Coping with Distances: Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies 9780857452825

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COPING

WITH

DISTANCES

COPING

WITH

DISTANCES

Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change, Roskilde University and Department of Planning and Community Studies, University of Tromsø

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First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2007, 2011 Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt First paperback edition published in 2011 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bærenholdt, Jørgen Ole. Coping with distances : producing nordic Atlantic societies / Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt p. cm. -- (Biosocial society series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-290-2 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-144-6 (pbk) 1. Communication--Social aspects--Scandinavia. 2. Scandinavia--Social conditions. 3. North Atlantic Region--Social conditions. I. Title. HN540.C67 2007 304.20948--dc22 2007043444 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-290-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-144-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-85745-282-5 (ebook)

This book is dedicated to the memory of Peter A. Friis (1945–99)

CONTENTS


List of Maps, Figures and Photographs Preface

ix xi

1 Coping on the Margins

1

2 Empowering Research

37

3 Nordic Atlantic Societies Emerging

65

4 Formative Transports

95

5 Nets and Flows I: Fisheries

127

6 Nets and Flows II: Tourism

153

7 Inhabiting Welfare Municipalities

175

8 The Ambivalences of Nordicity

199

9 Transnationalism and ‘Sustainable Development’

231

Bibliography Index

261 287

LIST

OF

AND

MAPS, FIGURES

PHOTOGRAPHS


Maps 1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

The Nordic Atlantic Northern Norway Iceland The Faroes Greenland

4 104 110 114 118

Figures 1.1 7.1

Socio-spatialities of coping Time and space of paradoxical coping

25 179

Photographs 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3

The coastal steamer Hurtigruten Bridge over Skeidará Norddepil Uummannaq airport, Qaarsut Fishing vessels in the port of Isafjördur Landing of Greenlandic halibut from dog sledge and snowmobile on sea ice, Uummannaq Icebergs from the Ice Fjord, Ilulissat Hotel Arctic, Ilulissat Reception, Hotel Arctic, Ilulissat

106 111 116 120 140 142 162 163 163

x

6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3

List of Maps, Figures and Photographs

Greenland Tours, travel agent and tour operator, Ilulissat Fishing heritage as tourist attraction, Å in Lofoten Klaksvík ‘Kosin’, the major fish-processing plant in Klaksvík Skibotn, Storfjord

164 169 188 189 191

All photographs were taken by the author (in the year indicated in brackets at the photo).

PREFACE


There are several ways of reading this book. It can be read as an attempt at a synthesis analysing the complex formation of societies in Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland. It can also be read in more general terms, as a contribution to a social science debate on how to understand the making of societies. It can be read as a totality, where some lines of reasoning can be followed from chapter to chapter – but it should also be possible to read chapters separately according to the reader’s thematic interests. Under the overall themes of how people make societies by coping with distances, there are chapters on history, transport and communications, fisheries, tourism, municipalities, nationalism and transnationalism. There are also theoretical discussions of territoriality, mobility, practices, power relations, materiality, networks, colonialism, welfare systems, the making of cultural boundaries, how environmental policies are used in international relations, etc. These should all form parts of the answer to the central research question: how are societies in the Nordic Atlantic produced? Many expressions, and especially place names, from Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway are mentioned throughout the text (their locations being indicated on maps). In most cases, names are spelled in the languages of Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Norway, though the special letters used in Icelandic and Faroese have not been used for technical reasons. The countries themselves are given their English names, and I deliberately use the term ‘Faroes’ or ‘the Faroes’ just as younger Faroese social scientists do internationally, to mark a country rather than just (the Faroe) islands. This book is also a contribution to the priority research project, Globalisation from Below, of the Social Science Faculty at the University of Tromsø, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. No chapters have been published elsewhere in their present form, but parts of Chapters 1 and 9, as well as a fragment of Chapter 7, have been published elsewhere, as

