Edmund (Snow) Carpenter

Edmund Carpenter (born 1922) has taught anthropology for 40 years at the Universities of Toronto, California and Harvard. He began his fieldwork as a boy in 1935 and has since worked in New Guinea, Borneo and Tibet as well as all of the world's Arctic regions. He has made fifteen field trips to the Arctic in Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Siberia. In 1951 he spent the winter in an Eskimo sod hut.

Carpenter's published works include "Patterns That Connect" (1996, ISBN 0810963264) and a twelve-volume work called "Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art", both about the work of Carl Schuster; "Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me" (1974, ISBN 0030068819); and "They Became What They Beheld" (1970, ISBN 0876900155). A documentary film built on interviews with Carpenter and footage from his fieldwork, also titled "Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me", was released in 2003. He is currently working on a book on Eskimo maps which will include 400 original drawings, all made before 1900 and some as early as the 18th century. (See for a more detailed entry on him, Edmund Snow Carpenter)