Robert Jarvenpa

Occupational status, ethnicity, and ecology: Metis Cree adaptations in a Canadian trading frontier

This paper develops an analytical method for assessing the interplay of economic behavior and ecological energetics among the Metis Cree, off-spring of Cree Indian-European unions in north-central Canada. Business account-book analysis provides unique insights into the production and exchange behavior of individual laborers and their families during the twilight of the fur trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The evidence generally supports conventional interpretations of the subartic Metis as economically and socially intermediate between Indian hunting bands and the Euro-Canadian managerial class. However, fine-grained account-book analysis also reveals that this general adaptation exhibited highly variable coping strategies, forming a continuum in work regimens and level of integration into trading-company hierarchies. A focus on individual variability reflects the growing interest among ecological anthropologists in individual strategy, theories of choice, and actor-based decision models.

Fun with Dick and Jane: Ethnoarchaeology, Circumpolar Toolkits, and Gender "Inequality"

Abstract Recent comparative ethnoarchaeological study of hunter-fisher and hunter-fisher-herder societies in the circumpolar world reveals interesting variation in the proportions of womens, mens and joint gear comprising toolkits employed in harvesting, processing, storage and distribution of major subsistence resources. In sheer numbers, womens tools and facilities overshadow those implements conventionally used by men and those used jointly by both sexes. Womens gear is often concentrated spatially within encampments and settlements, those areas with potentially greater accessibility and visibility for archaeologists. Moreover, women participate directly in the dispatch and processing of smaller animals, but as prey size increases women devote more time to the indispensable butchering, processing, storage and food distribution phases of hunting. These dynamics raise intriguing issues regarding the nature of the sexual division of labor and sexual inequality. Traditional archaeological paradigms have frequently privileged the hunting prowess and sociopolitical power of men while remaining virtually silent on women and womens roles in hunting. Data from a cross-cultural ethnoarchaeological study of Chipewyan, Khanty, Sámi and Iñupiaq communities offer insights for reassessing and recasting the social relations of production and gender in hunter-forager society.

Ethnoarchaeological and cultural frontiers : Athapaskan, Algonquian, and European adaptations in the central subarctic

Contents: Two anthropologists develop an ethnoarchaeological approach for understanding differential cultural-ecological adaptations in central subarctic Canada. Chipewyan, Cree, Metis and EuroCanadian life and livelihood are revealed.

Subarctic Indian Trappers And Band Society: The Economics Of Male Mobility

The spatial organization of economic production in contemporary subarctic Indian society is illustrated by an analysis of geographical mobility and commercial fur trapping among the English River Chipewyan of Patuanak, Saskatchewan. Quantitative comparison reveals the positive linear relationship between selected “performance” variables (numbers of animals captured and cash income) and “locational” variables (trapping area size, distances traveled between settlements and bush camps, and distances between neighboring trappers) for a population of 76 male trappers. At present, trapping performance varies positively with trapping area size and linear distance from the largest settlement. Variable social adaptations in the trapping work force are in part the result of complex compromises and adjustments between traditional familycamp organizations and emerging all-male partnerships. However, the relationship between size and structure of trapping teams, degree of team interaction, and economic efficiency requires further investigation. Finally, the formal analysis of productivity is reappraised in terms of community definitions of trapping success.

Diets of Experience: Food Culture and Political Ecology in Northern Canada and Northern Finland 1

Historical patterns of land use and subsistence in circumpolar communities often coexist in complex and novel ways with rapidly emerging wage labor markets and global political economic forces. The integration of traditional environmental knowledge and practice into contemporary contexts, as manifested in food culture, is explored as both a routine behavioral reality and a profound symbolic process. This paper examines the creative role of historical experience in procurement, processing, and presentation of food in (re)defining cultural identity and relationships with the environment and social others. Similarities and contrasts are drawn from active participation ethnographic field research among Dene (Chipewyan) hunter-fishers in north-central Canada and subarctic farmers in northeastern Finland.

Collective witnessing: Performance, drama, and circulation of valuables in the rural auction and antiques trade

Rural American estate auctions represent a compelling interplay of market capitalism and local ceremonies of entrepreneurship. Auctions operate to move used goods, converting them into commodities. Yet they also “move” people, emotionally and dramaturgically, via socially constructed ceremonies in which knowledgeable specialists transform commodities into valuables and, in turn, invest the circulation of these valuables with profound personal, historical, and geographical meanings. The public, collective witnessing of this circulation lies at the heart of auction ethos, exemplifying the creative and symbolically charged nature of a ubiquitous facet of American consumer culture. These issues are addressed with case materials from recent active participation ethnographic research on the auction and antiques trade in upstate New York.

Unfamiliar compatriots: Role ambiguity in Finnish field research

This article examines the special biases, social ambiguities and methodological problems characterizing ethnographic research among fieldworkers with cultural orientations vaguely or partially congruent with their hosts. Information for this discussion derives from a recent field study of agrarian adaptations in northeastern Finland conducted by an anthropologist of third‐generation immigrant Finnish‐American background. This context is used to address broad issues regarding detachment and objectivity, limits upon shared experience and meaning, and interpretive dilemmas facing the ethnographic enterprise generally.

Ethnoarchaeological Collaborations: Hunting Societies, Interethnic Relations, and Gender in the Northern Latitudes, Part II

While working together on ethnoarchaeology projects, we continued to pursue our separate interests in ethnology and archaeology. However, these pursuits often influenced our thinking about and approaches to ethnoarchaeology. Jarvenpa: In 1979 I traveled to Finland on a Fulbright to teach in the Institute of Ethnology at theUniversity ofHelsinki.Aside from learning a great deal about Finnish society, academia, and anthropology, I investigated possibilities for ethnographic fieldworkon agrarian adaptations in a Subarctic context. The latter came to fruition in 1983 with a project on agricultural decision making and social change. I worked as a maatyöläinen or general purpose farm hand with dairy farming families in Suomussalmi kunta or rural township, in an environmentally difficult and politically peripheral region of northeastern Finland. Since my labor was often needed in the cowshed, a traditionalworkdomainofFinnishwomen, I strongly empathizedwith the hopes and fears of rural women. That experience influenced my analysis of decision making and management style among farming families (Jarvenpa 1988). It also planted a seed regarding the significance of gender relations for future work. Among the many scholars who helped me find my way in Finland were Matti Sarmela, Juhani Lehtonen, and Jukka Pennanen. Pennanen’s wife’s cousin, Seppo Kallio, who worked for the Central Union of Agricultural Producers, was instrumental in helping me find an appropriate community and families for the research. Jukka became a particularly close colleague and friend who eventually came to the University at Albany as a visiting scholar. Many years later our paths would converge again in an ethnoarchaeological context. An interesting byproduct of the Finnish work was meeting Richard Gould. We both gave papers on our Finnish research in sessions at the AAA meetings in 1985 and at a symposium organized by Tim Ingold at the University of Manchester in 1986. I was already aware of Gould’s Australian research and could appreciate