Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen

Present and past dynamics of Inughuit resource spaces

Information from a collaborative GPS tracking project, Piniariarneq, involving 17 occupational hunters from Qaanaaq and Savissivik, Northwest Greenland, is used to explore the resource spaces of hunters in Avanersuaq today. By comparison with historical records from the time of the Thule Trading Station and the decades following its closure, we reveal a marked variability in resource spaces over time. It is argued that the dynamics of resources and resource spaces in Thule are not underlain by animal distribution and migration patterns, or changes in weather and sea ice conditions alone; but also by economic opportunities, human mobility, settlement patterns, particular historical events and trajectories, and not least by economic and political interests developed outside the region.

Water Citizenship: Negotiating Water Rights and Contesting Water Culture in the Peruvian Andes

This article examines the implementation of Peru’s new water law and discusses how it produces new forms of water citizenship. Inspired by the global paradigm of “integrated water resources management,” the law aims to include all citizens in the management of the country’s water resources by embracing a “new water culture.” We ask what forms of water citizenship emerge from the new water law and how they engage with local water practices and affect existing relations of inequality. We answer these questions ethnographically by comparing previous water legislation and how the new law currently is negotiated and contested in three localities in Peru’s southern highlands. We argue that the law creates a new water culture that views water as a substance that is measurable, quantifiable, and taxable, but that it neglects other ways of valuing water. We conclude that water citizenship emerges from the particular ways water authorities and water users define rights to access and use water, on the one hand, and obligations to contribute to the construction and maintenance of water infrastructure and pay for the use of water, on the other.

Moving facts in an Arctic field: The expedition as anthropological method

This article reflects on the merits of the expedition as an anthropological method on the basis of a recent cross-disciplinary experience, involving biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists working together in High Arctic Greenland. True to the term, the expedition had chartered a vessel from where the team could go ashore in places that would otherwise have been difficult to access, and where the individual perspectives could cross-fertilize each other in actual practice. It is argued that anthropology itself is a mode of experimentation in practice, which enables new trains of thought, and an engagement with other disciplinary practices. The gain of our cross-disciplinary experiment was therefore not only to know more about the makings of a particular landscape in a multi-disciplinary perspective, but also to understand how anthropology makes sense of inherently moving facts.

Is sustainable resource utilisation a relevant concept in Avanersuaq? The walrus case

This article addresses the role of Atlantic walrus (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) in present-day Avanersuaq from anthropological and biological perspectives, and asks whether or not sustainable resource utilisation is a useful concept in northwest Greenland. We describe the relations that unfold around walrus and walrus hunting, in the communities living adjacent to the North Water polynya on the eastern side of Smith Sound. We examine the interplay of walrus population abundance, hunting practices, uses, and formal (governmental) and informal (traditional) ways of regulating the hunt, and we analyse how walruses acquire multiple values as they circulate in different networks. Sustainable resource utilisation, we conclude, is a concept that is relevant in Avanersuaq and beyond, because it works as a biological standard, and hence organises laws, norms, and practices of formal management. Simultaneously, the term is problematic, because it ignores manifold levels of human and societal values connected to walrus.

Taking Note: A kaleidoscopic view on two, or three, modes of fieldnoting

In this article we examine what can be captured, recorded, remembered, and shared through different note-taking modalities. The case narrated is one of a simultaneous fieldwork experience carried out as part of a larger interdisciplinary project in Greenland. It reveals how the same situation is recorded differently in our respective notebooks; and that the way we write fieldnotes is not just determined by the anthropologists, but also by the field. We present three kinds of fieldnotes from the same day, produced partly by writing/not writing in notebooks, and by using handheld GPS devices that map activities related to hunting and travel. We suggest that our fieldnotes may best be understood as fragments, details and contexts. Although our fieldnotes may add up an entirety, they cannot represent a complete whole. Together, these fragments are mosaic configurations rather than complete or coherent sets of registered events and situations that come together kaleidoscopically.