Periodic Reporting for period 5 - ARCTIC CULT (ARCTIC CULTURES: SITES OF COLLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF THE EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN NORTHLANDS)
Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2024-09-30
The Arctic is Changing – this is now a dominant trope across global politics and global civil society. It is often argued that environmental changes are ‘opening up the Arctic’ – producing new opportunities and challenges for shipping, resource extraction, national security and regional governance. A number of political scientists have begun to refer to this as a ‘NEW NORTH’. In these debates, however, there is a resounding silencing of Arctic Cultures. This project argues that the way in which the Arctic is currently being constructed is not new at all. Indeed, such debates are part of a long history that has depicted the Arctic as a region-without-culture, and this has facilitated the dispossession of indigenous peoples and cultures and the silencing of indigenous voices for around 500 years. This is because the Arctic continues to be understood through the dominant framing of a Natural Region – that is a region where the environment dominates culture and cultural formation. Notwithstanding important critiques of nature-culture binaries, the framing of the Arctic-as-a-natural-region remains heavily influential in the study of Arctic peoples and societies. A core aim of the research is to investigate this discursive formation, to discover how it emerged and to depict what the consequences have been for inhabitants of the Arctic. The project argues that this framing of the Arctic emerges from the very first contacts between Europeans and Inuit in the late 16th century. It was evident in early European exploration, when the Arctic was depicted as blank space on maps; a space of absence to be perennially discovered and to be competed over. These spatial formations persist in the recent scholarly debates about the New North. This project aims to delineate the networks and collecting cultures involved in this creation of Arctic Cultures. It involves research at museums, archives, libraries and repositories across Europe and North America, as well as in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. It aspires to establish new understandings of the consequences of colonial representations and decolonial processes for debates about the Circumpolar Arctic today. It recovers the histories, voices and objects that comprise Arctic Cultures and uses this to rethink the spatial imagination of the Arctic.
Through the research, the project is developing connections between archives and museums and helping train a new generation of students of Arctic Cultures. The project produced talks, publications, a website, a series of workshops, an exhibition and international conference, as well events for the interested public.
The ARCTIC CULT project ran from October 2017 until September 2024 and has a budget of nearly €2million. The project team all have office space in the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
Through the research, the project is developing connections between archives and museums and helping train a new generation of students of Arctic Cultures. The project produced talks, publications, a website, a series of workshops, an exhibition and international conference, as well events for the interested public.
The ARCTIC CULT project ran from October 2017 until September 2024 and has a budget of nearly €2million. The project team all have office space in the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
The objective of the project is to transform a number of cross-disciplinary debates in Arctic Studies and the study of cultural formations by remedying a number of deficiencies in the existing historiography of the study of Arctic Cultures. It also aims to place the continuing importance of the framings of Arctic peoples and cultures at the heart of debates about the future governance of the Arctic. The project aims to answer the following research questions:
1. How did ideas of the ‘Arctic region’ develop through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
2. How did conceptions of the cultures of the Arctic Region develop through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How pluralistic were conceptions of Arctic cultures? What sorts of theories and disciplines contributed to the classification of Arctic cultures? How were representations, objects and practices of Arctic peoples and cultures used in debates about disciplinary remits and agendas?
3. What sorts of contacts occurred between European and North American explorers, scientists and scholars and the indigenous peoples of the Arctic? What sorts of collection practices were implemented at sites in the Arctic? What traces of these remain in the archive? How were objects, materials and representations from the Arctic catalogued back in the major cities of Europe, the US and Canada?
4. What sorts of relationships existed between scholars of Arctic cultures in different states and empires? What sorts of correspondence networks existed? How were objects and representations studied in the metropoles, and by whom?
In order to address these questions, a research team of nine members has been composed, involving the Principal Investigator (PI), six Post Doctoral Research Associates (PDRAs), and a Project Coordinator. Research was conducted at a range of sites, including museums in Canada and Greenland, archives in Germany, Denmark, Canada and the UK. Fieldwork was undertaken to sites in Greenland, Nunavut and Svalbard. There have been many presentations and scientific publications about the research around the world. An active presence has been maintained through a social media account, @ArcticCult, and this has grown the audience for the project and research. A website www.arcticcultures.org has been developed, and through a regular blog by the Arctic Cultures team members, many visitors from the general public have learned about the research.
1. How did ideas of the ‘Arctic region’ develop through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
2. How did conceptions of the cultures of the Arctic Region develop through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How pluralistic were conceptions of Arctic cultures? What sorts of theories and disciplines contributed to the classification of Arctic cultures? How were representations, objects and practices of Arctic peoples and cultures used in debates about disciplinary remits and agendas?
3. What sorts of contacts occurred between European and North American explorers, scientists and scholars and the indigenous peoples of the Arctic? What sorts of collection practices were implemented at sites in the Arctic? What traces of these remain in the archive? How were objects, materials and representations from the Arctic catalogued back in the major cities of Europe, the US and Canada?
4. What sorts of relationships existed between scholars of Arctic cultures in different states and empires? What sorts of correspondence networks existed? How were objects and representations studied in the metropoles, and by whom?
In order to address these questions, a research team of nine members has been composed, involving the Principal Investigator (PI), six Post Doctoral Research Associates (PDRAs), and a Project Coordinator. Research was conducted at a range of sites, including museums in Canada and Greenland, archives in Germany, Denmark, Canada and the UK. Fieldwork was undertaken to sites in Greenland, Nunavut and Svalbard. There have been many presentations and scientific publications about the research around the world. An active presence has been maintained through a social media account, @ArcticCult, and this has grown the audience for the project and research. A website www.arcticcultures.org has been developed, and through a regular blog by the Arctic Cultures team members, many visitors from the general public have learned about the research.
The research has contributed to the cultural history of the Arctic by showing the legacy of exploration, tensions between scientific nationalisms, and the consequences of cultures of collection. This was uncovered by the PI and research team. The search for imagined locations has influenced the development of the study of Arctic Cultures. This exploratory imagination has shaped the conception of the Arctic ever since, and evidence was found across archives. A further element has been a persistent nationalism within historical accounts of Arctic science, exploration and peoples. This is a focus on parts of the Arctic by particular states, such as the Danish concern with Greenland, or the Norwegian interest in the High North and the Svalbard Archipelago. However, there is also evidence of resistance to these statist agendas by some groups of Arctic scientists and individual scholars. Through the process of the team undertaking research across different archives simultaneously, the project has traced the international connections of Arctic scholars and scientists. The project was deliberately transnational and comparative in its approach to sites of collection, precisely because so much polar history has hitherto been entwined within national historiography. Research has also revisited the key sites, actors and objects in and from the Arctic through which nineteenth-century disciplinary formations between anthropology, geography and other social sciences were established. Research also evidenced that these themes were also developed in museum collections and representations of the Arctic, its peoples, and its cultures that remain influential today. The project also developed international networks between collections in the major cities of Europe and North America and those in the Arctic. This was completed through fieldwork, despite disruption due to COVID-19 restrictions. The project developed a new generation of interdisciplinary experts in the intellectual formation of Arctic cultures and in their collection and exhibition. The seven researchers and PI are all now involved in further research on these themes at universities and institutes around Europe and Greenland.