WENZEL, George W., 2008 Sometimes Hunting Can Seem Like Business: Polar Bear Sport Hunting in Nunavut, Edmonton, Canadian Circumpolar Institute Press, 120 pages.

Less than a decade ago, the hunting of polar bears by both Inuit and recreational trophy hunters received little public attention. The focus of international media and environmentalist attention was the Canadian seal hunt, with European importation bans in the 1980s leading to the demise of the seal hunt in numerous Inuit communities. All the while polar bear hunting activity remained generally ignored. All of this was to change in the middle years of this decade due to rapidly growing international awareness of the impact of anthropogenic climate change on polar environments, and with the emergence of the polar bear as the poster species of global warming. In the past five years, the polar bear has been raised to iconic status by environmentalists and the media, and this elevation has brought a growing public awareness and outcry regarding the hunting of bears both by Inuit and by recreational trophy hunters. Emerging alongside, and often in response, is a growing body of social science literature that explores the social, economic, semiotic, and cultural role of both subsistence and recreational polar bear hunting, and the cultural history of anti-polar bear hunting discourse (see Freeman and Foote 2009). George Wenzel has been at the forefront of much of this recent scholarship, and this, his most recent contribution, is a welcome addition. This short book (114 pages, including appendices) is a stripped-down, bare bones chronicle of the history, organisation, and socio-economic role of polar bear trophy hunting in three Nunavut communities. Unusually for anthropological scholarship, Wenzel makes no cross-cultural comparisons, nor does he make reference to other forms of trophy or subsistence hunting in Nunavut or elsewhere. He does not theorise or attempt to draw larger, broader conclusions from these three small-scale case studies. This is, in essence, a report, which presents the raw data of the author’s research. All of this, however, is to the book’s advantage. In a short space, Wenzel gets straight to the point, allowing his research in the three communities to speak for itself, providing in-depth social and economic accounts of the organisation, benefits, and costs of recreational trophy hunting, and making clear that while trophy hunt outfitting is organised and executed following the tenets of Inuit qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge) each of the three communities has its own unique and community-specific way of doing this. The three communities in question are Clyde River, Resolute Bay, and Taloyoak. Wenzel begins with a socio-economic introduction to each community, painting a picture of the mixed subsistence economies familiar to all scholars of the North. He goes on to explore the role of the polar bear as an economic resource, from its commoditisation from the 1850s to the 1970s, to the current and evolving role the species plays in most Inuit communities. Between 1970 and 1985, rapid social, political, and conservation change sowed the seeds for recreational trophy hunting of polar bears as it exists today. Socio-technological changes such as sedentarisation and the replacement of dogs with skidoos, the effects of the sealskin ban, and the successful completion of the international Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears all played their role in the transformation of both subsistence and trophy hunting of polar bears. The author recounts how, between 1985 and 2000, a growing number of Nunavut communities diverted part of their quota into trophy hunting, and how successful U.S. hunters returning home with large trophy bears enticed even more hunters north in search of an impressive bear for their trophy rooms. The author provides an exhaustive account of how the hunt is organised in each of the three communities. Inuit qaujimajatuqangit …