Food Security and Life Sustenance of the Northern Indigenous Peoples: Integration of Theoretical Approaches

Ragulina Milana Vladimirovna Doctor of Geography Professor of the Department of Geography, Security of Life and Methodology at Irkutsk State University, Leading Researcher at Laboratory for Georesources Studies and Political Geography at Viktor Sochava Institute of Geography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences 664003, Russia, Irkutskaya oblast', g. Irkutsk, ul. Karla Marksa, 1 milanara@yandex.ru

Introduction

The experience of survival of the Northern peoples in an extreme natural environment has been developing for thousands of years, and the most important place in it is occupied by the food problem. Communities of northern ethnic groups have developed cultural and economic mechanisms of adaptation to extreme climate and landscapes, which allow taking into account natural fluctuations of biological resources and obtainment of their products without disturbing ecological balance. Northern cultures comprehend harsh natural conditions as a human home, and at the same time adaptability does not provide for smooth homeostatic processes: sharp socio-demographic crises due to the instability of biological resources and the economic possibility of their development, famine, and epidemics were characteristic of almost all circumpolar ethnoses ^[1]. To study the mechanism of self-sufficiency in cultural ecology, a life support paradigm was developed. In the most common interpretations, the aim is the identification of the flows of matter and energy in the ethnos - natural environment system. By the end of the XX century, science had accumulated a lot of data on the specifics of self-sufficiency of Northerners, and their cultural features and traditions that have ecological meaning. Large-scale transformations of the traditional economy of the northern aborigines changed the way of life, the rhythm of development of the territory and resources, and the sources and quality of food. During the transition to transformed models of environmental management and the collision with the pressure of "large" society, pronounced food crises are noted, which can continue even after the relative stabilization of the social situation ^[2]. The concept of life support, in the "classical" cultural and ecological version, is focused on traditional societies and cannot fully take into account the dynamics of socio-political contexts. Modern approaches to food security, focused on the availability and quality of food, in turn, solve a number of these problems and can serve as tools for the study of northern food systems. But at the same time, most methods of studying food security rely on formalized economic calculations that leave behind the key ethno-cultural factors of food security of the northern ethnosocium. Both influential and workable approaches have both strengths and deficits in relation to the issue under study. Therefore, the analysis of the concepts of food security and life support from the point of view of their synthesis is an urgent task.

The place of the food issue in the concept of life support

Life support (subsistence) implies close links between society, the environment and technologies for obtaining food. Substance and energy, expressed in affordable food, which is produced within the economic area of the community, are the basis of material life support.

Arctic ethnoecology, focused on life support, ^[1] inherited the approaches of Western cultural ecology and geography. The paradigm of life support in the period of formation (1960 - 70s) was influenced by cultural geography: the adaptation of society to the environment assumed the dynamics of the spatial pattern of food production and consumption. Consistency, orientation to the identification of patterns and general principles of functioning for both natural landscape and socio-cultural spheres are its main features. The ethnosocium (cultural group) and nature were considered in unity, at several taxonomic levels: from a general view of their interrelationships to a component-by-component analysis of relations in the system, with access to the search for causality.

To identify food security, in addition to the standard ethnogeographic studies for Western cultural ecology, which give a general factual picture of the situation, demographic, areal-geographical and energy directions were added ^[3].

The demographic block of the study, in the context of self-sufficiency in food, focused on establishing links between the density and territorial organization of the population, its gender and age structure and the productivity of biological resources of the territory. Particular interest was noted in identifying the characteristics of the gender and age cohorts involved in nature management: for example, the indicator "the number of eaters per adult male, counting himself" was used for the hard work of sea st John's wort and hunters ^[4]. Fertility, mortality and natural growth were considered as indicators of the success of natural food consumption, and, consequently, economic adaptation to environmental resources and fluctuations in resource potential. The gender and age structure in the aspect of food consumption and production (which is also equivalent to the energy needed for the existence of an individual and a community) provides information about how "earners" and "dependents" relate. But she cannot answer the question about age and gender roles in the culture of life support, about the nature of auxiliary labor (making inventory, clothing, fuel procurement, cooking) without which the work of a tradesman is impossible.

Areal-geographical direction

The strength of the approach was that the developed area was treated not just as a background for the placement of the population. The researchers proceeded from its structural heterogeneity: division into microareals, and each type of land was used with different intensity, rhythm and had a strictly defined place in the economic cycle, where there was a kind of land turnover of ethnic nature management"^[5]. The population size should be considered in relation to traditional occupations, their seasonal rhythms, and areas that are in circulation. The resource intensity of the territory in this approach assumes such a volume of biotic resources that is able to maintain its productivity under the pressure of population growth. But this approach did not take into account that the state of resources was affected not only by the size of the population, but also by its cultural and ecological attitudes, farming methods, evolution and dynamics of the natural environment, as well as political and economic processes of a large society, where the aboriginal society was included as a subsystem. This approach assumes an ideal socio-natural balance, after which the intensification of nature management will lead to the degradation of the territory. At the same time, it is not taken into account that the deterioration of the habitat is a cumulative process: short-term changes may be insignificant, followed by a sharp change in the situation. To track it, additional geographical studies and long-term observation series are needed, but anthropologists and geographers limited themselves to field studies with relatively short periods of direct observation, while experimental physical and ecological geographical studies of tropical subsistence farming were few ^[3].

