Land, nature and culture in Finnish Lapland

Abstract

The late French sociologist Bruno Latour criticised contemporary global environmental discourses and geopolitical practices for being disconnected from the land, the basis of life, and suggested landing on the earth as a way to reconnect with the land and the politics concerned with it. He proposed taking a closer look at the multiple relationships which people have with land beyond current techno-rational governance practices. The cases from Finnish Lapland exemplify the diversity of land relationships as different practice-based land cultures, in order to problematise the binary distinctions between natural and cultural in rural and urban landscapes, and to show the central role governance plays at different levels in establishing and maintaining this separation through binary thinking in Finnish land cultures