抄録
The Inuit societies of Canada have experienced great socio-cultural changes in the process of assimilation and integration into the nation-state and the capitalist world system since being sedentarised in the 1950's. As a result, on the surface it seems difficult to find vestiges of ‘traditional’ life-style in their present everyday life. In other words, contemporary Inuit societies, in many respects, are as ‘modern’ as their Euro-American counterpart.
However, as many anthropologists have pointed out, Inuit societies have coped with assimilation and integration by preserving some ‘traditional’ patterns of socio-cultural systems, such as of social organisation, language, intimate relationships with their ‘land (nuna)’ through subsistent activities and world-view. Contemporary Inuit societies are going through the process of marrying their own ‘traditional’ way of life with the ‘modern’ way of life brought with assimilation and integration into the nation-state of Canada and the capitalist world system.
In this paper, I shall focus on one important aspect of this marriage of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, that is, the integration of the Inuit ‘Traditional Environmental Knowledge’ with the Western ‘modern’ science. Based on my research in Pelly Bay, Nunavut, Canada, and some studies of the Inuit ‘Traditional Environmental Knowledge’, I shall compare Inuit ‘Traditional Environmental Knowledge’ with ‘modern’ science in order to examine the possibility of integration of these two knowledge systems.
Then I propose the following hypothesis: that the Inuit ‘Traditional Environmental Knowledge’ is a ‘tactical’ knowledge system as opposed to the ‘strategic’ scientific knowledge system, as defined by Michel de CERTEAU(1987). While the ‘strategy’ of Western science is to try to manipulate and control the natural environment as separated from the human world, the ‘tactics’ of the Inuit ‘Traditional Environmental Knowledge’ stresses control of the human world, which is not separated from the natural environment, and tries to harmonise human behaviour with the principle of the natural environment. Therefore, while ‘modern’ science regards the natural environment as a pool of ‘resources’ to be exploited for development of the human world, the Inuit regard the intellectual faculties of humans as ‘resources’ and tries to train their ‘Traditional Environmental Knowledge’ in order to enforce harmony of human activity with the natural environment.
