Review: Green Hour: “Sharing life: Inuvialuit whaling and the politics of respecting animals” (Prof. Dr. Franz Krause)

The global crises of biodiversity require new ways of relating to each other and to the planet. Starting from this point, the anthropologist Franz Krause presented a model of “being-in-the-world” that is based on the notion of radical sharing as practiced by Inuvialuit whaling communites in Northern Canada. During his field work among the Inuvialuit, he learned that negotiating the sharing of butchered Beluga whales is a common practice that aims at redistributing basic resources among the community. What Krause terms “demand sharing” is partially at odds with Western ideas of conversation logic that consider the killing of whales as cruel and immoral per se. The Inuvialuit follow a different rationale: their sharing economy relies on a common understanding that everything is connected and part of a larger web of life. In line with this philosophy, the demands of animals and humans form an interconnected circle where respecting animals and killing them is no contradiction. According to the Inuvialuit, the killing of whales is a sharing of life – which is why the Inuvialuit leave a part of the whale meat to other animals, such as birds. After the talk, the multi-disciplinary Green Hour audience discussed whether the Inuvialuit understanding of giving and sharing can help pave a way towards a new, reciprocal economy in an era of dwindling natural resources and increasing conflict world-wide.

Written by Nicholas Schoch