Food and the Making of Modern Inuit Identities

Abstract

Although the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic have access to an ever-expanding market of different kinds of foods, they continue to invest considerable time and money obtaining Inuit foods, that is, foods hunted, fished, and gathered within the Inuit homeland. In this article, I explore how Inuit use these two types of foods (Inuit food and non-Inuit food) to express cultural differences as well as personal and collective identity. I focus on three realms of expressive activity: 1) local networks of exchange, 2) local discourses about the moral and physiological effects of Inuit and non-Inuit foods, and 3) the cultural logic of eating Inuit and non-Inuit foods. In short, food serves as an important vehicle in the production of meaning and identity, a process that has become increasingly important politically yet increasingly complicated socially and economically as Inuit react to an expanding world of commodities and consumer tastes.