Culture and praxis in post-modern times

Abstract

My latest project examines how small-scale, rural village-level sustainability both depends on and at the same time acts against simple household reproduction.That is, I am interested in how “making a community” and “making a family” come to find themselves in opposition, such that “successful” communities continue to shed significant numbers of people, even during economically and politically “good times”. The research for this project takes place in Labrador, Canada, in predominantly Inuit coastal villages and neighboring, not-predominantly-Aboriginal cities. Since the 1960s, coastal villages have seen considerable numbers of residents leave. At the conclusion of the most recent land settlement, one-third of Labrador’s Inuit population was living in Goose Bay, site of a large NATO air base created during World War II, where they make up more than one-fifth of the total population. If other nearby cities are included—St. John’s in Newfoundland, Halifax in Nova Scotia, or Quebec City and Montreal in Quebec Province—more than half of the Labrador Inuit now live somewhere other than the villages with which they most closely identify.