Walking in the culture of the James Bay Cree indians

Abstract

Today, ethnologists are confronted with cultural media whichhave not only been transformed, but above all have become composite. Fieldexperience defies the laws of cultural homogeneity, because the individualsthat the ethnographer encounters will have lived a multitude of experiencesin environments which no longer necessarily depend on the social universeto which they belong. This finding implies the need to construct tools withwhich to understand an ever more diverse reality. Field experience is thereforesubject to a set of competences, which the ethnographer must acquire,the principles of which depend on different environments on which he/shehas been «projected». This article reports on a work of reflexive analysisresulting from fieldwork done in the Bay James Cree society, in the northernpart of the province of Quebec, Canada. The fieldwork and the competencesthat this implied in the ethnographer, to introduce herself into the daily lifeof one of the families of this group, are thought out in accordance with threespatial entities inhabited by this people on a daily basis, namely the huntingcamps, the village and the region. This spatial partition results from a marchby this society after their ancestral territory was industrialised.