Arctic Worlds – serie

This book explores cooperation between humans and animals in extreme environments and contends that understanding domestication is crucial to explaining how life is possible in such conditions.The chapters draw on work from anthropology, genetics, law, and geography, with a range of ethnographic case studies from cold environments. The contributors offer new evidence for rethinking the dichotomy of trust vs domination previously used to characterize human-animal relations. They show how humans and animals partner for survival, and how a cold environment does not merely threaten existence but rather creates opportunities. Domestication is presented as a continuous, mutually beneficial human-animal relationship of becoming familiar with each other and the surrounding environment, which can lead to a symbiotic partnership of multiple agents for adapting to changes including a warming climate.This volume will be relevant to scholars from anthropology, geography, and related disciplines interested in human-animal relations, ecology, and the environment, particularly in the North.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Dogs in the North offers an interdisciplinary in-depth consideration of the multiple roles that dogs have played in the North. Spanning the deep history of humans and dogs in the North, the volume examines a variety of contexts in North America and Eurasia. The case studies build on archaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and anthropological research to illuminate the diversity and similarities in canine–human relationships across this vast region. The book sheds additional light on how dogs figure in the story of domestication, and how they have participated in partnerships with people across time. With contributions from a wide selection of authors, Dogs in the North is aimed at students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, and history, as well as all those with interests in human–animal studies and northern societies.

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland.Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication.An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and the North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

This book explores indigenous dances and social relationships surrounding the dance activities among Yupik on St. Lawrence Island and Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik, Northern Alaska. Yupik and Iñupiat proudly distinguish their indigenous styles of dance, locally called ‘Eskimo dance’, from Western styles of dance, such as ballroom, disco or ballet. Based on two years of intensive fieldwork and 18 years of experience living in Alaska, Ikuta sets out to understand how Yupik and Iñupiaq dances are at the centre of social relationships with the environment, among humans, between humans and animals, and between Native and the Euro-American societies. It also examines how the nature and structure of dance are connected to cultural politics, wrought by political, economic and historical events.

This book explores indigenous dances and social relationships surrounding the dance activities among Yupik on St. Lawrence Island and Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik, Northern Alaska. Yupik and Iñupiat proudly distinguish their indigenous styles of dance, locally called ‘Eskimo dance’, from Western styles of dance, such as ballroom, disco or ballet. Based on two years of intensive fieldwork and 18 years of experience living in Alaska, Ikuta sets out to understand how Yupik and Iñupiaq dances are at the centre of social relationships with the environment, among humans, between humans and animals, and between Native and the Euro-American societies. It also examines how the nature and structure of dance are connected to cultural politics, wrought by political, economic and historical events.

The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.

This book is based upon more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork and personal experiences with the Teetł’it Gwich’in community in northern Canada. The author provides insight into Gwich’in understandings of life as well as into historical and political processes that have taken place in the North. He outlines the development of an educational approach towards conducting ethnography and writing anthropological literature, starting with the premise ‘you have to live it’. The book focuses on ways of knowing and collaboration through learning and being taught by interlocutors. Building on the work of Tim Ingold, Loovers investigates the notion of reading life - land, water and weather as well as texts – and analyses the reading of texts as acts of conversations or correspondences.

The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.

Why Sámi Sing is an anthropological inquiry into a singing practice found among the Indigenous Sámi people, living in the northernmost part of Europe. It inquires how the performance of melodies, with or without lyrics, may be a way of altering perception, relating to human and non-human presences, or engaging with the past. According to its practitioners, the Sámi "yoik" is more than a musical repertoire made up by humans: it is a vocal power received from the environment, one that reveals its possibilities with parsimony through practice and experience. Following the propensity of Sámi singers to take melodies seriously and experiment with them, this book establishes a conversation between Indigenous and Western epistemologies and introduces the "yoik" as a way of knowing in its own right, with both convergences and divergences vis-à-vis academic ways of knowing. It will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Indigenous studies.*Honourable Mention - International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Book Prize 2024*

Why Sámi Sing is an anthropological inquiry into a singing practice found among the Indigenous Sámi people, living in the northernmost part of Europe. It inquires how the performance of melodies, with or without lyrics, may be a way of altering perception, relating to human and non-human presences, or engaging with the past. According to its practitioners, the Sámi "yoik" is more than a musical repertoire made up by humans: it is a vocal power received from the environment, one that reveals its possibilities with parsimony through practice and experience. Following the propensity of Sámi singers to take melodies seriously and experiment with them, this book establishes a conversation between Indigenous and Western epistemologies and introduces the "yoik" as a way of knowing in its own right, with both convergences and divergences vis-à-vis academic ways of knowing. It will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Indigenous studies.*Honourable Mention - International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Book Prize 2024*

This volume provides fresh insight into northern human–animal relations and illustrates the breadth and practical utility of archaeological human–animal studies. It surveys recent archaeological research in northern North America and Eurasia that frames human–animal relations as not merely economically exploitative but often socially complex and deeply meaningful, and attuned to the intelligence and agency of nonhuman prey and domesticates. The case studies sample a wide swath of the circumpolar region, from Alaska, Nunavut, and Greenland to northern Fennoscandia and western Siberia, and span sites, finds, and scenarios ranging in age from the Mesolithic to the twenty-first century. Many taxa on which northern lives hinged figure in these analyses, including large marine mammals, polar bear, reindeer, marine fish, and birds, and are variously approached from relational, multispecies, semiotic, osteobiographical, and political economic perspectives. Animals themselves are represented by osteological remains, harvesting gear, and depictions of animal bodies that include zoomorphic figurines, petroglyphs, ornamentation, and intricate portrayals of human–animal harvesting encounters. Far from settling the problem of how archaeologists should approach northern human–animal relations, these chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of northern worlds and highlight the diversity of human and nonhuman animal lives. This book will be of particular interest to northern archaeologists and zooarchaeologists, and all those interested in the possibilities of a multispecies approach to the archaeological record.

