In 1950-51, a young French geomorphologist travels alone to Thule in north-west Greenland, meaning to study glaciers—but instead spends months living among the Polar Eskimos, hunting, traveling by dog sled, and being drawn into a remote hunting culture just as the modern world begins arriving at its edge.
Some people experience safety and monotony as an affliction rather than a relief, and they will choose danger over boredom. Families once left a ship whose comforts upset them and walked for eight months across ice, nearly starving, to cover a distance the ship sailed in three weeks. They arrived ready to set out again. The same spirit shows in a craftsman who charged more for identical items because repetition bored him.
Hardship that a people overcomes with thrift and ingenuity builds their pride. Easy comforts handed to them from outside can wear that pride away. Once a nearby modern base brought store food, wages and welfare, hunters lost their teeth, their sharing and their standing, and some became sweepers of the streets they once roamed as masters.
Where survival depends on pooling a meager catch, bringing in trade and personal ownership does not enrich people. It impoverishes them. When outside commerce replaces a hunting group's obligation to share with exchange and accumulation, the group is drained of what kept it alive, and in the author's words is reduced, "in terms of development, to zero."
For a people whose whole way of life is organised around a single kind of work, that work is the core of who they are. When the subsistence economy is destroyed, cultural identity and self-respect go with it. The author blames this collapse on the economic system rather than on religion or ideas.
The way back for a dispossessed people is not to refuse the modern economy. It is to build their own version of it, based on group effort, self-government and "sustaining one's historical dignity." When native delegates organised and argued for themselves, the author saw a realistic path to recovery rather than just an elegy.