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.