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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what human-animal encounters and interactions looked like in the European Arctic during World War II. How and why did humans document the animals they encountered, lived and worked with? What role did these animals play for humans, and what social meanings were attached to them?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores what human-animal encounters and interactions looked like in the wartime European Arctic. As a point of departure, I examine how and why humans documented and described certain animals they encountered, lived and/or worked with in exceptional conditions between 1940-1945. What role did these animals play for humans, and what social meanings were attached to them? What kind of networks of different humans and animals existed, and how did they relate to one another? A diverse set of humans - including the local original population such as Sámi herders, newcomers like foreign soldiers and prisoners of war - suddenly coinhabited remote Arctic regions alongside local and imported (semi-)domesticated animals and wildlife. Different types of encounters and interactions between these humans and animals shaped the everyday life and the war experience of all parties involved. These relations are under-researched, and this paper aims to address this gap. Especially reindeer and their indigenous Sami herders, who largely kept their cross-border mobility despite the war and its ensuing border closures, serve as a point of departure. The aim of my research is to include a range of heterogeneous sources, including material produced by the German military, Sami reindeer herders, as well as by other representatives of the local population and regional authorities in several Nordic countries. The ambition is to contribute to a less anthropocentric and more integrative human-animal dimension in the historiography of World War II in Sápmi, the cultural Sámi area spanning from Norway to the Russian Kola-peninsula.