Paper short abstract:

Scientific expeditions to the Spitsbergen archipelago around 1900 performed surveys of water, ground, air and ice. They prospected for minerals, discovered new land – and wrote stories. This paper investigates if and how the times of nature and the times of culture were entangled in these histories.

Paper long abstract:

How is natural and cultural histories interwoven in the records from the Arctic and what can they tell about how the participants experienced their mission as storytellers from a no-mans land? With the reports from the Beer Island, located midway between North-Norway and Spitsbergen as example, this paper will look at how stories of men, animals, geology and biology were entangled in the expedition reports. As a genre these reports could encompass natural and cultural histories. At the same time establishing a division between human and natural history became all the more important in the disciplinary formations at universities. How and if these disciplinary divisions were important, and the ways of organising the knowledge and experiences in the narratives will be discussed. The texts that will be investigated are Swedish and Norwegian travelogues and articles in journals that reports from the Beer Island at a time were the run for the Arctic was at its peak. Theoretically the paper is inspired by the discussions following upon among others Dipesh Chakrabarty's plea for a new approach to the writing of history, were the drastic changes in natural environments begs an entanglement of times of nature and culture.