Food, sharing, and social structure in an arctic mixed economy [electronic resource]
Keywords: Anthropology.

This dissertation examines household livelihood strategies, particularly food sharing, and social structure. Although food sharing has been a central topic of research in human behavioural ecology, the field has lacked the methods necessary to scale up from dyadic interactions to broader social structures. Here, I employ social network theory and analysis to explore how strategic economic decisions, such as decisions about sharing, are embedded in and feedback onto social structures. The dynamics of these social structures have important consequences for processes of social and cultural change, including both the persistence of cultural practices and changes in socioeconomic inequality. This research is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik, an Inuit settlement of approximately 800 people on the eastern coast of the Hudson Strait in northern Canada. In Kangiqsujuaq, traditional Inuit socioeconomic goals and activities, particularly customary resource harvesting and sharing practices, co-exist and depend upon opportunities and constraints in the cash economy. Analyses presented in this dissertation are based on a questionnaire conducted with 110 Inuit households in the settlement. This questionnaire covered a broad range of subjects relevant to household livelihood strategies, including demographics, economics, harvest participation, food security, and food sharing networks. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the development of mixed cash and subsistence economies in Inuit settlements and on evaluating the prevalence and form of food insecurity in Kangiqsujuaq. The food security assessment indicates that 41% of households in Kangiqsujuaq have low or very low food security, and analysis of these results reveals that food insecurity is correlated with other indicators of wealth. However, the patterning of Kangiqsujuarmiut responses also suggests that standard food security assessment modules need to be used in conjunction with other metrics of food access, such as food sharing networks, to adequately account for the additional factors that influence access to harvested foods. Chapters 4 through 6 examine customary food sharing in Kangiqsujuaq and its relationship with socioeconomic status. Most importantly, traditional food sharing in the settlement does not serve a single function such as reciprocity. Instead, food sharing emerges as a complex social, political, and economic phenomenon that accomplishes different objectives for actors based on their social position. Generosity is a strategy through which economic, political, and social advantages can be obtained and maintained, for those who can afford it. These network patterns impart broad social and economic consequences in the settlement. In particular, the sharing network is not structured to effectively reduce food insecurity for the settlement as a whole. Poor and food insecure households have the least resilient sharing networks. Social structures at the household level, including household divisions of labour and marriage patterns, also affect the economic strategies available to households. The network approach adopted in this research highlights the conjugate role of individual decisions and structural constraints in broader processes of social and cultural change. In Kangiqsujuaq, mixed economies persist because food-sharing articulates with social structure in ways that have consequences for the creation and persistence of inequality within the settlement. Food sharing among Inuit redistributes wealth, but the act of redistribution reinforces patterns of social organization in the settlement. Given the structural inequalities documented in this research, traditional sharing cannot be considered as a palliative to climate change so long as high levels of poverty continue to undermine food security, access to hunting equipment, and food sharing in Kangiqsujuaq.