Social structure and the dynamics of Inuit food sharing networks – Elspeth Ready, Anthropologist

Informal resource exchange networks are fundamental to people’s livelihoods in many remote and rural communities worldwide. For hunter-gatherer and former hunter-gatherer populations in particular, food sharing is often central to their subsistence system and to their cultural identity. Food sharing is often understood as serving a risk-management function, but an important question in evolutionary anthropology is how these networks are maintained despite potential vulnerability to free-riders. These concerns are not simply academic. In the North American Arctic, for instance, locally-produced foods like caribou, seal, and fish are widely distributed through sharing networks and are important for food security, but many Inuit fear that sharing is declining due to a variety of factors, including population growth, increasing dependence on cash income, and formal schooling. In this talk I first consider structural features of networks that might stabilize or destabilize resource exchange, and explore these phenomena empirically using food sharing network data from Kangiqsujuaq, an Inuit community in Nunavik, Canada. I then present a preliminary analysis of change in food sharing networks in Kangiqsujuaq between 2013 and 2023, using a decomposition approach that reveals that the network structure is deeply influenced by  household lifecycles. I consider the broader implications of the findings for supporting the food security of remote rural communities in the context of climate change.
Salle des colloques 2, sur le site Saint-Charles 1 (place Albert 1er).