Cross-Cultural Research

This special issue of Cross-Cultural Research presents four papers each of which in their own way addresses the question of how Arctic populations tackle the high levels of unpredictability and risk associated with their environment. It takes as a starting point the evidence for and against aspects of disequilibrium between humans, animals, and their environment. The authors consider both contemporary and historical Indigenous Arctic populations and the dynamics of human–animal relations in the context of an ever-changing socioecology of the Arctic. Three overarching sources of disequilibrium are identified: (a) disruption in existing ecological networks due to climate and environmental upheaval, (b) effects of sociopolitical change (including migration and disease), and, finally, (c) changes to subsistence strategies. Based on contemporary field studies from across the Arctic, including the Ust’-Avam and Samoyed from the Taimyr Region in Russia, Sami in Finland, Yukagir and Chukchi from Siberia, and the historic Thule community from Greenland, the authors illustrate how, despite apparent disequilibria, there is nevertheless notable resilience evident in the coupling of human-environmental systems. Documenting past and present changes in local livelihoods, subsistence patterns, and sociocultural practices helps us understand the wider context in which these cultures persist. It also allows us to explore what factors are significant in supporting the long-term resilience of Indigenous communities, especially in the context of challenges, such as high levels of addiction, depression and suicide, facing contemporary arctic societies.

As hunters and gatherers, humans have always exploited a wide variety of natural resources. Hunting, in particular, focuses upon individual species. The relationships between human and game are most often seen as isolated entities, for example, human–bison, human–whale, human–seabird or human–mammoth. However, hunting interactions are embedded in large and complex ecological networks. Seabirds such as the common eider (Somateria mollissima) have been and are still being hunted by both indigenous people of the Arctic and Europeans. Due to anthropogenic pressures, including hunting, several common eider populations have declined during the 20th century, even as much as up to 10-fold. Here, we review the ecological role of the common eider in Arctic networks and the diversity of human–eider interactions, underlining its importance for both humans and nonhumans. We place these interactions in a wider ecological context and discuss how human activities affecting eiders propagate through the Arctic ecological network and can cause far-reaching ecological effects.

Subsistence food sharing in Ust’-Avam (Taimyr Region, Russian Federation) is analyzed in light of Arctic research on sharing and current debate. Cultural traditions such as food sharing practices are widespread across indigenous communities in the Arctic and are arguably fundamental to the sustainability of indigenous Arctic cultures and their ability to buffer against environmental disequilibrium. Sharing diaries from 10 respondents over 12 weeks in August and October 2001, describe 162 distributions among 69 household dyads. Independent variables, including household relatedness, reciprocal sharing, and interaction effects, influence the documented food sharing pattern. Economic need and social association also influence sharing. Indicators of risk buffering are weaker than in two previous analyses of food sharing in Ust’-Avam that focus on primary distributions after the hunt and interhousehold meal sharing. Consideration of sharing by nonhunters provides an opportunity to examine explanatory hypotheses of food sharing, illustrating the nuances and robusticity of social ecology in indigenous subsistence economies.

The Thule community (Northwest Greenland) sets the scene for this study of health and environmental hazards in a historical perspective. In the early 19th century, when European contact was first made, the region was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, and the tiny population was on the brink of extinction partly owing to epidemics. This was to change in the late 19th century when more regular contact was made and provisions became more secure. During the 20th century, new political realities were mixed into the environmental issues, leaving the local population on the brink of disaster once again. Most recently, global warming is undermining the hunting economy, yet few subsistence alternatives are present this far in the High Arctic. Increasing contamination of the sea is having negative effects on all Arctic trophic levels with consequences for human health. This article discusses the historicity of health, and the unification of the world through disease and pollution and unpacks a pervasive sense of disequilibrium owing to many factors.

Name-soul beliefs maintain that, through a process of reincarnation, spirits of the deceased return into the bodies of newborn members of the same society. When this is recognized, the newborn or very young child is then named for the previously known ancestor or close kin relation believed to be returning (e.g., a grandfather, or an aunt). Name-soul spiritual beliefs among traditional indigenous societies residing in circumpolar regions are pervasive. These correlate with livelihoods earned through hunting, gathering, and fishing in freezing cold expanses of extreme landscape, presenting great physical challenges for traditional families over many generations. A neo-functionalist argument is proposed here, with two aspects. First, that kin ties are strongly reinforced between generations through this close association of affinity and identity, providing important emotional bonds that vitally facilitate physical survival. Second, that the sharpened spiritual power of a soul with the wherewithal to journey back offered powerful protection to the young. Drawing on detailed readings of qualitative ethnographic literature on 11 discrete societies across the region as evidence, this article compares and contrasts name-soul beliefs to better understand the extent to which very similar beliefs might have emerged independently of each other, and how these might have solved similar problems.