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Preface

indicated in the notes. Drafts of some of the chapters have been presented at a number of seminars. A draft Chapter 1 was first presented to the opening seminar of the Globalization from Below project in the Department of Planning and Community Studies at the University of Tromsø in February 2004, and to the Nordic Research School on Local Dynamics (NOLD), PhD course no. 7, on Embeddedness and Migration, in Klaksvík, the Faroes, in March 2004. Chapter 4 was first presented at the European Urban and Regional Studies conference in Pultusk, Poland, in September 2004, and Chapter 6 at the Nordic Symposium for Tourism Research in Aalborg, Denmark, in November 2004. Drafts of Chapters 7 and 8 were discussed in meetings of the research group on the Social and Economic Geography of the Information Age (SEGIA) in Roskilde University, early in 2005, while Chapter 8 was also presented to the Mobilities, Politics, Knowledge Workshop of the Globalisation from Below project on Sommarøy, Northern Norway, in April 2005. Chapter 9 was first presented to the Inaugural Nordic Geographers’ Meeting at Lund University, May 2005. This book is dedicated to the memory of Peter A. Friis, who died all too young in 1999. It was his commitment to the North Atlantic that led me on the track to this area, and he was the main supervisor for my PhD study in 1988–91. He was my first mentor, and there are many who still miss the inspiration he gave. My second mentor in Roskilde, and additional PhD supervisor, Kirsten Simonsen, has continued to discuss theoretical approaches with me, always insisting on consistency, as she has been doing with a whole generation of human geography PhDs in the Nordic countries. To my work with the Nordic peripheries and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Circumpolar Coping Processes Project, the energy and cooperative mind of Nils Aarsæther in Tromsø has been absolute decisive; our joint work has been fundamental to me. Furthermore, for many years Richard Apostle in Halifax has also supported my work with constructive comments and suggestions, from which I have learned a lot. Richard is the person who has given me the most advice in the making of this book, since he has provided comments and suggestions, along with revisions of language, for most of the draft chapters. Finally, a major inspiration for this book came from my recent work on tourism and mobility with John Urry in Lancaster. This inspiration is mostly theoretical, but it is certainly also about how to organise the writing of a book. With these five mentors I have been very lucky, and I thank them all. Though I think few are as lucky as I am, it is essential to acknowledge the importance of supervision, mentorship and backing in respect of postdoctoral work too. In my case, there are in fact many other supporters I should mention. In 1996 the UNESCO MOST programme accepted a proposal by Svein Jentoft, Abraham Hallenstvedt, Jan Einar Reiersen and Nils Aarsæther of the University of Tromsø to form what was to be called the Circumpolar

Preface

xiii

Coping Processes Project (CCPP). This project became a network of researchers committed to investigating in practice how people cope with the challenges of globalisation in North West Russia, Northern Finland, Northern Sweden, Northern Norway, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and the Atlantic and Arctic areas of Canada. The project ran from 1996 to 2001, coordinated by myself in cooperation with Nils Aarsæther, and it is still serving as the platform for a whole range of research projects in the north (see the website: uit.no/mostccpp). The word ‘coping’ was initially given to us by UNESCO, and we tried to cope with and develop this concept. Many activities, seminars, publications and networks came out of this initiative, and most financial support has come from a number of organisations associated with the Nordic Council of Ministers, including the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (NORA), the Nordic Committee of Social Research (NOS-S), the Nordic Academy of Advanced Study (NORFA), the Nordic Arctic Research Programme (NARP) and not least the Nordic Centre for Spatial Development (NORDREGIO). Among the many supportive individuals associated with these organisations, here I can only mention Carlos Milani of UNESCO, Kjartan Hoydal and Kaspar Lytthans of NORA and Jon P. Knudsen and the late Lars Olof Persson of NORDREGIO. In running the MOST CCPP projects, meetings, publications and networks, the employment of an academic research officer in Tromsø has been absolutely crucial: I would therefore like to express gratitude for the efforts made in this position by (in the order of their holding the position) Tabitha Wright Nielsen, Marit Aure, Jochen Peters and Brynhild Granås. The many projects and activities on the MOST CCPP platform – and much of my own work – have depended totally on their competence and enthusiasm. No book is the work of just one person, but in making this book I have depended on the support, help, knowledge, criticisms and suggestions of many individuals. In addition to my mentors mentioned above, for careful reading of and commenting on my draft chapters, I would like to thank Karl Benediktsson, Henrik Gudmundsson, Michael Haldrup, Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, Jonas Larsen, John Pløger and Viggo Plum. Writing this book would have been impossible if I had not had the opportunity to share knowledge and draw on the expertise and research of Marit Aure, Karl Benediktsson, Siri Gerrard, Brynhild Granås, Michael Haldrup, Klaus Georg Hansen, Gestur Hovgaard, Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, Samal Matras Kristiansen, Eva Munk-Madsen, Larissa Riabova and Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir. In addition, the three impressive PhD theses I examined in Norway, written by Knut Bjørn Lindkvist, Jahn Petter Johnsen and Anniken Førde, all inspired me a great deal. Moreover, many more researchers associated with the University of Tromsø should be mentioned, among them Inger Altern, Peter Arbo, Marianne Brekke, Willy Guneriussen, Thomas Hasvold, Petter Holm, Lisbet Holtedahl, Svein Jentoft, Ingrid M. Kielland, Trond Nielsen, Ragnar Nilsen, Torill Nyseth, Gry Paulgaard, Jan Einar

