist; for men, a sporty coat called a houpelande, which was a long loose outer garment held in by a belt at the waist and with loose sleeves up which the wind could whistle; jackets buttoned up the front; and tall cylindrical caps.
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, "We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit." Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe's most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on "We are Europeans" becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland's climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders' clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive." pp. 245-247
Mucho foda indeed, faça um favor pro seu cérebro e leia o livro. Aqui tem um pdf pra quem güenta na tela, mas deve ser fácil de achar em qualquer lugar, o livro é de 2005.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário