Innovation Anthology #526:
Among the presenters at the recent meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco was Zoe Todd.
Zoe is a Trudeau Scholar and a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen.
Zoe has just returned from a year in the Arctic where she conducted her research on the role of women in fishing.
ZOE TODD: Well fishing plays a fairly important role in Paulatuk, and obviously it’s not the only thing that people do. People are also involved in hunting and trapping and also gathering plants and berries throughout the year. But fishing is something that women are involved in, in a very real way, and it’s also something that is accessible to people in the ways that polar bear hunting and caribou hunting aren’t. So it’s something that everybody has the opportunity to participate in. And it’s something that gets overlooked quite often at the policy level. So there’s a lot of attention to caribou and polar bear harvesting and other charismatic megafauna, but fish in and of themselves don’t capture people’s imagination. So they kind of just get overlook in a lot of northern policy work.
As a social anthropologist, Zoe Todd is interested in how fishing shapes women’s knowledge of the environment, and how that in turn shapes community life.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Program Date: 2013-01-17