Chapter 5 CONFLICT MANAGEMENT IN A MODERN INUIT COMMUNITY

• Main Author: Jean L. Briggs
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: In Nomadic Camps; Arctic; inuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.607.8368; http://www.peacefulsocieties.org/Archtext/Briggs00.pdf

This chapter examines what happens to traditional means of solving interpersonal difficulties when Inuit move from small camps into large communities.1 Such moves, though they alleviate, even solve, some of the problems of camp life, create others in their stead. To put the situation in the simplest—perhaps oversimple—terms, nomadic Inuit, moving into a settlement, exchange physical hardship and (relative) social ease for physical ease and social hardship. On the physical side, no matter how inadequate the diet in the settlement is felt to be, there is no longer need to fear starvation; no matter how inadequate the housing, it is always heated somehow; no matter how ill people get, there are nurses and doctors to tend them; and if one has no means of earning money, welfare will, no matter how inadequately, provide. But on the social side, a great many unfamiliar and difficult situations are now encountered. Uncertainties with which Inuit had established ways of dealing have been replaced by uncertainties that they do not know how to manage. How are conflicts resolved under these new circumstances? What has survived of old methods, and how have old and new been adapted to one another? I begin by briefly outlining some old ways of keeping and restoring peace in hunting camps, and how those strategies worked. Then I describe the new situation in one Canadian Arctic settlement and suggest reasons why the old mechanisms cannot work in that context. Finally, I discuss an interesting new way of dealing with tension that is developing in the community—a new way that both embodies and carries forward some aspects of traditional strategies.