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- Convenors:
-
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius
(Stockholm University Nordiska museet)
JoAnn Conrad (Diablo Valley College. Univ. of Iceland)
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- Chair:
-
Brynhild Granås
(UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- KWZ 0.606
- Start time:
- 28 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The North has been a reservoir of imaginary potential: raw, stable but uninhabitable, the antithesis of Home. In the face of global disruptions those imaginings are dissolving and challenging presumptions about Home and Away. What are the responses, returns and re-imaginings to this shift?
Long Abstract:
The Far North has been a reservoir of imaginary potential in which modern subjects might regenerate and reinvigorate, tapping into the power of raw, frozen Nature. Extreme, always on the edge of crisis, always threatening to crush attempts at subjugation, the North was configured as inhospitable and uninhabited. And yet such was its magnetic pull that those in more moderate climes were drawn either vicariously or in actuality to experience and tap into this energy. The relationship of "man" to the North has been defined broadly in three modalities:
Man in the North- a masculine, colonizing narrative in which North is both direction and destination.
People of the North - an ethnographic and evolutionist discourse in which local populations are configured as living as part of the landscape, tied to the narrative of "vanishing races."
Humanity and the North - an environmental discourse that today shakes the stability of existing narratives.
Despite this fact that the North has long been a frontier and a source by which the "center" found definition by contrast, the lived realities of this imagined wilderness tell a different story; one in which the inhabitants moved, worked, and established homes -- temporary and permanent. How are those formerly evacuated and silenced able to negotiate and inhabit the narrow space between old and new narratives? In the face of global disruptions the Arctic imaginings are dissolving and challenging major presumptions about Home and Away, Nature and Culture, Stasis and Change. What are the responses, returns and re-imaginings in this shift?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Drawing upon Donna Haraway, the turfhouse provides figures of human dwelling as a sympoiesis system (2016), or architecture as a collaborative, co-evolving assemblage of humans and nonhumans in the North.
Paper long abstract:
Early in the 20th century, turfhouses were identified as a national problem, affiliated with shame, and an official moral mission marked the turf house for extinction. Hostility towards the turf house became ingrained into local language in Iceland as an idiomatic expression for decline. In building new narratives and making room for non-human others, we propose relationality and creative forms, as fitting to return to the turfhouse, not as cultural heritage but as an investigative tool for building alternative and more earthbound temporalities into the compressed present where the order of the Anthropocene is "instantaneous time" (Pascal Gielen 2014). Drawing upon Donna Haraway, the turfhouse provides figures of human dwelling as a sympoiesis system (2016), or architecture as a collaborative, co-evolving assemblage of humans and nonhumans in the North.
Paper short abstract:
The human-dog relation in dogsledding exemplifies a current interspecies world-making social formation in the Nordic North. The paper describes how stories from the shared everyday life of humans and dogs sometimes challenge boundary making practices that still tend to mark descriptions of the area.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I investigate an example of an interspecies and cooperative world-making social formation. The relation between humans and dogs that do long distance dogsledding together - resembling traditional mobile practice of Inuit people in other parts of the Circumpolar North - appeared for the first time in the Nordic North a little less than 50 years ago. Through her accounts of unromantic relations between companion species that have to sort things out through communication to solve tasks together, Donna Haraway offers a language for articulating happenings and processes in the space that dog mushers and sled dogs share in their everyday life. The analysis investigates human-dog companies and communications, performed through bodies that smell and sound and that, through their movements, are watched with the sight and felt with hands and paws, snouts, tongs and mouths. I ask how stories from this everyday life may challenge and inflict on some of the boundary- and distinction making practices that still tend to be repeated when life in the far North is described. Among them is the distinction between Western and non-Western perceptions of nature. Another is the boundary between indigenous and non-indigenous social formations. Mushers and sled dogs inhabit environments where the wild-domestic divide sometimes is blurred and where economic categorizations seem to dissolve within fuzzy cohabitations.
Paper short abstract:
How is an endurance sport event used to reproduce images of strong and enduring athletes using nature as a field to revert to a local image of a nordic outdoor destination? The paper shows how the prejudices of the area, the race organisers and the athletes create a co-produced perception of Lofoten.
Paper long abstract:
The ocean for the swim might reach 15°C. Elements of nature, the likely rough weather conditions and the terrain as well as the physical fitness needed to endure the Lofoten Triathlon offer a sublime and intense experience. With the engagement to a very long journey of 4 km swimming, 196 km cycling and a 45 km run over two mountain passes, it seems that at that endurance event in northern Norway the extreme meets the extreme. People who shape themselves for those forms of competitions for many years maroon themselves to the area. At the same time the race organiser mainly highlights the beauty of the Lofoten archipel and stresses that the experience is foremost about moments and not about race time.
