Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hastrup, Kirsten

Titel

Human Terrains: A Mutable Landscape

Ist Teil von

• Early Ethnography in the American Arctic, 2024, Vol.1, p.146-173

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Amidst all the local specificities of the vast Arctic landscape it also allows for some general observations about human terrains, understood as the lived landscapes of people. They are landscapes of perception and assessment, of promise and betrayal, of living resources or none, of old habits and new possibilities. The terrain is both a stage and its actors. People play out individual lives, while also following a script at least partly authored by the arctic environment that was never still. The mutable landscape expanded in both time and space. What meets the eye when looking on mountain slopes, riverbeds, tundra, ice deserts, fishing waters, or glacier bursts, is already half-interpreted; this is where landscape literacy takes off. Scholars and others arriving from more southerly regions of the American continent or from Europe met with people knowing their landscape from within, and the newcomers actively sought out so-called native maps. Amidst all the local specificities of the vast Arctic landscape it also allows for some general observations about human terrains, understood as the lived landscapes of people. Moving into the human terrain as lived by the Inuit until a century ago, a distinct territorial practice is started, that of extensive movement in response to seasonal migrations of animals. What emerges is a lived space with its own moods and provocations; seasonality is part of the terrain, as are the companion animals.