Talk:aranu'tiq
Latest comment: 8 years ago by -sche
Russian penetration of the north Pacific Ocean, 1700-1799 (1988, →ISBN) mentions "Koekchuchami. A Kamchadal word for a male native wearing women’s clothing and performing women’s tasks; a male wife; transvestite. In Alaska, the term akhnuchik referred to a ‘changed sex’ person." However, the book does not make clear what language akhnuchik is in. (Kamchadal = Itelmen (itl).) It is probably Koniag, in which case the word is simply a variant of this one. - -sche (discuss) 04:52, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
Details:
- Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men (2010, →ISBN), reports (page 113) that aranu'tiq "probably did not wear women's clothes, but rather men's clothes — or at least mixed costume". Lang says that Birket-Smith's (1953) consultant mentioned them, giving the canonical view that they were male on one side of their bodies and female on the other. At least one did both men's and women's work, with great skill, and had the "descriptive" personal name "Tyakutyik", "What Kind of People Are These Two?", which was also born by a [cisgender] daughter of a chieftain in the village of Chenega, who was not an aranu'tiq. Lang adds (on page 166) that "exclusion of women-men from the healer profession was also found among the Chugach Eskimo [...] although in these groups the women-men's status was not explicitly cited as the reason."
- Pacific Homosexualities (2002, →ISBN), page 209 (confusingly using the opposite term, "a man-woman of this kind", cf. Talk:man-woman), says that an aranu'tiq "was really supposed to be two persons in one. When he was a young man, Makari saw one in Chenega named Tyakutyik".
- Many faces of gender (2002), page 18, says that "According to Kaj Birket-Smith, in Chugach society no known cases exist of boys raised as girls or of women who lived or behaved like men, but a half man/half woman (aranu'tiq) appears in historical traditions. The aranu'tiq are said to be male on one side and female on the other; they performed the work of both sxes and were considered more skilled than ordinary persons (Birket-Smith 1953:94). Although Birket-Smith refers to the aranu'tiq as a transvestite, in the Chugach intellect the aranu'tiq more aptly refers to a third gender, not an either-or category."