Hunting ‘bosses,’ inequality and the question of exploitation: structures and practices in James Bay Cree society

• Main Author: Feit, Harvey A.
• Other Authors: Anthropology
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: 1987
• Subjects: Inequality and Egalitarian Societies; Inequality and Exploitation; Leadership of Hunting Territories; Dialectical Social Practices; "Seeing Through" Social Reality; Managing Wildlife Reciprocally; James Bay Cree; Waswanipi Cree; Tromsø; James Bay; University of Tromsø
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11375/24588

This is an idea, discussion and lecture paper. Earlier versions of this paper were given in: 1984 - London School of Economics and Political Science, “Structures and Praxis of Cree Hunting;” 1985 - University of Manchester, “Hunting ‘Bosses,’ Inequality and the Question of Exploitation in Cree Society,” University of Tromsø, “James Bay Cree Hunting as Structure and Practice,” and University of Copenhagen, “Structures and Praxis of Cree Hunting.” This analysis explores the complex and reticulate relationships between Waswanipi Cree symbolic structures, social practices, and the material conditions of hunting. The analyses of contemporary processes are presented around the issue of the nature of the social inequality arising from the contemporary Cree hunting territory leadership and the related question of whether these inequalities are associated with forms of exploitation. These findings and questions build on and revise long-standing accounts of the egalitarian bases of James Bay Cree society. Cree elders teach and legitimate social reality by pointing to experiential knowledge of material being, and in doing so they open the possibility of seeing the Cree world as a social construction which socially located persons reconstruct in everyday action. On the other hand, in that very process they also recreate the social order and the social hierarchy, because even when they point to the ambiguity of experience and structure, they reaffirm their privileged position as bearers of this knowledge and as socially recognized authorities controlling access to hunting territories and resources. Inequality may thus be exposed as socially constructed in the same process that its existence and value is asserted and re-affirmed. Inequality thus becomes discussible, but it is not reduced to a structure without substance, without links to material conditions; it creates respected hunters. On examination, evidence confirms the widely shared assessment among diverse Cree hunters that hunting leaders do provide material ...