Kirsten Hastrup

A passage to anthropology : between experience and theory

The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage to Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates in Europe and the US, as well as to new developments in linguistic theory and, especially, newer American philosophy. Although the style of the work is mainly theoretical, the author illustrates the points by referring to her own fieldwork conducted in Iceland. A Passage to Anthropology will be of interest to students in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

Getting it right: Knowledge and evidence in anthropology

In this article the nature of anthropological knowledge is discussed with a view to a reassessment of the call for evidence. It will be argued that the traditional view of evidence as being somehow outside a particular argument is untenable, given the way in which anthropology accesses knowledge by engaging a particular field. This may be seen to lead to an uneasy question of authority in anthropology, yet at closer inspection, it is possible to establish new grounds for anthropological authority and to arrive at a new sense of ‘getting it right’. The general discussion is substantiated by reference to the author’s work on Icelandic history as well as her fieldwork in Iceland.

The Dynamics of Anthropological Theory

This article is a general discussion of the nature and implications of anthropological theorizing in the contact zone, that is the space where cultures meet and horizons fuse. In so far as we can no longer see anthropology as simply the study of other cultures, the theoretical language of anthropology must be a language of contrast, which may challenge the self-understanding on both sides of the contact zone at the same time. A distinction between designative and expressive theories is made, amounting to a difference between clarification and radical interpretation. The latter is seen as the more congenial to the general theoretical ambition of anthropology, and indeed of any social theory, whose object is never a natural one. Through the infiltration of self-understandings anthropology changes its object in the very process of studying it. Therein lies part of its dynamic potential, and its likeness to human action in general.

The nomadic landscape: People in a changing Arctic environment

Abstract Geografisk Tidsskrift—Danish Journal of Geography 109(2):181–189, 2009 The paper will explore the sense of place in the Thule district, Northern Greenland, including the emotional topography by which people live. The analytical framework is the notion of a nomadic landscape, drawing from the essay on nomadology by Deleuze & Guattari (2004). The nomadic landscape is constituted by a network of spatial centres—or points of reference—from each of which an infinite spatial realm takes its beginning. The ambition is to demonstrate how, in a nomadic landscape, movement is integral to memory, sociability and experience; this is vital to the understanding of present day responses to the reduced mobility owing to changing weather and ice conditions in the Thule district.

All the World's a Stage The Imaginative Texture of Social Spaces

In this article, Shakespeare’s theatre provides the point of departure for a discussion of social spaces in general. “The social” itself is a performed space, where notions of place, performance time, and coactors play a crucial role in the shaping of individual actions. Most important, it is argued that meaningful action is always partly based on a sense of the plot in which one participates, and thus in anticipation of what will happen next. This sense of plot is closely related to an illusion of a whole already in place but which becomes real only as individuals act on their perceptions of it. Individual agency is thus firmly based in the collectivity and in the imaginatively envisaged future.

Scales of attention in fieldwork: Global connections and local concerns in the Arctic

The social sciences face a set of complex challenges in an era of intensifying global connections that seem to undermine their constitutive object. Cultures, nations and even societies are not what they used to be, and the ‘methodological nationalism’ that once qualified the social sciences is no longer self-evident. One of the manifest perforations of local communities comes with the experience of dramatic climate change. Based on fieldwork in northwest Greenland, this article addresses the question of scaling through discussions of conversations, connections and concerns surfacing in the field, yet vastly transcending the local. This enables a new understanding of the inherent complexity of scaling and of the field itself as a plastic space, where the fieldworker’s attention may stretch and bend according to situation and perspective.

Introducing the North Water: Histories of exploration, ice dynamics, living resources, and human settlement in the Thule Region

The North Water is a recurrent polynya in the High Arctic situated between Northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island of Canada. The North Water makes a dynamic space, where various processes may enhance or obstruct each other, accelerating or halting particular modes of human–animal relations in the region, where life itself depends on the North Water. This will be discussed in four steps. The first step posits the North Water as a perceived oasis for explorers and whalers hailing from Europe or America in the nineteenth century. The second step concentrates on the diverse rhythms inherent in the ice conditions, as affected by trends that are set in motion elsewhere. The third step highlights the implications of the dynamics of the ice and sea currents for animal life in the region. The fourth step gives an overview of human settlement patterns around the North Water across the ages. The article shows how natural and social features are deeply implicated in each other, even if they are not directly co-variant.

Climate change and human mobility : global challenges to the social sciences

1. Introduction: climate change and human mobility Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog Olwig 2. Leaving home: how can historic human movement inform the future? Carole Crumley 3. Inuit and climate change in the prehistoric eastern Arctic: a perspective from Greenland Mikkel Sorensen 4. Dehumanising the uprooted: lessons from Iceland in the Little Ice Age Kirsten Hastrup 5. Relocation of Reef and Atoll Island communities as an adaptation to climate change? Learning from experience in the Solomon Islands Thomas Birk 6. Contextualising links between migration and environmental change in northern Ethiopia James Morrissey 7. On the risks of engineering mobility to reduce vulnerability to climate change: insights from a small island state Jon Barnett 8. Mobility, climate change and social dynamics in the Arctic: the creation of new horizons of expectation and the role of the community Frank Sejersen 9. Land grab in Africa: resilience for whom? Quentin Gausset and Michael Whyte 10. Climate change, migration and Christianity in Oceania Wolfgang Kempf 11. Climate-induced migration and conflict: what are the links? Christian Webersik.

Walrus history around the North Water: Human–animal relations in a long-term perspective

AbstractThis article highlights the relationship between walruses and humans in and around the North Water polynya in a long-term perspective. The present study draws on a combination of biological, archaeological, archaeo-zoological, historical, and ethnographic sources covering the period from the 8th century ad to the late 20th century. The study demonstrates that the walrus was an important resource of meat, blubber, and other products throughout all the studied periods, if always supplemented by other kinds of game. It is suggested that walrus distribution and behaviour, as well as hunting strategies and technologies historically constituted a powerful component not only in forming human action and social life in the region but also in serving as an imaginative resource. It is further argued that the walrus and the walrus hunt still play a significant role in the present community living on the edge of the North Water, even if the hunt is increasingly circumscribed due to changing ice conditions.

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.