Using the case of an Inuit settlement in Northern Québec I explore the interactions between place, identity, scale, and the construction of community. This case study provides a discussion of what a relational construction of the identity of place means in practice. Focusing on country foods—foods that people catch from the land, water, and sky—I describe how the getting of these foods affects Inuit notions of place and constructions of identity and community. Sharing country foods is required in order to ensure future success in hunting and fishing. Such sharing and the social capital it generates were prerequisites for survival in the days when Inuit were living on the land in communities that were constantly changing as people traveled from one location to another in search of food. The move to settlements has brought about changes in Inuit notions of sharing food and ideas about identity. By using a particular event in one Inuit community, I explore the ways in which Inuit have developed a relational sense of identity as a result of the changing places and scales in which they live as occupants of fixed settlements who retain the mores of life on the land. As they call upon different identities, Inuit are invisibly shifting between places. I argue that there is a distinction between a settlement and a community, and that as people adjust to life in settlements they learn to manage their shifting places and shifting identities strategically so that they are able to benefit maximally from the conventions appropriate to both life on the land and life within settlements.

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The article considers the perceptions of Inuit in one settlement in Nunavik regarding the dynamic relations between market and subsistence economies. The socio-economic role of country foods in Inuit society are described followed by a discussion about the impacts of the Hunter Support Program (HSP) on Inuit society. A hybrid institution, the HSP buys country foods in order to give them away. Based on interviews that included Inuit purveyors to, and administrators of, the programme, the article discusses some socio-economic effects of commoditisation of country foods on subsistence economies and explores the ways in which this food moves in and out of commodity status. It is argued that these shifts are linked to conflicting notions of value. Some Inuit justify the existence of the HSP because they perceive it to be an essentially non-Inuit institution which lies outside the realm of customary socio-economic organization and thereby frees them from the need to observe those rules strictly while providing them with the income to be able to respect the requirement to share food amongst Inuit. Others express reservations about the programme because it elicits behaviours amongst Inuit that they perceive as threatening their socio-economic reproduction. It is argued that the HSP, an institution that both mimics and breaks with tradition, one which is designed to help Inuit to promote the subsistence way of life yet does so in the context of at least some components of the market, is an example of Wenzel's (2001) contention that the analytical distinction between acculturation and adaptation is not a matter of oppositions, but rather, part of a whole.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to show that, until the 1960s, subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering were the mainstay of the economy for Inuit in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. This economy was sustained by the moral imperative that food should be shared with others whenever possible. The article explores the experience of one man in Nunavik (Northern Québec) who has started a business selling food. Design/methodology/approach -The paper shows that regulatory challenges facing the industry are considered in relation to the moral dilemmas that need to be confronted in moving from an economy based on sharing food to an economy predicated on market exchange. Practical implications -The paper concludes with a discussion about how this businessman has come to terms with his breaking of social norms about the sharing of food and his understanding of how, in doing so, he is representative of a new economic order amongst Inuit in Nunavik. Originality/value -The paper shows that this is an original and novel subject for study.

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