Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with how people encounter and existentially treat changes of the physical environment in places they call home. It will argues that their relationship to the physical environment is lived and is to be considered social and reciprocal in character .

Paper long abstract:

As a result of quotidian work and care in the place where we live, we become familiar with it, and appropriate it as our own. In this process we simultaneously embody something of ourselves in the place; it gives rise to a sense of being a part of it, or an oneness with it. This phenomenological idea of merger of subject and object, identity and physical environment, is helpful if we want to understand what is happening when people are subjected to changes of the physical environment in places they call home.

In a forested region in northern Sweden, where I currently carry out a fieldwork, the forest land is mainly owned by a big forest company which exploits it for raw material supply and wind power production. As a consequence, the forest landscape becomes changed. For the residents, this implies that new phenomena, something alien, appear in their life worlds. How do people interact with and encompass this otherness? In focusing on the lived, direct, and unreflective relation with the physical appearances, the paper will argue that this relationship is to be considered as social and reciprocal in character between subjects, that is to say an intersubjective relationship. Like the interaction with another person, wind turbines or clear-cut areas have the potential to become a part of them or being separated from them, as an alien other.