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Reiersen, Hallvard Tjelmeland and Haldiss Valestrand, as well as elsewhere Vladimir Didyk, Runa Hjelm, John Hull, Samal T.F. Johansen, Ivar Jonsson, Örn Jonsson, Anna Karlsdóttir, Esko Lehto, Karin Lindahl, Thibault Martin, Jogvan Mørkøre, Gísli Pálsson, Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, Anna Dóra Sæthorsdóttir, Emil Sandström, Leena Suopajärvi, Karo Thomsen, Markku Tykkyläinen and Cecilia Waldenström. I am well aware that the list is far from complete, since living for seventeen years of research in the north has been made not only possible, but also a pleasure, due to the commitments and acknowledgements of friends. Furthermore, hundreds of interviewees in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes, Northern Norway and the Murmansk Region of the Russian Federation opened their homes and offices to me for interesting conversations during numerous field trips from 1989 to 2001. And, at the MOST CCPP user conferences in Isafjördur in 1998 and Storfjord 2001, I learned a lot from dialogues with representatives from the Murmansk Region in the east to Nunavut and Nova Scotia in the west. In Roskilde, I have had encouragement and support from very many students and colleagues in the geography section, including the SEGIA (Social and Economic Geography in the Information Age) research group. In addition to those already mentioned above, I would like especially to acknowledge the support and friendship of Keld Buciek and Kristine Juul. I have also depended on my association with Laurids S. Lauridsen in the section for International Development Studies, and with John Andersen and Jon Sundbo in the Department of Social Sciences and Business Economics, Roskilde University. Finally here I would like to thank Bülent Diken, a former colleague in Roskilde now in Lancaster (UK). Our cooperation and discussions in the late 1990s were among those which were definitely the most inspiring to me, opening my eyes to the ambivalences of the Nordic project. The administrative staff has been second to none, and my thanks go to Jytte Bach, Anette Skaarup and Joan Truelsen in the Department of Geography and International Development Studies at Roskilde University, as well as to Kari Mette Foslund in the Department of Planning and Community Studies at the University of Tromsø. I thank Kim Mogensen in the geography section at Roskilde for his commitment in producing the maps for the book. Also thanks to Tor-Arne Lillevoll, University of Tromsø, for providing the digital basis map of Northern Norway. Encouragement to write this book from Henrik Secher Marcussen, head of the, now former, Department of Geography and International Development Studies at Roskilde University, was decisive. In finalising the book, I have depended on Robert Parkin’s revision of my language, and the encouragement of the publisher Marion Berghahn at Berghahn Books. It took two years from making the book proposal to the first submission to the publisher and to Roskilde University as a doctoral (habilitation) thesis in December 2005. But it took another year, 2006, to complete the process before the final submission to the publisher. During this year, the

