I document
the knowledge forms of three distinct constituencies operating in
the community of Cambridge Bay in the Canadian Arctic: its Inuit inhabitants,
visiting ecological scientists and researchers documenting 'traditional
ecological knowledge' (TEK). I explore the relationships that develop
between them during attempts to understand the Dolphin-Union caribou
herd, which inhabits Victoria Island and the adjacent mainland. I
argue that there are fundamental differences between what ecologists,
TEK researchers and Inuit understand to constitute knowledge and that
these currently impair efforts at collaboration. I show what these
differences are and go on to suggest how, in practice, they might
be transcended.
I pursue
these themes through an ethnographic study of the ways in which relationships
between risk and knowledge are played out in practice among Inuit
hunters, scientific ecologists and TEK researchers. F ollowing the
work of Beck (1986), I argue that modern conceptions of risk fundamentally
underpin the structure and focus of western science, giving priority
to knowledge that will aid prediction, control and management. This
in turn often dictates the objectives of the TEK research process.
Meanwhile Inuit hunters, operating largely outside of modernity's
preoccupation with risk, find these concerns rather unnecessary.
I move
on to address the underlying epistemological similarity between Inuit
knowledge and scientific ecological knowledge. This similarity is
often obscured by representations of scientific knowledge as comprising
an accumulation of discrete, prepositional, impersonal products. An
ethnographic account of the processes that contribute to the formation
of ecological science and Inuit knowledge shows that in practice,
both rest on learning by experience within a process of engaged activity.
Focusing on the similarities at this fundamental level I suggest how
scientific and Inuit knowledge may be integrated in a way that remains
faithful to Inuit understandings of what it is to know caribou.
