Moving facts in an Arctic field: The expedition as anthropological method

Abstract

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.

Critical Review of Visual Anthropology

“…Kirsten Hastrup's (1992) article "Out of Anthropology: The Anthropologist as an Object of Dramatic Representation", as a result of her unsuccessful attempt to use photography to convey her fieldwork perception of what she perceives as the existing aura of "male sexuality domination" during her research of the Icelandic Ram Festival. As a result of this failure, Hastrup (1992) blames the medium's uselessness for developing a "thick description" or gaining insight into invisible aspects of "social reality". She argues that she was only able to record the surface: a "thin description".…”

Taking note: a kaleidoscopic view on two, or three, modes of fieldnoting

“…1 The project gathered 15 researchers from anthropology, biology, and archaeology to explore the overlaps and discontinuities between past and present human settlements, animal migrations, and how changes in the climate affects human life in the present. We have written elsewhere about the challenges and gains to anthropology in interdisciplinary fieldwork (Hastrup et al, 2016), and about ownership in a collaborative project (Flora and Andersen, 2018). Apart from brief spurts of field collaboration with other researchers on the project (a biologist on a walrus tagging mission, and another anthropologist) we were largely alone in the field collaborating with each other.…”