Geographies of knowledge and identity: Everyday lived experience and features of the home, community, and land, in a post-nomadic Arctic hamlet

Since the earliest days of the discipline, sociologists have been preoccupied with the dislocation and disorientation that comes with sudden social change, particularly that bundle of changes called modernization. A particular type of anomie occurs when nomadic groups are forced off the land and compelled to settle in one place. Under such circumstances groups often attempt to maintain their cultural identity by combining traditional and new (often imposed) elements as a form of resistance to the new environment and mainstream, Western society.;This dissertation takes the Inuit of Arviat, a hamlet in northern Canada, as a case study for the examination of identity reconstruction via cultural hybridization. It finds a consistent motif of this reconstruction is the merging elements from the past when living depended on mastery of a harsh environment (being "on the land") with elements from the present settled lives (being "in the town"). For many aboriginal groups, including the Inuit, the land is a locus of traditional knowledge and pride. Maintaining the symbolic ties to the land, although the nomadic period ended a half century ago, is essential to the Arviat Inuit's collective representation of themselves as a distinct people. With traditional knowledge located in the land, the boundary work which a marginalized group must perform to assert a distinct identity from mainstream Western culture must, therefore, involve a performance of culturally-specific knowledge.;Through ethnography, 50 formal in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and photography, I analyze power and place, and knowledge and identity, in Arviat, a built environment that represents colonization and the anomie of relocation to within walls. Displaced groups are not merely victims of their built environment and the historical or colonial power dynamics enforced by that environment. Displaced groups do not merely accept Western scripts with the result that their culture disappears. People engage with things. Interact. Resist. How space is organized contributes to the power of some groups over others and yet the Inuit enact strategies to maintain a distinct cultural identity.