Preface

xv

manuscript was peer-reviewed with Berghahn Books by an anonymous reader that I want to thank for constructive discussions of my work. Also, Roskilde University appointed an evaluation committee for the doctoral degree, Professor Kirsten Simonsen (chair), Professor Emeritus Ottar Brox (Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research) and Professor John Allen (Open University, Milton Keynes). The committee made a common evaluation of the thesis recommending a public defence, and the successful defence took place on 1 December 2006. I want to thank the committee, and especially the two official discussants, Ottar Brox and John Allen, for their thorough discussion and suggestions. With these suggestions, the recommendation that the Dr. Scient. Soc. degree should be given by the Academic Council of Roskilde University, an idea suggested by the head of the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change, Valery Forbes; and corrections suggested by my daughter Liv, I felt safe in making the last corrections of the manuscript. My thanks to all the people that supported this process. During my whole life, I have had the unconditional support of my mother and father, and this also goes for the completion of this work. My thanks for this are beyond limits. However, few people have been as affected by my work on this book as Helle, Liv and Gry at home. It has occupied not only a room in the basement, but also much time, energy, thought, worry and concentration. Therefore, my final thanks go to Helle, Liv and Gry for their patience, understanding, help and support. Roskilde, December 2006 Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt

1 COPING

ON THE

MARGINS


Introduction People connect and, in doing so, make societies. Thus societies emerge through people coping with distances: societies do not exist a priori. Many approaches have taken societies for granted as territorial containers of modern society per se. Others have seen the mobilities of globalisation, networks and flows as the ‘external’ forces forming the socio-spatial forms of human life beyond society in the twenty-first century. This book aims to pursue a third position, which highlights how people’s mundane practices of coping with distances constitute various kinds of society. Such practices are not the effects or consequences of social orders. Rather, coping practices produce social orders in time and space. There are remarkable cases of society building on the margins, which might be perceived as too remote and isolated for societal construction. People in the Nordic Atlantic area have spun nets and links that make societies through connections across physical, social and cultural distances. People have coped with distances through innovation, networking and the formation of identities that connect and reshape their lived places, thus continuously rebuilding societies in Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland. Many would question the use of the notion of society, but, if there is a meaningful way to comprehend societies, it is through the spatial and temporal practices that produce, reproduce, stabilise, destabilise and change them. The extreme cases on the Nordic Atlantic margins present critical evidence to explain how and why people link together and, in turn, form societies. ‘Nordic’ implies a specific historical path towards society building, whereas the term ‘Atlantic’ points to the maritime geographies and specificity of these societies, in contrast to the ‘Baltic’. Coping is a concept with which to understand the practices that are intrinsic to the production of wealth, social relations and identifications.

2

Coping with Distances

Coping is neither mastering nor adaptation, but something more. It means to make do, to get by. This implies both the instrumentality to deal with, handle and overcome a problem (for example distance) and to make a living, even when there is no way of overcoming (since there is always distance, even in proximity, for example). Therefore coping is double; it combines strategies that ‘can be isolated from an “environment”’ with tactics that ‘belongs to the other’ (de Certeau 1984: xix). It is neither only the ability to totally control nor only discrete (biological) evolution. Coping has to do with self-regulation (Simmel 1971) or, better, self-government (governmentality, Foucault 1994). To cope means to manage a problem successfully, but a problem not of the actor’s own making. It is something people have to contend with, something they cannot escape. Furthermore, coping entails a feeling of handling something complex and involves the use of technologies such as machines and distant communication, but in vulnerable ways. The nexus producing the wealth, social relations and identifications associated with the idea of society is to be found in people’s humble practices in securing their ways of life under conditions that are never fully under their control. In other words, societies can be seen as the unintended consequences of contingent coping. But the coincidence of social production does not imply that we cannot understand why specific socio-spatial formations arose, only that these explanations are not universal but contextual. Distance is a very basic challenge that people have to cope with, and this is certainly the case in the Nordic Atlantic. People cope with distances between people and with distances between people and specific resources and attractions in their environment. Distances involve questions of power in relation to other people and things. While the idea of society has been associated with territorial borders, much coping involves mobilities as ways of producing societies across distance. The notion of distance combines the physical, imaginative and virtual, thus including coping at a distance. People go the distance, but they also keep (at) a distance. Innovations, networks and identifications connect and bridge, but they may also disconnect and bond, and most often they do both at the same time, thus including some and excluding others. Bridging implies connecting social groups that differ from each other in respect of, for example, organisation, status or norms: to bridge means to cut across social distinctions or fields. In contrast, bonding is about keeping a group together based on its common organisation, status, origin or background. Therefore bonded groups are held together by practices that distinguish them from others. Numerous meanings of the concept of society are at work in this book. Bonding and bridging are distinct ways of coping, producing different forms of societies, recalling Tönnies’s (2002) classical distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. But these forms mingle, transact and refer to each other in various ways. Therefore it seems more appropriate to use

