Arctic trophy hunters,tourism and masculinities, 1827–1914

Trophy hunting in the Arctic happened in an intersection between tourism, expeditions and hunting. This study contributes to a discrete history of masculinity within the context of trophy hunting organized from North Norway and to a broader understanding of Arctic masculinity. As trophy-hunting expeditions are primarily a male, even masculinist, practice, an analysis from a gender perspective is unavoidable. By taking an empirical approach I investigate performances of masculinity in written accounts of Arctic trophy-hunting expeditions from 1827–1914. The use of masculinity as a pivot demonstrates that a modification of the prevailing perception of Arctic masculinity is necessary. While the general understanding is dominated by an emphasis on physical strength, roughness, ingenuity, and self-realization, qualities connected to traditional knowledge of trappers, sailors and explorers, my analysis shows that trophy hunting introduced aristocratic ideals such as gentlemen’s sport, self-discipline, hunting morals, care for nature and knowledge to their home communities. Trophy hunting made possible performances of different forms of masculinity, not only the conquest and mastery of nature, but also the interest in and care for nature. Women accompanied as family members and hunters, and took part in the hunt more than has been commonly noted.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.     

The Model Arctic Council: Simulated Negotiations as Pedagogy and Embodied Diplomacy

This article draws on the perspectives of students and organizers involved in recent iterations of the Model Arctic Council (MAC), an experiential learning simulation designed to expand students’ knowledge and understanding of the Arctic and its governance. While much of the discourse related to simulations such as the MAC emphasizes its pedagogical and networking benefits, this article leverages participant-based ethnography to argue that the MAC also affects multi-track diplomatic outcomes in addition to serving as a site for diplomatic engagement. Applying an interpretive approach driven by the onset of practice-tracing in international relations, we demonstrate that the MAC both produces and constitutes diplomacy. Such a reimagination elevates the diplomacy of non-state actors and exposes false binaries between state diplomacy and non-state diplomacy.     

The sky is the limit: reconstructing physical geography from an aerial perspective

In an era of rapid geographical data acquisition, interpretations of remote sensing products are an integral part of many undergraduate geography degree schemes but there are fewer opportunities for collection and processing of primary remote sensing data. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide a relatively inexpensive opportunity to introduce the principles and practice of airborne remote sensing into field courses, enabling students to learn about image acquisition, data processing and interpretation of derived products. Two case studies illustrate how a low-cost “DJI Phantom Vision+” UAV can be used by students to acquire images that can be processed using Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry software. Results from a student questionnaire and analysis of assessed student reports showed that using UAVs enhanced student engagement and equipped them with data processing skills. The derivation of bespoke orthophotos and Digital Elevation Models has the potential to provide students with opportunities to gain insight into various remote sensing data quality issues, although additional training is required to maximize this potential. Recognition of the successes and limitations of this teaching intervention provides scope for improving future UAV exercises. UAVs are enabling both a reconstruction of how we measure the Earth’s surface and a reconstruction of how students do fieldwork.     

“As Though There Was No Boundary”: the Shipshaw Project and Continental Integration

This essay reads Munro’s 2001 story collection as embodiment of her artistic accomplishment. Beginning with a 1952 internal Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reader noting “evocative and luminous phrases” in two of Munro’s earliest stories, it argues that such phrases have informed Munro’s fiction throughout her career. In Hateship, these phrasings are key to “Family Furnishings,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” “Post and Beam,” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and especially “Nettles.” There Munro structures her stories around “real facts in the making,” combining autobiographical facts and situations with her imaginative renderings of them. This collection reveals Munro at the height of her accomplished art.     

