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 …
The paper presents comparative ethnographic material on volunteer biodiversity monitoring from environmental organisations in three postcommunist countries: Poland, Slovenia, and Lithuania. The argument charts and discusses aspects of the heritage from socialism and communist rule in terms of their effect on the present-day running and operations of four case-study organisations in these countries, focusing particularly …
Climate change will likely affect the practice of pastoralism in the Sámi areas of Scandinavia severely. Winter temperatures may increase significantly, while changes in precipitation and wind will affect snow patterns. Traditional Sámi pastoralism is well adapted to handling rapid change in extreme and often unpredictable environments, and past responses to climatic variability may offer …
If societies are going to tackle climate change, significant changes in production processes as well as consumption patterns will be required. These changes cannot be achieved unless climate change is taken into account in the general and sector-specific policies essential for economic activities and general social development. In this report the degree of climate policy …
The chapter discusses the role of nation-states and their systems of governance as sources of barriers and solutions to adaptation to climate change from the point of view of Saami reindeer herders. The Saami, inhabiting the northernmost areas of Fennoscandia, are one of more than twenty ethnic groups in the circumpolar Arctic that base their …
“There is a sort of centrifugal force at work in biodiversity management discourse – a vector that seeks to take humans out of the equation and position them instead at the blackboard, chalk in hand, solving the same equation. This position of exteriority may be imperfectly realized, for a number of reasons—curtailed by the limitations …