Publication scientifique
Inuit and modern hunter-gatherer subsistence
Some two decades ago, Asen Balikci (1989) and David Riches (1990) questioned whether research on Inuit, despite production of a voluminous literature, had made any contribution to theoretical issues in anthropology. On their heels, Burch (1994) asked very much the same about Hunter-Gatherer Studies. The thesis of the present paper is that research on Inuit economy has, in fact, contributed importantly to a rethinking of the shape and content of subsistence. Once described as encompassing the most basic economic activities, it is now understood as a cultural adaptation. This has import because few hunter-gatherer societies can be portrayed as they were at the time of the Man the Hunter symposium (Lee and DeVore 1968). Rather, today, huntergatherers, from the Arctic to Australia, experience near-constant contact with market economies and a reality in which money plays a critical part in their livelihoods. It is in this regard that research on Inuit, as noted by Sahlins (1999), has conceptually contributed both to Hunter- Gatherer Studies and to anthropology
Article, 2013