Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The social sciences face a set of complex challenges in an era of intensifying global connections that seem to undermine their constitutive object. Cultures, nations and even societies are not what they used to be, and the ‘methodological nationalism’ that once qualified the social sciences is no longer self-evident. One of the manifest perforations of local communities comes with the experience of dramatic climate change. Based on fieldwork in northwest Greenland, this article addresses the question of scaling through discussions of conversations, connections and concerns surfacing in the field, yet vastly transcending the local. This enables a new understanding of the inherent complexity of scaling and of the field itself as a plastic space, where the fieldworker’s attention may stretch and bend according to situation and perspective.

Keywords

ethnographic fieldwork climate change scaling practices Arctic hunters Greenland located knowledge

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barnett

Campbell

(2010) Climate Change and Small Island States. Power, Knowledge and the South Pacific. London: Earthscan Climate.

Bravo

(2010) Epilogue: The humanism of sea-ice. In: Krupnik

Aporta

Gearhead

Laidler

Holm

(eds) SIKU: Knowing Our Ice. Documenting Inuit Sea-Ice Knowledge and Use. New York: Springer Press.

Clifford

Marcus

(1986) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coleman

Collins

(2006) Locating the Field. Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg.

Crate

Nuttall

(2009) Anthropology and Climate Change. From Encounters to Actions. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Deleuze

Guattari

(2004) Treatise on nomadology. In: A Thousand Plateaus (transl. B. Massumi). London: Continuum, pp. 387–467.

Evans-Pritchard

(1962) Fieldwork and the empirical tradition. In: Social Anthropology and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, pp. 64–85.

Field

Fox

(2007) Anthropology Put to Work. Oxford: Berg.

Fox

King

(2002) Anthropology Beyond Culture. Oxford: Berg.

10.

Geertz

(1988) Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

11.

Gluckman

(1958) Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

12.

Griaule

(1965) Conversations with Ogotemmêli. An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: International African Institute/Oxford University Press.

13.

Gudeman

Rivera

(1990) Conversations in Columbia. The Domestic Economy in Life and Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Hannerz

(2003) Being there … , and there … and there! Reflections of multi-site ethnography. Ethnography. 4: 201–216.

15.

Hastrup

(1990) The ethnographic present: A reinvention. Cultural Anthropology. 5: 45–61.

16.

Hastrup

(1994) Anthropological knowledge incorporated. In: Hastrup

Hervik

(eds) Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 224–237.

17.

Hastrup

(2004) Getting it right: Knowledge and evidence in anthropology. Anthropological Theory. 4: 455–472.

18.

Hastrup

(2005) Social anthropology: Towards a pragmatic enlightenment? Social Anthropology. 13: 133–149.

19.

Hastrup

(2007) Performing the world: Agency, anticipation and creativity. In: Hallam

Ingold

(eds) Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg, pp. 193–206.

20.

Hastrup

(2009a) The Question of Resilience. Social Responses to Climate Change. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

21.

Hastrup

(2009b) Arctic hunters: Climate variability and social flexibility. In: Hastrup

(ed.) The Question of Resilience: Social Responses to Climate Change. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, pp. 245–270.

22.

Hastrup

(2009c) The nomadic landscape: People in a changing Arctic environment. Danish Journal of Geography. 109: 181–190.

23.

Hastrup

(2010) Emotional topographies: The sense of place in the Far North. In: Davies

Spencer

(eds) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 191–211.

24.

Hastrup

(2011) Shady plantations: Theorizing coastal shelter in Tamil Nadu. Anthropological Theory. 11(4): 425–439.

25.

Hastrup

Olwig

(in press) Climate Change and Human Mobility: Global Challenges to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26.

Heide-Jørgensen MP (2002) Optælling af narhvaler i Qaanaaq Kommune, august 2001. Nuuk: Grønlands Naturinstitut (Teknisk Rapport nr. 50).

27.

Helmreich

(2009) Alien Ocean. Anthropological Voyages in the Microbial Sea. Berkeley: University of California Press.

28.

Ingold

(2007) Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

29.

Ingold

(2010) Footprints through the weatherworld: Walking, breathing, knowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special Issue:. S121–S139.

30.

Ingold

(2011) Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.

31.

James

(2000) Beyond the first encounter: Transformations of ‘the field’ in North East Africa. In: Dresch

James

Parkin

(eds) Anthropologists in a Wider World. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 69–90.

32.

Kopnina

Shoreman-Ouimet

(2011) Environmental Anthropology Today. London: Routledge.

33.

Krupnik

Jolly

(2002) ‘The Earth is Faster Now’. Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change. Fairbanks, AK: Arcus.

34.

Krupnik

Aporta

Gearhead

Laidler

Holm

(2010) SIKU: Knowing Our Ice. Documenting Inuit Sea-Ice Knowledge and Use. New York: Springer Press.

35.

Latour

(2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry. 30: 225–248.

36.

Latour

(2005) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

37.

Lee

Ingold

(2006) Fieldwork on foot: Perceiving, routing, socializing. In: Coleman

Collins

(eds) Locating the Field. Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, pp. 67–85.

38.

Malinowski

(1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

39.

Massey

(2005) For Space. London: SAGE.

40.

Mol

(2002) The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

41.

Nuttall

(2009) Living in a world of movement: Human resilience to environmental instability in Greenland. In: Crate

Nuttall

(eds) Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 292–310.

42.

Orlove

Wiegandt

Luckman

(2008) Darkening Peaks. Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

43.

Otto

Bubandt

(2010) Experiments in Holism. Oxford: Blackwell.

44.

Parkin

(2000) Templates, evocations and the long-term fieldworker. In: Dresch

James

Parkin

(eds) Anthropologists in a Wider World. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 91–108.

45.

Pettenger

(2007) The Social Construction of Climate Change. Power, Norms, Knowledge, Discourses. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

46.

Putnam

(2004) Ethics without Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

47.

Smith

(2007) Disrupting the global discourse of climate change: The case of indigenous voices. In: Pettenger

(ed.) The Social Construction of Climate Change. Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 197–216.

48.

Sontag

(1970) The anthropologist as hero. In: Hayes

Hayes

(eds) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 184–196.

49.

Starthern

(1999) Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.

50.

Strathern

(2004) Partial Connections, updated version. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

51.

Strauss

Orlove

(2007) Weather, Culture, Climate. Oxford: Berg.

52.

Tsing

(2010) Worlding the matsutake diaspora. Or, can actor-network theory experiment with holism? In: Otto

Bubandt

(eds) Experiments in Holism. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47–66.

53.

Turnbull

(2003) Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. London: Routledge.

54.

Verran

(2003) A postcolonial moment in science studies: Alternative firing regimes of environmental scientists and Aboriginal landowners. Social Studies of Science. 32: 729–761.

55.

Verran

(2010) Number as an inventive frontier in knowing and working Australia’s water resources. Anthropological Theory. 10: 171–178.

Scales of attention in fieldwork: Global connections and local concerns in the Arctic

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References