Like the Knife of the Carver

Language is the principal tool with which the Eskimo make the natural world a human world. They use many words for snow, which permits fine distinctions, not simply because they are much concerned with snow, but because snow takes its form from the actions in which it participates: sledding, falling, igloo-building.  Different kinds of snow are brought into existence by the Eskimo as they experience their environment and speak; words do not label things already there.  Words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside.  As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth but also is the very thing about which he is talking. 

---Edmund Carpenter, "Arctic Realities." Taken from the exhibition pamphlet for "Upside Down: Arctic Realities" on display at the Menil Collection, April 15-July 17, 2011.