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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [230], (1) Lines: 0 t ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: T [230], (1) fourteen Iglu to Iglurjuaq Frank James Tester Among Canadian Inuit, the transition from igloos and tents to rigid-frame European-stylehouses(iglurjuaq)inthe1950sand1960sseverelychallenged the methodological practices of anthropology, especially the environmental determinism characteristic of Boas’s early ethnography of Baffin Inuit, The Central Eskimo (1964 [1888]), and the cultural ecology it foreshadowed (E. A. Smith 1984). 1 The introduction of housing—a social and political act on the part of the Canadian State—pushed anthropologists toward a different mix of ideas with which to understand changes in Inuit culture no longer determined (and it is debatable that any culture can be understood this way) by the resources (objects) and circumstances (geography) of the Arctic environment . Factors other than the physical environment and Inuit cultural practices were increasingly affecting Inuit lives as the colonial agenda of the Canadian state intensified. Boas’s envelope has been difficult to escape, and the interpretive anthropology used to examine Inuit culture change in the 1960s was, arguably, equally flawed.2 Some anthropologists attempted to apply ethnographic and interpretive methods to the examination of Inuit living in newly created settlements. The result was a form of social psychology, whereby the mental processes and stresses associated with community living were described in light of what researchers knew, or thought they knew, about Inuit culture. Interpreting the data involved bringing into the mix assumptions about adaptation and the complex nature of urban environments borrowed—often unconsciously—fromtheresearchers’understandingoftheirowncontexts. Studies of Canadian Inuit living in Arctic settlements by Frank Vallee (1962) and John and Irma Honigmann (1965) are examples. In examining culture Iglu to Iglurjuaq 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [231], (2) Lines: 14 to 24 ——— 6.4pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [231], (2) change and arctic suburbs, the conscious role of State actors—revealed by the content of official State and related documents as well as other edicts they produced—were largely ignored. How then, might we produce better explanations, giving due regard to the cultures of the colonized and the colonizer in understanding change? Such explanations, by their very nature, must always be incomplete fragments. In this chapter I argue the importance of paying attention to the textual means by which relations of ruling were (and are) created—as a source of information that nevertheless moves us in this direction—and as data essential to attempting an understanding of both cultural formation and emerging cultural practices. Ethnographic data, combined with a critical reading of text, move the project along. The Modern Agenda The history of housing policy in the former Northwest Territories of Canada is writ large with the struggle between housing as a market commodity and housing as a social good essential to Inuit health and welfare. Superimposeduponthisarequestionsofform .WhatshouldInuithousinglooklike? How are we to make the transition between traditional forms and functions and those that contemporary rigid-frame housing attempted to dictate? These struggles emerged on the coattails of a period of high modernism, in the decade following the Second World War when faith in the modern, the scientific, and “the idea of progress” was relatively unshaken. Modern science and rational planning by the State had won the war. The precepts of modernity would also conquer squalor, disease, and poverty. These commitments were behind the idea of development and modernization ushered onto the world stage by U.S. President Harry Truman in a speech on January 20, 1949: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” (cited in Esteva 1992: 6). In the Canadian Arctic the same logic informed a process slow to get off the ground. By the late 1950s, modernization of the eastern Canadian Arctic— for example, the presence of the Distant Early Warning (dew) line, a mine at Rankin Inlet, and the collapse of the traditional trapping economy— convinced the State that modernization was an inevitable if...

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