Guy Bordin, 2015, Beyond Darkness and Sleep: The Inuit Night in North Baffin Island, Louvain – Paris – Bristol, CT: Peeters Publishers, 415 pages.

French anthropologist and filmmaker Guy Bordin has a rich history with Inuit living on Baffin Island (Nunavut, Canada) and has produced several books and articles on the subject, including Beyond Darkness and Sleep: The Inuit Night in North Baffin Island (2015). In this work, the author immerses us in a nocturnal ethnography conducted in Mittimatalik (or ᒥᑦᑎᒪᑕᓕᒃ, also known as Pond Inlet) through an updated and translated version of his doctoral thesis. It therefore comes as no surprise that the book is intended for researchers and Western scholars as well as the most avid readers interested in aspects of the polar night in Inuit Nunangat. By running through the pages, the readership will be exposed to some aspects of Mittimatalingmiut culture and history, narratives from classical ethnology (e.g., Nansen 1893; Stefánsson 1914; Jenness 1922; Rasmussen 1929, 1930a, 1930b, 1932), and a deconstruction of prejudices and preconceptions toward nychthemerons in the Canadian Arctic, as well as the Western thought—among many others—encompassing darkness, sleep, and night. The book is structured into three distinct parts and comprises ten chapters, including an introduction that provides essential background information on the research (i.e., the methodology and approach adopted, as well as the population studied), a conclusion, an Inuktitut-English glossary, and appendices. The first part presents different nocturnal contexts leading to the Arctic night, everyday (night)life, the uniqueness of cosmology, cosmogony, and angakkuuniq, and the concepts of darkness and light. The second part is intended to address various nighttime experiences—some from a state of wakefulness (such as travelling, hunting, and staying up for pleasure or leisure activities), others from a sleep study (including dreams and visions). The third and final section addresses the modalities and timing of Inuit nightlife in relation to birth, illness, death, and fear. Thus, using a diachronic perspective and the knowledge of comparative history (Pre-Christian and Christian eras) from page one to the end, Guy Bordin’s analyses determined significant correlations and complementarities linked to the 24-hour cycle (and hence the annual cycle of light in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago) between night and day and darkness and light. The author captures the readers’ attention by employing a skillful, sharp, and brilliant approach to engage us with his primary interlocutors, such as through biographical notes and quotes (Bordin 2015). Another point of interest is how Guy Bordin reclaims the “nocturnity” concept and challenges the pattern spectrum of binary opposition so familiar to Westerners (and the Judeo-Christian worldview): “[…] darkness/light alternation in the form of a succession of a night and a day” (ibid., 89). The results of the attentive (cross-)examination are thus mainly on how Inuit are, and always have been, subject to time (whether it is daytime or nighttime) and tend to see their world with unique criteria (based mostly on intergenerational knowledge, intellectual construct, and subjectivity) for defining night. For them, darkness is not the night, and day/night/evening times vary. Therefore, Inuit understanding and views of the night are inseparable from time reckoning of the annual and circadian rhythm scale in Mittimatalik, and everywhere else in Inuit Nunangat. As such, Guy Bordin illustrates the above argument through storytelling, anecdotes, facts, gendered examples (from olden times to present day), reasoning, and expert testimony, making it a central theme of his work. However, a review more punctilious of the sexual division of labor and societal clichés of both men and women would have been worthwhile in debunking the myth involving males as hunters and females as the ones who wait (ibid.), as at the time the book was published, it was well established that both sexes participated in large and small game hunting, …

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