What image of the area do they create by this layout and what kind of participants are drawn to the race? Within this, how is the picture of the north created and phantasms of experiencing the north to its fullest are packaged into a triathlon competition? How is the narrative of the enduring male reproduced? What is the role of the Vikings and why is there an 'Arctic Triple Bun' given out at the food stations?
The paper explores the makings of destination and askes how understandings of the north are part of creating a local self-understanding of external stereotypes. With the practice of participating in the north and stepping and inheriting the nature, the athletes affiliate the region and are part of a co-production process of creating a transformation to a former raw countryside.
Paper short abstract:
Analyzing two of the numerous parking lots along the main roads in the vast but densely populated, county of Finnmark, Northern Norway, this paper demonstrates the co-dwelling and relation to landscape as task-scapes, by different forms of mobilities in the area.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I analyze the interaction between landscape and different categories of people and how co-dwelling is created in the sub-arctic county of Finnmark, Northern Norway. As a vast but densely populated area, mobility is important for how the landscape is formed and how the landscape form practices and co-dwelling. Based on Ingold and Kurtilla's emphasis on "people's practical engagement with the environment" (2000: 192) and Bissel's stress on an ontology where "mobility itself gives rise to different kinds of proximity" (2013: 352), I analyze how the mobilities and practices of different groups like anglers, hunters, gatherers, reindeer herders and tourists interact with each other and the landscape, the latter also shaping this interaction. Thereby, the analysis is also a critique of what Malkki (1992: 31) has labelled a Sedentarist Metaphysics that forefront a concern for and emphasis on existing close relationships and bounded units, and what Hannerz (1980: 201) has claimed as a tendency in social sciences to 'disregard near non-relationships'.
Bissell, David (2013) Pointless Mobilities: Rethinking Proximities Through the Loops of Neighbourhood. Mobilities 8(3), 349-367.
Hannerz, Ulf (1980) Exploring the City. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ingold, T. and Kurttila, T. (2000) Perceiving the environment in Finnish Lapland. Body & Society 6(3-4), 183-196.
Malkki, Liisa, 1992. National geographic: the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees. Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 24-44.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we will examine local/global interplay in relation to growing "Arctic" tourism in Iceland and contextualize in particular puffins and polar bears within the imaginings of the North where an exotic, dangerous and dynamic landscape is a dominant feature.
Paper long abstract:
Can one fit the Arctic into a suitcase? The simple answer would no. However tourists traveling to Iceland sometimes try the impossible when buying "Arctic" souvenirs that can easily be packed in their suitcase. In the downtown Reykjavík area the shelves in every tourist shop are now flooded with "Arctic" objects and symbols of various sorts, including stuffed puffins and polar bears. As a symbol of power, conservation, climate change and Arctic cooperation the polar bear carries various meanings in the Arctic including an emerging sub-regional folkloric image in the North Atlantic. The most popular artefact among tourists however seems to be the Arctic puffin in all shapes and sizes. Within every Icelandic tourist shop one can find puffins on a mug, puffin key rings, puffin miniatures, postcards and magnets. This clown of the air has, as it seems, become a new national symbol and takes part in the positioning of Iceland firmly within the contemporary Arctic cultural and political context. In this paper we will take a closer look at at this interplay and contextualize Iceland within the imaginings of the North where an exotic, dangerous and dynamic landscape is a dominant feature. The result is a seemingly pristine construct, exempt from the Anthropocene, and thus serves well as a dreamscape for the growing global Arctic appetite.
Paper short abstract:
To early northbound travelers, visited Sámi homes represented ultimate alterity. Subsequent commodifications in shows and tourism, demonstrate a striking stability regarding the visual imaginary, all though understandings might have changed.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will present some of the most important early contributions to the formation of an imaginary of what the northern, sub-arctic Scandinavian home looked like. To the early northbound travelers, the homes of the nomadic, reindeer herding Sámi were at the center of their attention. These homes represented ultimate alterity, as the visitors found them deeply connected to nature, animals, and the Sámi's Arctic surroundings. Re-imaginings of these homes soon found their way to book illustrations, folk shows, and museums in the big European cities. When travelling possibilities increased with early tourism to the North, the same imaginaries emerged in promotional material as well as in more or less permanent tourist installations in the travelled areas. This has continued through time into contemporary tourism, with a remarkable stability in the images presented. However, while these commodifications of Sámi everyday life remain relatively unchanged, the understanding of the northern homes as symbols of primitivism, nature bound, and exotic, might have changed when re-imagined in terms of contemporary tourists' understandings of phenomena like new spirituality, ethno-politics, environmentalism, and climate change.