Focusing on the delivery of justice in Inuit communities in northern Quebec, Incorporating the Familiar investigates the complexities and contradictions of accommodation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal legal systems. Conflict between the two legal orders, Susan Drummond argues, is really more about incommensurability between underlying cultural codes. She uses legal pluralism as a springboard to reflect on wider questions of intercultural history, concepts of identity and belonging, and problems of communication across cultures and between men and women.

Drummond explores a series of philosophic, ethnographic, and legal dilemmas produced by the interaction between legal cultures, setting up a dialogue between narrative and theory by interspersing accounts of her field experiences in Inuit communities with analytical chapters. In the first section she addresses problems of delivery of justice among Inuit communities and explores the cultural determinacy of understanding. In the second section she focuses on the problem of family violence and the complexities to which it gives rise in rendering justice in Inuit communities. In the third section she provides an ethnographic account of Nunavik's first sentencing circle, underlining her contention that juridical rules emerge from the habits and forms of a society.

Exploring the quandaries of intercultural communication and contemplating how diverse legal sensibilities might be mutually recognized, Incorporating the Familiar evokes the possibilities and limits of intercultural accommodation.