publications

Sámi reindeer pastoralism in Norway is said to be in a state of crisis that has lasted for several decades and is due to excessive numbers of reindeer. A general overstocking of the range is believed to cause widespread pasture degradation, poor economic performance, and increasing land-use conflicts. These are the main assumptions of a …

Resilience thinking has growing purchase in the context of Arctic policy, resource management and indigenous politics. The present text outlines and compares two conflicting versions of the resilience concept, both currently at work in the field of contemporary Norwegian Sa ́mi reindeer pastoralism. First, while ecological resilience originally emerged as a challenge to mainstream equilibrium …

For decades now, the dominant narrative about indigenous reindeer pastoralism in northern Norway has been that there is a crisis of excess: an oversized reindeer population, poorly held in check by poorly governed herders, is overgrazing the tundra, degrading the pasture grounds, spilling over into urban spaces and precipitating moral crises by starving to death …

Drawing on ethnographic material from the Norwegian Arctic, this article explores issues of specificity, encounter, and emplacement in human-animal relations through the lens of modernizing indigenous reindeer pastoralism in the region. In turn, the main sections of the argument examine three things: first, the changing technological context of indigenous herding practice, focusing on the impact …

Drawing on a multi-sited study of transnational efforts to safeguard the highly endangered Lesser White-fronted Goose (Anser Erythropus), the text develops an argument about a certain “biopolitics of the wild”—a particular mode of governing nonhuman life, rooted in certain conditions of visibility and engagement. As a wild avian population, the Lessers are known and managed …

The article examines the emergence of waste as an industrial category in the context of contemporary indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralism and slaughter in northern Norway. In recent decades, commercially available substitutes and the industrial reorganization of slaughter have displaced traditional methods of extraction and utilization. As a result, the slaughtered reindeer body has been reorganized …

Drawing on historical records and ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the history of the so-called curved knife, or krumkniv, as a window on the governance and regulation of indigenous Sámi reindeer slaughter in Norway. Originally developed by scientific activists in the 1920s, in the context of a series of experimental field trials held at a …

My concern in this essay lies with exploring the possibility of grief for the loss of a nonhuman animal beyond the cozy domestic assemblages where such grief is conventionally situated, some might say confined. Parallel to the entangled intimacy of pets, livestock and companion species, I am interested in developing (or recuperating) a notion of …