Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T18:18:29.562Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The need to ‘belong’: social connectedness and spatial attachment in Polar Eskimo settlements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2013

Stephen Pax Leonard
Stephen Pax Leonard*
Affiliation:
Trinity Hall, Cambridge CB2 1TJ (spl42@cam.ac.uk)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Climate and environmental change places a variety of different pressures on remote, indigenous Arctic communities. The sea ice is the platform on which the Inugguit culture of northwest Greenland is based and thus it is inevitable that its retreat will have implications for the indigenous notion of place and for the manner in which the Inugguit articulate their sense of belonging with respect to the natural environment. With the demise of story-telling, the traditional vehicle for knowledge transmission, and the squeeze on hunting by consumer society and the Greenland Self Rule imposed quota system, it is apparent that some younger people are now engaging with more western ontologies of place. The relationship between man and nature is for some beginning to be expressed in terms of detachment and not extension. Whilst the way the Inugguit relate to their immediate natural environment might be in flux, other social practices of belonging such as naming and visiting are unchanged and still characterise these communities. In northwest Greenland, the need to ‘belong’ remains the social imperative that it has always been and the mechanisms used to reinforce this remain intact.

Type
Research Article
Information
Polar Record , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 138 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alia, V. 2009. Names & Nunavut: culture and identity in the Inuit homeland. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A. 1997. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom sits in places: landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Baumeister, R. F. and Leary, M.R.. 1995. The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin 117 (3): 497–529.Google Scholar
Bender, B. 2001 Introduction. In: Bender, B. and Winer, M. (editors). Contested landscapes: movement, exile and place. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Bodenhorn, B. 2007. Calling into being: naming and speaking names on Alaska's north slope. In: vom Bruck, G. and Bodenhorn, B. (editors). The anthropology of names and naming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 139–157.Google Scholar
Briggs, J. L. 1970. Never in anger. Harvard: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
De Certeau, M. 1984. The practice of everyday life. (translated by Rendall, S.) Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Drengson, A. and Inoue, Y. (editors). 1995. The deep ecology movement: an introductory anthology. Berkeley: North Atlantic Publishers.Google Scholar
Fromm, E. 2004. The fear of freedom. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jackson, M. 1995. At home in the world. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Lovell, N. (editor). 1998. Introduction. In: Locality and belonging. New York: Routledge: 1–12.Google Scholar
Massey, D. 1994. Space, race and gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, M. 2003. Phenomenology of perception. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nuttall, M. 1992. Arctic homeland: kinship, community and development in northwest Greenland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Rose, G. 1995. Place and identity: a sense of place. In: Massey, D. and Jess, P. (editors). A place in the world? Places, culture and globalisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 87–132.Google Scholar
Tuan, Y.F. 1991. Language and the making of place: a narrative-descriptive approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 (4): 684–696.Google Scholar
Willerslev, R. 2007. Soul hunters: hunting, animism and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar