Tracking Nature Inscribed : Nature in rights and bureaucratic

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Tracking Nature Inscribed: Nature in Rights and Bureaucratic Practice

Indigenous people live in places that non-indigenous people generally consider nature. As these peoples’ livelihoods often are in this nature, their lives are frequently bureaucratised in ways that most of us would never encounter. This article describes my long-term effort to find ways to explore such bureaucratic processes in practice as part of my contribution to an environmental anthropology. I describe how I methodologically and theoretically explore such processes by using two examples of my writing, the articles “Blåfjella-Skjækerfjella nasjonalpark: Naturforvaltning som produksjon av natur/sted” and “Enacting Human and Non-Human Indigenous Salmon, Sami and Norwegian Natural Resource Management”. The first text describes Sami reindeer herders fighting the establishment of a national park. The other concerns an attempt of the Directorate of Nature Management to reregulate sea salmon fishing. Comparing these two articles, I show the variety of bits of nature that are materialised in bureaucratic process. Agency within such bureaucratic processes is explored with references to the materialities of the coined terms, texts bits, conventions and other legal references, as well as the numbers produced in the documents. Circulated, these bits of nature certainly influence the outcome of environmental controversies – they can contribute to naturalising particular narratives or foreseen outcomes.

Tracking Nature Inscribed: Nature in Rights and Bureaucratic Practice

Indigenous people live in places that non-indigenous people generally consider nature. As these peoples’ livelihoods often are in this nature, their lives are frequently bureaucratised in ways that most of us would never encounter. This article describes my long-term effort to find ways to explore such bureaucratic processes in practice as part of my contribution to an environmental anthropology. I describe how I methodologically and theoretically explore such processes by using two examples of my writing, the articles “Blåfjella-Skjækerfjella nasjonalpark: Naturforvaltning som produksjon av natur/sted” and “Enacting Human and Non-Human Indigenous Salmon, Sami and Norwegian Natural Resource Management”. The first text describes Sami reindeer herders fighting the establishment of a national park. The other concerns an attempt of the Directorate of Nature Management to reregulate sea salmon fishing. Comparing these two articles, I show the variety of bits of nature that are materialised in bureaucratic process. Agency within such bureaucratic processes is explored with references to the materialities of the coined terms, texts bits, conventions and other legal references, as well as the numbers produced in the documents. Circulated, these bits of nature certainly influence the outcome of environmental controversies – they can contribute to naturalising particular narratives or foreseen outcomes

Digitalisation of Crafts. Comparative approaches to Arctic Fur.

Efforts to digitally engage with indigenous source communities and craftspeople are many and diverse. This paper has as its starting point a comparison between two such digital engagements, both celebrations of Arctic animal fur clothing, yet each at seemingly opposite ends of a continuum of possible digital interfaces. Skinddragter Online and Mittimatalik Arnait Miqsuqtuit Collective were both launched the same year, 2015, in Copenhagen and Mittimatalik, Nunavut, Canada respectively. By comparing each with the other, our ambition is to illuminate some of the curatorial choices involved in the making of such digital platforms, and the consequences they have in terms of wider visibility, audiences reached, knowledge included, and collaborative engagements invited. Postcolonial critique can come at the expense of general outreach, conversations between designated experts can be difficult to make equal. Technological sophistication can be challenged by the digital divide. Attention to issues of cultural appropriation is a constant. Yet, driving these initiatives is the need to maintain a digital diversity in online and offline spaces

Writing Nature

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies is interested in how nature, in different versions and forms, is invited into our studies, analyses, and stories. How is it that we “write nature”? How is it that we provide space for, and actually describe the actors, agents, or surroundings, in our stories and analyses? The articles in the issue each deal with different understandings of both the practices of writing and the introduction of various natures into these. In this introduction to the issue the editors engage with actor-network theory as a material semiotic resource for writing nature. We propose to foreground actor-network theory as a writing tool, at the expense of actor-network theory as a distinct vocabulary. In doing this and pointing out the semiotic origins to material-semiotics we also want to problematize a clear-cut material approach to writing nature

Indigenous land claims and multiple landscapes: postcolonial openings in Finnmark, Norway

This chapter explores an ongoing process of establishing local and indigenous user rights in Finnmark, Northern Norway. Our concern is the extent to which this ongoing process allows for what we tentatively refer to as ‘otherness within’, i.e. the nation ́s acknowledgement of multiple natures; and/or of indigenous and local nature practices that are radically different from hegemonic and legal notions of property. In our analysis, we explicitly engage Australian legal processes as a comparative figure. Our aim is not to provide an exhaustive account of Australian native title processes but rather to use this as a lens for examining the Norwegian indigenous legal process. The comparison is triggered by the following observation: While legal practices framing landscapes and indigenous rights are hardly straightforward anywhere, the Australian native title framework appears, at certain moments at least, to encompass the possibility of multiple natures; as it has incorporated attempts to engage an indigenous other with radically divergent practices of nature and time (see for example Verran 1998, see also Stengers 2005). Our concern then, is to what extent postcolonial openings provided by an acknowledgement of multiplicity, are incorporated in the ongoing Sami rights process in Norway. This chapter is part of "Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian perspectives on peoples and landscapes". © 2017 Routledg

Digitale visjoner: En kartlegging. Identitet, tilgjengelighet og digital demokrati.

Efforts to digitally engage with indigenous source communities and craftspeople are many and diverse. This paper has as its starting point a comparison between two such digital engagements, both celebrations of Arctic animal fur clothing, yet each at seemingly opposite ends of a continuum of possible digital interfaces. Skinddragter Online and Mittimatalik Arnait Miqsuqtuit Collective were both launched the same year, 2015, in Copenhagen and Mittimatalik, Nunavut, Canada respectively. By comparing each with the other, our ambition is to illuminate some of the curatorial choices involved in the making of such digital platforms, and the consequences they have in terms of wider visibility, audiences reached, knowledge included, and collaborative engagements invited. Postcolonial critique can come at the expense of general outreach, conversations between designated experts can be difficult to make equal. Technological sophistication can be challenged by the digital divide. Attention to issues of cultural appropriation is a constant. Yet, driving these initiatives is the need to maintain a digital diversity in online and offline spaces

Nordic National Museums Strengthening Arctic Heritage

Nordic national cultural history museums are linked with Arctic societies due to the shared heritage of substantial museum collections. We share concerns to re-vitalize, preserve and exchange knowledge on this heritage. Thanks to a grant from NMR’s The Nordic region and its neighbors to the west the National Museum (DK) in partnership with the Museum of Cultural History (NO) in 2017-19 successfully executed the project Arctic heritage in Nordic museums. Strengthening Arctic efforts in Nordic national museums. This volume presents recommendations within the project’s three major fields: 1) Intensified collaboration on digital strategies and heritage perspectives with Canadian Inuit organizations, 2) a comprehensive and critical analysis of digital databases of cultural institutions in the ABM sector, 3) the constitution of a feasible and sustainable Nordic Cross-Arctic Museum Network

Specialized sledge dogs accompanied Inuit dispersal across the North American Arctic

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs deriv

Specialized sledge dogs accompanied Inuit dispersal across the North American Arctic.

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP