SELECTED THESES ON THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC

This dissertation describes the lives of young Inuit men between the ages of 15 and 30 in a Canadian Arctic village. It explores the relationship between their perception of stressful features in their socioecological contexts; their negotiation of age, gender, and ethnic identity; their use of various coping tactics, strategies, and styles to mediate the experience of stress; and their overall social, psychological and physiological well-being. It analysies the relationship between sociocultural change, life-cycle development, and creative coping capacity.
It is an interpretive, interactionist, and epidemiological account of stress-related health problems such as emotional disturbance and substance abuse. It argues that well-being is related in a multi-dimensional way to a personšs participation in the on-going negotiation of definitions of self, and understandings about society, and the active construction of a supportive social reality. It concludes that in rapidly changing, multicultural contexts, the experience of stress and its health consequences cannot be fully understood with models which rely on unilinear concepts such as acculturation or social support to explain variation in the effects of stress.
It argues that the coping tactics, strategies and styles generated among young Inuit are legitimate, rather than deviant responses to the social, economic, and political conditions of internal colonialism which characterises northern Canadian society. In a variety of ways, Inuit youth are contributing to the redefinition and ultimate restructuring of northern society in a manner which strengthens Inuit identity and tradition, and redistribution economic and political resources in a more equitable arrangement. Participation in this process is problematic: the experience of stress and its health consequences are often the consequence.