Moving as a way of living

Hot on the heels of last week's discussion about mobility and intersite variability, here's a news report on some research done by Claudio Aporta (Carleton University) on how moving and mobility strategies form integral parts of Inuit cultural identity (Aporta 2009). Based on his analysis, it seems that that moving about is not only a utiliatarian strategy to best procure resources for the Inuit. That is, the Inuit don't simply use mobility as a way of bringing people to resources or resources to people. Rather, it seems like their mobility strategies and all of the knowledge it entails are a defining feature of who they are, how they relate to other social groups and how it structures their social organization. To put it in terms we recently discussed, Inuit mobility may be more 'informational' and 'network' (sensu Whallon (2006)) than simply logistical or residential in nature. That being the case, it is perhaps not surprising that many high latitude groups did not conform to the expectations of Binford's (1980) model.

Here's a blurb from the Science Daily report:

Using a combination of historical documents, ethnographic research, geographic tools including GPS, GIS and Google Earth, as well as a recent journey following Inuit along a traditional trail, Dr. Aporta shows the geographic extent of the Inuit’s sophisticated network of routes. He describes how the Inuit have made use of the Arctic environment and how their trails represent significant channels of communication and exchange across the territory. To the Inuit, the Arctic is a network of trails, connecting communities to their distant neighbors, and to fishing lakes and hunting grounds in between.

What is remarkable is that although the trails are not permanent features of the landscape, their locations are remembered and transmitted orally and through the experience of travel. They do not use maps to travel or to represent geographic information. Rather the journey along the trail, or the story of the journey, becomes one of the main instruments for transmitting the information.

It's very interesting that the story of the journey becomes the longest-term important cultural artifact rather than whatever was procured as part of a given instance of travel. In a way, this is reminiscent of a thought-provoking paper by Caroline Funk (2004) who had argue that simple behavioral ecological models were insufficient to understand how Arctic groups structured their land-use strategies in prehistory. Which makes me wonder how Aporta's results and perspective fit in with a recent paper on human wayfinding in some highly mobile human groups in high latitudes (i.e., in Finland reindeer pastoralists) published by Istomin and Dwyer (2009:29) who argue that "humans rely on mental maps but also memorize vistas while navigating, and an individual's navigation method, ability, and the form of the mental map is likely to depend on a situation as well as on factors such as age, sex, familiarity with the environment, and life history."

References:

Aporta, C. 2009. The Trail as Home: Inuit and Their Pan-Arctic Network of Routes. Human Ecology doi: 10.1007/s10745-009-9213-x.

Binford, L.R. 1980. Willow smoke and dogs' tails: hunter-gatherer settlement systems and archaeological site formation. American Antiquity 45:4-20.

Funk, C. 2004. Optimal foraging theory and cognitive archaeology: Cup'ik cultural perception in southwestern Alaska. In Hunters and gatherers in theory and archaeology (ed. G. Crothers), pp. 279–98. Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations Occasional Paper 31. SIUC, Carbondale, IL.

Istomin, K.V., and M.J. Dwyer. 2009. Finding the Way: A Critical Discussion of Anthropological Theories of Human Spatial Orientation with Reference to Reindeer Herders of Northeastern Europe and Western Siberia. Current Anthropology 50:29-50.

Whallon, R. Social networks and information: Non-"utilitarian" mobility among hunter-gatherers. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 25:259-270.