The Disappearing Arctic? Scientific Narrative, Environmental Crisis, and the Ghosts of Colonial History

Abstract

This chapter charts various trajectories of Arctic historiographies by addressing how climate change tourism is not new but continues a tradition of Arctic scientists concerned with the decay of the environment and society. The author examines the contradiction between the Arctic being “frozen in time” and yet being threatened, and how this relates to colonialism. He traces this contradiction through cultural ethnography. Focusing on anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, he shows how Stefansson engaged in exactly the kind of environmental intervention that he warned against. The Arctic thus needs to be shifted from the object of Euro-American and Asian expansion and representation to a homeland that has been inhabited for centuries.