Animal Rights, Human Rights : : Ecology, Economy, and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic / / George Wenzel.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Wenzel, George,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©1991
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (206 p.)

The campaign to ban seal hunting in Canada won international headlines and achieved its aims to a large extent. Most observers felt instinctively that the campaigners were "right" but little thought was given to the cataclysmic consequences the ban would have on the way of life and economy of a traditional people, the Inuit of Arctic Canada.A distinguished anthropologist who has spent over twenty years living and working with the Inuit Community, George Wenzel provides a reasoned, in-depth, coolly written but powerful critique of this received interpretation and shows how the campaigners 'own cultural prejudices and questionable ecological imperatives brought hardship, distress and instability to an ecologically balanced traditional culture.This book is both a careful academic study and a disturbing comment on how environmental activity may oppress a whole society, which raises serious questions about the motives and methods of the animal rights' movement in a much wider context than the case here studied.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Traditional people in the modern world -- 2. Animal rights, the seal protest, and Inuit -- 3. The culture of subsistence -- 4. Clyde Inuit and seals: ecological relations -- 5. The Clyde Inuit economy -- 6. Seals and snowmobiles: the modern Clyde economy -- 7. Ideological relations and harvesting -- 8. The seal protest as cultural conflict -- 9. A blizzard of contradictions -- 10. The controversy today -- Appendix: Notes on Inuktitut -- Bibliography -- Index