Weight, Density and Space in the Norwegian Reindeer Crisis–Notes Towards a Critique

Abstract

For decades now, the dominant narrative about indigenous reindeer pastoralism in northern Norway has been that there is a crisis of excess: an oversized reindeer population, poorly held in check by poorly governed herders, is overgrazing the tundra, degrading the pasture grounds, spilling over into urban spaces and precipitating moral crises by starving to death “out there,” on the tundra. Set against the background of this ongoing crisis, the present paper focuses on a set of particularly dense conceptual intersections that cluster around the notion of weight , and the manner in which weight functions both as a crisis indicator and a metric for assessment in contemporary Norwegian pastoral governance. Tracing the work and structure of the weight concept as applied to reindeer–against a dominant government narrative that parses numerical indicators as neutral, objective and apolitical–the paper outlines some of the erasures that the weight metric simultaneously carries out and occludes. The aim of the exercise is to specify and critically reframe certain core issues in the current management of Norwegian pastoralism, by problematising the supposedly neutral, scientific operation of quantitative metrics and assessment practices.

Conceptualising resilience in Norwegian Sámi reindeer pastoralism

“…In line with administrative conceptualisations of pastoral space as a simplified, largely undifferentiated expanse (e.g. Reinert, 2008Reinert, , 2014bBenjaminsen, Reinert, Sara, & Sjaastad, in press), the environments of herding are imagined here as basically stable, predictable and recurrent -a 'barnyard space', as herders sometimes mockingly refer to it, within which 'disturbances' occur in the form of a limited set of discrete, occasional and already-known events or potentialities: predation, and adverse weather. The imagined 'optimal' or climax state of this system is defined by a stable, largely unvarying population of heavy reindeer, whose high weight renders them resistant to all the known (and predictable) risks they are exposed to within the system.…”

“…A key assumption guiding intervention here is that the reindeer population should be stable and largely invariant over time: fluctuations in population size or density are attributed to human modifications of the pastoral ecosystem, largely to do with excessive herd sizes produced by excessive individual accumulation. The principal aim of policy then becomes returning the 'system' to a stable, steady stateits 'natural' condition -in which the reindeer will be heavier and therefore also more capable of protecting themselves from predators and surviving difficult weather (Reinert, 2014b). To illustrate how these broad trends articulate with the concept of 'resilience' -or rather, how resilience is re-articulated relative to them -we focus on a recent article, co-authored by a team of government-sponsored natural scientists 1 : the article makes substantive but not unproblematic use of the term.…”

“…The question of 'livelihood resilience' here also extends beyond human factors: consider, for example, the problem of herd structure. The productivist herd advocated by biologists and the reindeer herding administration (Reinert, 2006(Reinert, , 2014b maximises pastoral meat output by maintaining a high and continuous production of calves, minimises the number of males in the herd in favour of 'productive' females and eliminates 'non-productive' animals such as castrates. Against this, indigenous critics, in particular, have advocated for more complex, differentiated herd structures, based for example on traditional principles of herd composition and aesthetic ideals such as the 'beautiful herd' [cappa eallu ], composed of a wide range of different reindeer types, sizes, ages and morphologies (Oskal, 2000).…”

“…As we saw earlier, Hausner et al (2011) define the resilience of individual reindeer through weight, as a metric of their physical condition and thus their ability to survive. More generally, this reflects a near-exclusive emphasis, in government interventions as in media discourse, on weight as a primary metric and indicator not just of survival, but of 'responsible' herding (Reinert, 2014b). Pastoral understandings of reindeer expand significantly on this, drawing out other aspects of their 'behaviour and physiology' (Mathiesen et al, 2013) that help ensure their survival -including, for example, their ability to learn from predator attacks and their independent ability to find forage within complex and ever-shifting environments.…”

“…These prescriptions can appear startlingly simple: at times at least, it seems as if every problem can be resolved by increasing the H. Reinert and T.A. Benjaminsen 10 weight of reindeer (Reinert, 2014b). The understanding of pastoralism and of the herd that underwrites this approach is biometrical, biophysical and -more often than notextremely reductive.…”