Coping on the Margins

3

multiple notions of ‘society’ or social figurations, rather than maintaining a basic distinction between community and society. There can be communitylike bonding societies, but today these are often rather mobile bonds, transcending the image of local community and neighbourhood, and often being associated with ‘community’, though Tönnies did also acknowledge non-proximate communities like those of friendship. Such bonded, mobile societies can also be imagined communities beyond personal contact and knowledge of each other. Certainly localities cannot be taken-for-granted communities: several bonds may interact and transact in a particular location. Furthermore, the way bridging coping produces societies across bonds and localities implies complexities and variations that are hard to generalise into a single notion of Gesellschaft. Economic, political and cultural relations are intertwined, but, when we are able to talk of a society in its connection with the state and citizenship, this is often stabilised through territorial borders. However, events in the first years of the twenty-first century have demonstrated the porosity and fragility of social orders. Since many of these examples of social collapse have emerged most clearly in particular locations (such as Baghdad or New Orleans), we may better understand how societies are produced in respect of particular localities. To understand how societies are made concretely in people’s lives, the coping approach suggested in this book takes localities as a methodological point of departure. The processes of the socio-material construction of societies can thus be studied from a local point of departure, but this approach does not depend on the presumption of a homogeneous local community. It is rather the other way round: through an approach that acknowledges local events and connections, we can more easily envisage how societies are constructed through people’s coping – both territorial and mobile – with cultural, social and material distances. The aim of this chapter is to explore further how various forms of society are actually made this way.

Context, Question and Position of Research Nordic Atlantic societies and the researcher: who, what and where are they? Nordic Atlantic societies are those socio-material entities of people physically living around the shores of the northernmost part of the Atlantic Ocean, being socially part of the Nordic countries. This common overlapping of the Nordic and the Atlantic means coastal Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, the latter two being territories of the Danish realm that enjoy home rule. This is also the area included in the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation, a Nordic Council of Ministers cross-border cooperation body (‘NORA’, see Chapter 9). However, in Norway I have chosen to focus on Northern Norway. Strictly speaking, the Nordic Atlantic

4

Coping with Distances

Map 1.1: The Nordic Atlantic.

region would also include the much more populated Western Norway, since the Atlantic coastal regions of Norway are parts of the Nordic Atlantic region. But it is a deliberate choice to focus mainly on the three counties in Northern Norway, Finnmark, Troms and Nordland, which are more ‘peripheral’ (Map 1.1). However, in some cases and especially when dealing with nationalism in Chapter 8, the book addresses Norway as such, Denmark also being dealt with here because of the history of colonialism. Among these four areas where we shall examine the various societies involved, there are a number of similarities and differences. The first similarity is their remote location in the north, implying that coping with physical distances is central for any social relation. However, physical distances vary. While Greenland, with a land area free of ice of 410,449 sq. km (2,166,086 sq. km, including the ice cap) and a population of 56,969 in January 2005, has a population density on lands free of ice as low as 0.14 inhabitants persons per sq. km (www.statgreen.gl), the area of the Faroes is only 1,400 sq. km, with a population of 48,379 on 1 January 2005, meaning a density of population as high as 34.5 inhabitants per sq. km (www.hagstova.fo). Mountains, sounds and fjords together with the distance to the southern island, Suduroy, present some kind of barrier, but distances in the Faroes are more those with the outer world. With an area