Energy studies of food consumption and labor costs for its production were associated with significant difficulties, including methodological discrepancies, small volumes of samples of quantitative data, and the difficulty of accounting for food consumption and production. The direction gave several brilliant works at the turn of the 1960s, (for example, ^[6], where a system analysis based on mathematical modeling of physical and geographical bioresource and social subsystems of life support was used to study the traditional Inuit nature management). According to K. Hader, the variables used to determine the effectiveness of summer seal hunting included wind speed, wave height, detection range, seal behavior, hunting equipment, movement speed and shooting accuracy ^[3]. Despite all the originality, the research required large-scale labor and time, and their results were intuitively predictable from the point of view of the aborigines, so there was a break in such work for several decades. In our opinion, quantitative methods do not provide an exhaustive picture of traditional nature management as a source of food, since in aboriginal culture food and its production cannot be separated from the cultural and symbolic side of life support. In other words, the lull in energy consumption research and the reduction of its subject area was due to the lack of methods adequate to the complexity of the problem. Methods capable of taking into account the cultural and symbolic aspects of food production and consumption and consistently combined with its quantitative and medical and hygienic characteristics were proposed in the expanded concept of food security almost three decades later.

Food security and the specifics of the traditional ethnic society

The connection between the national security of the state and food security is obvious. Domestic and international documents reflect the understanding of food security as a state of the country's economy, in which the food independence of the state is ensured, physical and economic accessibility of food products that meet the requirements of the legislation of the Russian Federation on technical regulation is guaranteed for every citizen of the country, in volumes not less than rational norms of food consumption necessary for an active and healthy lifestyle ^[7]. In the domestic works on urbanized and rural territories, the population of which is not engaged in traditional nature management, it is noted that under the condition of economic-geographical, political and natural-geographical stability, a favorable situation in the field of food security depends on the availability of funds for the purchase of food by the population. At the same time, three groups of factors that influence the territorial organization of food security are identified: the first is related to local food markets, agricultural policy strategies, and the degree of development of various agricultural enterprises in the area, which mainly affects the physical availability of food. The second group focuses on incomes and prices, socially vulnerable categories of the population, crisis life situations, and poverty, which determines the economic availability of food. The third provides for the parameters of the food itself: the content of the main nutrients, environmental and medical-hygienic safety, and quantitative compliance with consumption standards that meet the needs of the body ^[8]. Intensive theoretical developments are underway in this area and new research methods are emerging. Foreign authors consider the political, ethno-racial, socio-economic and valeological facets of food security offer a wide range of methods for it research.

Aboriginal northern communities, as an object of study from the point of view of food security, represent a kind of theoretical and practical challenge for this scientific approach, since the approaches created for developed and developing countries do not work in the North. For the northern ethnoeconomics, traditional food has cultural and symbolic value, and often serves as an indication of ethnic identity ^[8]. The essential difference is that traditional nature management and its products, and not purchased, market food, are the core of building food security of ethnic communities. Since the traditional economic complex provides employment for aborigines, and their connection with the land is at the symbolic and material levels, reliable and stable access to food is equivalent to the preservation of traditional nature management.

Therefore, all the methodological tools developed in the study of life support by the school of cultural ecology can be integrated into modern studies of food security. The term "cultural food security" (cultural food security) has been proposed for studies of ethnic areas ^[9].

The ethnic (cultural-anthropological) specificity of physical accessibility is that food has a clear seasonal character, and the absence of fish, berries or venison in the diet is associated with the "shutdown" of appropriate environmental management practices or a temporary change of life-supporting resources. Physical accessibility is also ensured by the preservation of labor skills, traditional knowledge, environmental prohibitions and beliefs, traditions of mutual assistance, treats, gifts and exchange, resource sustainability and environmental well-being of the area, as well as the demographic state of the collective. Economic accessibility is connected with physical accessibility and is intertwined with it: some of the products of the fishery can go for sale, and it is difficult to predict which products will be sold. The recreational development of the North, the popularization and romanticization of traditional cultures, and the spread of animal rights movements are few of the factors on which the demand for products depends. In the concept of cultural food security, special attention is paid to the ability of indigenous peoples to ensure reliable access to food through traditional management methods.