Quality, imagery and marketing: producer perspectives on quality products and services in the lagging rural regions of the European Union

A range of factors, including consumer concerns about food safety, the growing popularity of rural tourism and policy initiatives to promote endogenous rural development, is converging to promote a relocalization of food production and service provision, especially in those regions marginalized by the globalization of the food supply system. The recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK has starkly illustrated the fragility of localized systems which depend heavily on consumers travelling to them. Within such a context, the importance of successful marketing strategies has become even more apparent. This paper reports on a questionnaire survey which investigated promotional and marketing strategies among a diverse range of producers and service providers in marginal agricultural areas of the EU. The findings suggest that many producers are situated towards the "formal" end of a marketing continuum, whereby ability to promote quality products and services (QPS) lies with a range of intermediaries. This raises doubts about the future economic benefits of QPS, should current marketing structures persist. The discussion offers critical reflections on interdisciplinary and international research of this nature, and advocates further theoretical and methodological development in order to explore in more depth many of the aspects raised in this exploratory investigation.     

The Social Role of Technology in Coastal Alaska

Novel technologies linked to women and men through identity-demarcated tasks and knowledge sets can potentially have differential and even long-term effects on each group. This study follows the trajectory of two significant imports into the coastal western Alaskan system, the firearm and the metal cook pot. These imports had different implications for coastal Yup’ik women and men, young and old. Over time the gun became an integral piece of a man’s tool kit and one that had the potential to boost production and thus a man’s access to status-building. However, these same tools had the potential to undermine the apprenticeship system of male authority. Likewise, the metal cook pot replaced the productive oversight and skill set of elder women’s ceramic production but created paths of independence for younger Yup’ik women. These changes in technology destabilized relative balances of gender and age based status, security, and authority and fashioned new gender and age based social and economic opportunities and limitations.     

High modernism in the Arctic: planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik

This paper considers Frobisher Bay and Inuvik, two Canadian Arctic towns, as examples of the high-modernist planning that swept the globe during the middle decades of the twentieth century, but also Cold War projects reflecting a sudden interest in the Arctic as a region of military significance. Building on the framework provided by James Scott in Seeing like a State (1998), the paper details the connections between modernization theory and Cold War militarism before turning to the strikingly parallel case studies. In each instance, federal officials proposed ambitious urban models designed to simultaneously overcome the hostility of a northern environment and catapult native northerners into conditions of modern living. While the limits and failings of such schemes varied by location, both sites were also laboratories for social scientists employed by the federal government to document and analyze the modernization of the Arctic. The work of these scholars represents a particularly rich and complex record of governmental interventions, tied variously to Cold War imperatives, in northern lives and landscapes at a time of great faith in the transformative power of modern engineering.     

Mapping ancient chinampa landscapes in the Basin of Mexico: a remote sensing and GIS approach

This paper uses remote sensing data to document a raised field, chinampa system adjacent to the Postclassic kingdom of Xaltocan in the northern Basin of Mexico. Various forms of landscape information; historic records and maps as well as remote sensing; are considered to understand the chinampa system. The remote sensing data examined include 1950s aerial photographs, Landsat 7 data, and Quickbird VHR, multi-spectral imagery. This article evaluates the utility of each of these forms of data to identify buried chinampa features and integrates them in a GIS to produce a map of Xaltocan's chinampa landscape. Canals of various sizes and hydrological positions comprised the chinampas and integrated the system together. Occupying at least 1500–2000 ha, Xaltocan's chinampa system represents the largest pre-Aztec, chinampa system in the Basin of Mexico.     

Archaeological magnetometry in an Arctic setting: a case study from Maguse Lake,Nunavut

Magnetometry has been little used on Arctic archaeological sites, but has great potential to help us understand site structure by identifying buried features and providing additional detail about the construction and use of visible surface features. In the Arctic environment, magnetometer surveys have to deal with the effects of permafrost activity on soils and the potential influence of glacial erratics of varying geological composition. Here, we present the results of magnetometer surveys of a non-cultural site with periglacial features and two archaeological sites located in the Canadian low Arctic. Despite considerable “noise” apparently caused by igneous erratics, the surveys successfully identified several frost features and a range of archaeological feature types. They also appear to have located buried archaeological features and identified activity areas within some dwellings. These preliminary results suggest that the technique is worth pursuing on northern sites.