This book focuses on Greenlandic oral history and how to better understand people, their cultural remains, and their landscape through their own stories. It offers a way to consult Inuit oral history that opens up a perspective on houses and landscapes that may otherwise be invisible to the barren eye. Working with and re-activating Indigenous knowledge of Greenland, the study draws on more than two thousand stories collected between 1735 and 1981, preserved, and later enrolled in an online and searchable database. The author unearths the concepts woven into Greenlandic Inuit’s homes, settlements, and landscapes. These re-discovered insights challenge the archaeological interpretation, transcending the tangible to illuminate the unseen. The narratives contribute to safeguarding invaluable Indigenous knowledge and perhaps also to the revival of cultural practices, customs, and traditions. The book demonstrates how oral history is more than merely fantastical ‘myths’ and ‘legends’; it is valuable knowledge for scholars and communities. It will be of particular interest for scholars of Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, and history.

This book explores cooperation between humans and animals in extreme environments and contends that understanding domestication is crucial to explaining how life is possible in such conditions.The chapters draw on work from anthropology, genetics, law, and geography, with a range of ethnographic case studies from cold environments. The contributors offer new evidence for rethinking the dichotomy of trust vs domination previously used to characterize human-animal relations. They show how humans and animals partner for survival, and how a cold environment does not merely threaten existence but rather creates opportunities. Domestication is presented as a continuous, mutually beneficial human-animal relationship of becoming familiar with each other and the surrounding environment, which can lead to a symbiotic partnership of multiple agents for adapting to changes including a warming climate.This volume will be relevant to scholars from anthropology, geography, and related disciplines interested in human-animal relations, ecology, and the environment, particularly in the North.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Sacred Places in the Arctic and Beyond brings together indigenous and nonindigenous scholars, rightsholders, and practitioners to explore the status and management of sacred places, which are important as both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. It acknowledges the critical functions and roles that sacred places play in connection with local people, traditions, beliefs, and practices, as identity markers, places of cultural transmission and memory, and locations that support ecosystems and biodiversity.An introductory chapter presents an organising framework for this book based in cultural ecology and law. Four chapters present case studies from the Arctic, and four more widen the geographical coverage to North America, South America, Africa, and Europe, each describing the cultural contexts and Indigenous cosmologies of sacred places in their respective regions. The studies raise issues of access to sacred places, destruction and disruption caused by extractive industries and tourism, and implications of these challenges for their management. This book concludes with three chapters that call for policy reappraisals. They address the problem of how Western‑orientated discourses and organisational structures frame legislation about, and management of, sacred places in ways which are seldom compatible with how Indigenous people understand these places and engage with them. Major themes from the case studies are integrated with ideas from cultural ecology and legal pluralism into a framework to inform future policy.

This book focuses on the concept of unwritten Indigenous Arctic infrastructures. It takes inspiration from activists in the field of Indigenous studies, who argue that ‘critical’ Indigenous infrastructures are often not railways, pipelines or data cables, but instead sacred places and sustainable craftsmanship. The authors in this collection challenge the standard definition of cultural heritage and of industrial infrastructure. They encourage the critical re-thinking of roads and other forms of industrial infrastructure which can be re-tooled to support emplaced practice. Through learning from Northern and Arctic Indigenous craftspeople on how small-scale but evocative objects can define identity and landscapes, the contributors show how conical tents, trails, spoken stories, and miniature models break out of the boundaries of their metadata to generate and re-generate relationships. The volume considers the changing role of museums and protected areas in providing examples of embedded and embodied cultural practice, and builds on the craft of ‘unwriting’ objects of cultural heritage by comparing embodied and relational practice to formal classifications. It will be of interest to those working in anthropology, museum and heritage studies, archaeology and geography, as well as Indigenous studies, Northern and Arctic studies.

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland.Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication.An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and the North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

Dogs in the North offers an interdisciplinary in-depth consideration of the multiple roles that dogs have played in the North. Spanning the deep history of humans and dogs in the North, the volume examines a variety of contexts in North America and Eurasia. The case studies build on archaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and anthropological research to illuminate the diversity and similarities in canine–human relationships across this vast region. The book sheds additional light on how dogs figure in the story of domestication, and how they have participated in partnerships with people across time. With contributions from a wide selection of authors, Dogs in the North is aimed at students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, and history, as well as all those with interests in human–animal studies and northern societies.

This volume provides fresh insight into northern human–animal relations and illustrates the breadth and practical utility of archaeological human–animal studies. It surveys recent archaeological research in northern North America and Eurasia that frames human–animal relations as not merely economically exploitative but often socially complex and deeply meaningful, and attuned to the intelligence and agency of nonhuman prey and domesticates. The case studies sample a wide swath of the circumpolar region, from Alaska, Nunavut, and Greenland to northern Fennoscandia and western Siberia, and span sites, finds, and scenarios ranging in age from the Mesolithic to the twenty-first century. Many taxa on which northern lives hinged figure in these analyses, including large marine mammals, polar bear, reindeer, marine fish, and birds, and are variously approached from relational, multispecies, semiotic, osteobiographical, and political economic perspectives. Animals themselves are represented by osteological remains, harvesting gear, and depictions of animal bodies that include zoomorphic figurines, petroglyphs, ornamentation, and intricate portrayals of human–animal harvesting encounters. Far from settling the problem of how archaeologists should approach northern human–animal relations, these chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of northern worlds and highlight the diversity of human and nonhuman animal lives. This book will be of particular interest to northern archaeologists and zooarchaeologists, and all those interested in the possibilities of a multispecies approach to the archaeological record.