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.