Cycle de conférences en anthropologie : Colonization through the Soil : Rethinking Nordic Arctic Frontiers

Titre : Colonization through the Soil : Rethinking Nordic Arctic Frontiers  by Marianne Elisabeth LIEN  (University of Oslo/Professor - Department of Social Anthropology)
 

Bio:

Marianne Elisabeth Lien is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway. Her research concerns nature, human-animal relations and the politics of food and landscapes, including salmon aquaculture. She has a long-standing interest in how lives are sustained through materials, and has spearheaded anthropological studies of domestication. Her current works focuses on Arctic domestication and challenges of the Anthropocene, and in the links between agricultural practices, colonization, and geomorphology, which will be the topic of her talk. Key publications include ‘Becoming Salmon, Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish (University California Press 2015) and Domestication Gone Wild; Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations (Duke University Press 2018).

Abstract:

Modernist farming has a particular capacity to render other relations invisible, and indigenous relations to land are particularly vulnerable to being marginalized through practices. In this talk, I elaborate these erasures and relations from the vantage point of coastal Finnmark, an Arctic region in North Norway, where I am currently doing fieldwork. In this region, agriculture was intensified in the 20th century, but is now nearly abandoned. I propose that in order to grasp the significance of such transformations, we need to be attentive, not only to human and multispecies processes and relations, but to also pay attention to how elements of land morphology, soil and water shape the conditions for future livelihoods. Inspired by the notion of landscapes as archives (Laura Ogden) and the need to cultivate arts of noticing (Andrew Mathews, Anna Tsing), I will reflect on the boundaries and openings of an ethnographic approach, as it plays out in a region marked by loss and dramatic transformation.