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- Convenors:
-
Matilda Marshall
(Umeå University)
Flora Mary Bartlett (Linköping University)
Inger Johanne Lyngø (Lyngøya )
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- SUSTAINABILITIES
- Location:
- Room H-203
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In a time of global warming, ways of living with cold are challenged. This panel focus on the culture and history of cold with a particular interest in the relation to a changing climate. How has refrigeration influenced everyday practices and what happens to these when cold is under threat?
Long Abstract:
We are surrounded by heat and cold in our everyday lives. We conform, adjust to, and strive for temperatures in relation to our indoor environments, clothing, cooking, storing and choice of vacation destinations. Managing and mastering cold and heat is thus intimately connected to practices concerning survival and sustainability, especially in the context of global warming. Warming has previously been suggested as a cultural analytical tool or metaphor to think about change and continuity (Ger 2007); here we wish to turn focus on the opposite, the cooling, or more specifically refrigeration. We wish to explore the culture and history of refrigeration from different perspectives with particular interest in relation to a changing climate. A central question is how refrigeration has influenced and become integrated into everyday practices and narratives and what happens to these when cold is under threat.
We welcome papers on topics relating to, but not limited to:
• Production, commodification, and consumption of ice and refrigeration technology
• Living with and managing cold
• Sensing cold
• Refrigeration and freezing practices, for example air-conditioning, food storage, ice halls, sports and recreation, laboratory work.
• The folklore of cold and refrigeration
• Power relations and social inequalities in access and use of refrigeration
• Natural vs artificial cold
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Flora Mary Bartlett (Linköping University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Arjeplog, rural Northern Sweden/ Swedish Sápmi, this highly visual paper investigates how the freezer is critical in everyday sustainability and prosperity, arguing that it is a vital element of not just survival, but ideas of the good life.
Paper long abstract:
The modern home freezer has revolutionised food storage, advancing traditional techniques of preservation towards new materialities of modernity. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork and image co-production in Arjeplog, in rural Northern Sweden/ Swedish Sápmi, this highly visual paper investigates how the humble freezer plays a critical material role in the everyday sustainability and prosperity of the community. In Arjeplog, fishing, the moose hunt (älgjakten), the bird hunt, and reindeer meat from local herders is a crucial part of life. The majority of protein is consumed from the local landscape, building on these traditional practices that provide meat and fish throughout the year. While previously preserved through salting, drying, curing and smoking, the introduction of the modern freezer into Arjeplog life has changed these material practices. Today, neatly packaged fish, berries, reindeer cuts, moose meat, and entire bird carcasses fill the electric freezers of the locals until the promise of the hunting season sparks an emptying in anticipation of new bounty. These hunting and foraging practices are framed as sustainable ways to procure first-class sustenance for the entire year directly from nature, following an ‘eat local’ approach that locals often argue is missing from the urban Swedish population. Using original photographs from fieldwork that work together with the text to explore the materiality of the freezer in everyday practice, I argue that the freezer is a vital element of not just survival, but prosperity and ideas of the good life.
Ana Svetel (University of Ljubljana)
Paper short abstract:
Based on the fieldwork, conducted in Northeast Iceland, the paper focuses on the various engagements, experiences and perceptions of the environment during the winter season. The ethnographic examples will be contextualized within the wider questions of the weather, temporality and seasonality.
Paper long abstract:
»And cold was that beauty/ that was our dominion/ The snowdrift creaked beneath our feet/ and the sky lent us its toys/ stars, moon and northern lights« are the opening verses of the poem Memory of winter by the Icelandic poet Þuríður Guðmundsdóttir. The paper focuses on the various »conversations« (Benediktsson and Lund 2010), engagements, experiences and perceptions of the environment and landscape during the winter months. It is based on the fieldwork, conducted in Northeast Iceland in 2019, as part of the PhD project Weather, time, light and darkness in social dimensions of Icelandic landscape. As the seasonality (Olwig 2005; Palang, Printsmann and Sooväli 2007) plays a crucial role in human-environment relations, co-creates the sense of place (Feld and Basso 1996) and its atmospheric, sensory and affective dimensions (Anderson 2009; Asu Schroer and Schmitt 2018), the corresponding ethnographic material will be contextualized within the wider questions of the temporality and luminosity (Bille and Sørensen 2007; Edensor 2017). Following Ingold's notion about the weather, namely that »we just have to go through it« (Ingold 2010: S136) the relations between the weather, the winter, the darkness, and the coldness will be examined. Since these relations can be anthropologically identified through the numerous everyday practices, collective and individual memories and anticipations, forms of art, as well as through the various social events, holidays and celebrations, the attention to the potential limitations when approaching the afore-mentioned relations from such a wide perspective will also be discussed.
Roger Norum (University of Oulu)
Paper short abstract:
This talk investigates the imaginaries, practices and materialities of coldness and silence in the European Arctic.
Paper long abstract:
The High Arctic has long been imagined as a frigid, silent and remote space, devoid of human presence and populated only by nature's dark forces. The binary relationship between sound/silence and warmth/cold is reproduced extensively in common understandings of wilderness and the experience of wilderness spaces. However, coldness, unlike darkness and silence which are often understood to be absences of light and sound, is a presence of material experiences of natural phenomena such as wind and precipitation. In this talk, I explore cold not as mere absence of heat, but rather a renewable resource that exists across multiple, diverse social and nature-based forms, carrying with it multiple significations. Through an investigation of how the material and symbolic infrastructures of coldness and silence give them meaning as they are produced, consumed and experienced in place, I deconstruct the expectations of the two experiential phenomena through their wider social and cultural processes, to show them to be fundamental aspects of everyday life in the North, cultivating them as a utilizable immaterial resources. Through playing and experimenting with new constellations of mixed methods from across several disciplines, I show how novel forms of observation and documentation might effectively encapsulate the significance of cold and silence, and show how researchers can implement a more nuanced understanding of their significance in everyday life.