A book with unpublished texts by and on Jean Malaurie has just been published by Éditions Dépaysage in France. Entitled “INUA – l’imaginaire arctique de Jean Malaurie” (“INUA, Jean Malaurie’s Arctic Imaginary”).
Edited by Jan Borm, it contains some of Malaurie’s writings, either difficult to access or unpublished in French so far, including his magnificent preface about circumpolar art to the volume “L’Art du Grand Nord” (“The Art of the Far North”), as well as testimonies from friends and close collaborators. It also includes photographs and images of objects from Malaurie’s Arctic collections, which he donated to the Oceanographic Institute/Foundation Albert I of Monaco. Prince Albert II of Monaco has contributed a spirited preface.
The book reveals the fundamentally creative dimension of an anthropo-geographer who never ceased to question himself over 70 years of his international career about the connatural link between humans, animals, the Indigenous peoples of the Far North and the world they live in. A book of testimonies and transmission, but also a sensitive crossing of Jean Malaurie’s Arctic imaginary in which science, art and the sacred are continuously engaged in dialogue.
INUA - an Inuit term signifying the spirit that resides in all beings as well as the human part of the animal soul – invites the reader to enter Malaurie’s Arctic imaginary. Thanks to his texts, diaries, pastels and objects which he collected, as well as the testimonies of those who were his companions, a holistic view of an intellectual universe appears which is characterised by a constant interest in the sacred, the visible and invisible, the mineral and the presence of spirits.
