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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how romantic fantasies of happiness and the good life inform social dynamics in two remote mountain villages in the High-Arctic (Norway) and Southern Patagonia (Argentina). It asks whether such imaginaries can challenge existing ways of living in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Since its emergence as a broad cultural ethos that spanned across large parts of the west, particularly from the 19th century and onwards, romanticism has been associated with fantasies of happiness and the good life centered around the search for sublime experiences in pristine natural landscapes. In today’s world, the allure of the wilderness is fueling a rapidly growing tourist industry and the emergence of a new cosmopolitan migrant class formation. Formed principally by people who seek alternatives to what they perceive as the fast-paced, spiritually poor, and alienating urban lifestyles of late modernity, many seek to the world’s last remaining wilderness areas to “reconnect” with nature and the self, and find peace and happiness. The double movement of tourism and lifestyle migration produces tensions, transformations, and frictions along an emergent global frontier between civilization and the wild outdoors. I examine recent socioeconomic developments in two frontier towns in Svalbard and Patagonia in order to explore how life projects shaped by romantic fantasies of a retreat from modern life negotiate, challenge or reproduce the global dynamics of late capitalism. At the center of this exploration, is a concern with the potential of experimental and speculative anthropology to contribute with new ideas about what constitutes a good life in the Anthropocene and, furthermore, of the limits of practices and perspectives that focus on the radical reshaping of desire in producing actual social change.