The Social and Ecological Dimensions of Food Security: Foraging and sharing in the Canadian Arctic

Abstract.  Ethnographic research with Inuit in Kangiqsujuaq (Nunavik) highlights the primacy of environmental conditions and social relationships in access to hunted and gathered foods. In this talk, I investigate the relationships between household economics, traditional harvesting, and food sharing in Kangiqsujuaq, finding that economic trade-offs at the individual and household levels condition processes of household formation and the cooperative division of labour in the settlement; as well as broader patterns of social structure. I consider the relevance of these conclusions both for the resilience of communities to climate change and for models of the origins of inequality.