The quality of food plays a special role. Thus, the Canadian Inuit, who adhere to the traditional type of diet, did not register cases of diabetes mellitus until the 1950s, but now this disease is spreading at a high rate, having the character of an epidemic ^[10]. A quantitative analysis of the frequency of consumption of traditional and purchased products, and the content of basic nutrients in them, as well as qualitative approaches based on interviews revealed a reliable relationship between the change in the type of nutrition towards the predominance of unhealthy purchased food and the rapid increase in obesity and the spread of endocrine pathologies in all groups of aborigines and ethnically mixed communities of the Canadian Arctic ^[11]. The growth of obesity and related pathologies of the endocrine and cardiovascular systems in developing countries has been proven, when the share of traditional food is replaced by high-calorie and relatively inexpensive purchased food. These foods contain a large amount of hydrogenated fats, sugars and fast carbohydrates. Thus, with formal compliance with the criteria of physical and economic accessibility of food, the quality of food reduces food security to a low level.

Within half a century, between 1950’s and 2000’s, there was an opinion in the domestic scientific literature that diabetes was not genetically peculiar to Arctic peoples ^[12], current events are developing according to the Canadian scenario. On the contrary, there is information about the genetically determined difficulty of assimilation of sucrose by northern populations, in whose traditional food sugars were present in insignificant amounts ^[13].

In Russia, the northern aboriginal and old-age communities are experiencing a violation of four main safety criteria: the physical availability of purchased food (northern delivery) is complicated, the physical availability of traditional food is diminished (seizure and damage of land, departure from the traditional way of life), the economic availability of purchased food is at a low level (income indicators of Northerners in relative terms are lower than the average in Russia), and the economic availability of traditional food is reduced (high cost of inventory, transport, licenses for the extraction of commercial animals and fishing).

Similar problems exist abroad: the spread of poverty in many communities leads to the fact that low price plays a major role in the choice of food, rather than considerations of benefit, social desirability and taste preferences ^[14]. In 1998/1999, health surveys among Canadian households found food insecurity problems among respondents living off reservations at the level of 27.0% and 24.1%; their connection with low incomes of the population was proved ^[15]. Along with the statement of the spread of overweight incidence and obesity, there are reports of cases of real hunger ^[2].

The quality of traditional food is affected by man-made pollution of landscapes, the lack of technological capacities for processing and harvesting products, as well as the loss of experience in creating stocks of meat, fish and berries for the future. In the Russian North, although the spread of metabolic syndrome is lower than abroad, and there is a general scarcity of both purchased and traditional food, the high role of traditional nature management remains. At the same time, state support measures for the life-support system of indigenous peoples do not allow them to abandon physical labor on a subsidiary farm or in traditional industries. Thus, the total energy consumption and its consumption is still relatively balanced, even taking into account the qualitative inferiority of the food consumed and the progressive decrease in the composition of traditional food products. But this is an imaginary well-being, since the characteristics of ethno-cultural food security, the complex of food knowledge, the culture of life-support, traditional environmental management systems and the safety of traditional products are complicated by the lack of full access to traditional areas, difficult and legally unsettled relations with industrial companies, depletion of biological resources, violation of intergenerational continuity of food production experience, and even, as in the Canadian Arctic, the loss of the ability to appreciate traditional products due to an increase in the share of purchased food with brighter, «synthetic» flavors ^[8]. At the same time, a spatially heterogeneous picture of food security and life-support violations is formed, which can be studied using the categories of "food deserts" (territories with violation of all food security criteria), along with more prosperous areas forming the "food landscape" ^{[16, 17]}.

Conclusion

Modern nutrition practices of most indigenous peoples pose a significant threat to health and reduce the quality of life. Therefore, it is extremely important to get information about the factors that determine the choice of food and access to them. There is insufficient research documenting the determinants of healthy eating in Aboriginal communities; therefore, there are many gaps in understanding traditional food security ^[18]. In view of the vast diversity of indigenous peoples, research to address these gaps should be conducted at both the national and local levels. In our opinion, in the traditional understanding of food security, proceeding from the primacy of economic criteria, it is difficult to take into account the complexity and diversity of alternative self-sufficiency strategies, cultural traditions and informal practices of mutual support and revenue, subtle and inaccessible quantification of relations with nature – human home, characteristic of traditional societies. The category of food landscape is more suitable for these contexts. "Landscape" as an integral geographical concept and social metaphor combines heterogeneous areas into a mobile and time-changing system. This integrity is ensured by direct and inverse connections, processes that are essentially the same, but have differences in each of the loci. The landscape combines the systemic ordering of components and their qualitative heterogeneity. Thus, the natural landscape combines various forms of relief; it, as a spatial system, is characterized by evolution and dynamics, stability and vulnerability. Local practices and strategies, culture, traditions, and meanings involved in the processes of traditional nature management and food supply should be combined and interpreted "landscape-wise" as mutually complementary. In this regard, the study of indigenous peoples significantly expands the theoretical perspective of food security. Attention to ethnic traditions of self-sufficiency, human and environmental relations, understanding of "food culture" as a component of identity, health and worldview can contribute to the development of more precise and targeted measures of regional policy in the field of life safety. The mutual overlap of food and cultural landscapes will allow us to give a more complete picture of the food security of the Northerners in the ethno-cultural aspect.