Coping on the Margins

5

of 103,000 sq. km (including glaciers) and a population of 293,577 on 31 December 2004, Iceland’s density of population is also low, at 2.85 inhabitants per sq. km (www.statice.is). As in Greenland, population is also unequally distributed. Most of Greenland is uninhabited, Greenlanders living in towns and villages mainly in the southern half of the west coast. In comparison, while Iceland’s coasts and lowlands are populated by scattered farms, the interior highlands are not populated, and most of the population lives in the area around the capital of Reykjavik. Finally, Northern Norway is also vast in area, with 112,951 sq. km, and had, as compared with the rest of the Nordic Atlantic, a population as high as 462,895 on 1 January 2004 (calculated from www.ssb.no), or around one-tenth of Norway’s total population. The population density in Northern Norway is therefore 4.10 inhabitants per sq. km, though it is higher in the counties of Nordland and Troms than in the northernmost county of Finnmark. Although population concentration in urban centres is growing (with Tromsø being the largest), there is still a relatively scattered settlement structure, still somehow a political priority. In spite of internal differences in the form and extent of remoteness, in the European and international contexts, there is little doubt that these areas have remoteness in common. The second similarity is Greenland’s, Iceland’s, the Faroes’ and Norway’s more or less common Danish colonial heritage, although the presence of indigenous Inuit in Greenland and Sami in Norway (as well as in Sweden, Finland and Russia) makes a difference. Thirdly, they all depend on marine resources, which provided the socio-economic basis for modernisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, remarkably, Iceland, the Faroes and Norway belong to the wealthiest countries of the world, with wealth created initially from fisheries (plus oil and gas for Norway and hydroelectric power for Iceland). Alongside similarities in remoteness, colonial heritage and marine resources, the political statuses of the four countries differ. Norway and Iceland are independent nation states (both obtained their independence in the twentieth century), whereas the Faroes and Greenland continue to live with the colonial presence in the form of home-rule governments. But few would question the existence of a Faroese or a Greenlandic society; at least they are nations without states. This is not to say that there are no other overlapping societies involved, and indeed this book will investigate the various forms of society that emerge by people doing them. The research question is therefore the following: How are societies in the Nordic Atlantic produced? Although set in the present tense, this question also unavoidably addresses the past by asking also how societies in the Nordic Atlantic were produced. Societies are not taken for granted: they do not just exist as finished and stable products once they have been produced initially. They are constantly being reproduced. Where this is not the case, connections among people dissolve and societies collapse, as has happened

6

Coping with Distances

in a number of recent cases internationally. Thus the book seeks to illuminate the organising principle – or hypothesis – that societies are constantly being produced by the effects of people’s practices. This means that the research question, in addition to the ‘how’ in the present and past tenses, also asks ‘what’ are the societies produced, ‘what’ are they made of? Admittedly, this formulation is almost commonsensical, if not extremely ontological. But it does also have the underlying historically and geographically contextual problem of how and why it was or became possible to make such modern societies in the north in the twentieth century. It is, indeed, still a task to show how people make societies. To do this, it matters from where. Research practices mean coping with, but also making use of, a number of distances. This book is written from the position of a human geographer and historian in Denmark. It seeks to balance the specificities of the historical geography of the formation of Nordic Atlantic societies with the possibly more general relevance of its findings to social science discussions as such. Though I have travelled through and worked in the ‘field’ of Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Norway, I am territorially situated in Denmark, though a frequent visitor to the University of Tromsø in Northern Norway. I am (male, yes, white and middle-class and) situated in traditions of critical geography with keen interests in spatialities and social practices and how they combine (Simonsen and Bærenholdt 2004). But I am also trained in history and have travelled across disciplines, especially through anthropology, sociology and international relations, and especially with regard to the areas being examined here. Certainly the empirical foci on Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Norway share the legacy of being part of the Danish empire, symbolised by the nodes played by the port, and now the airport, of Copenhagen. I am fluent in Danish and to some extent Norwegian and English, but apart from a number of words and meanings, not in Faroese, Icelandic or especially Greenlandic. In writing this book, therefore, I am depending on Scandinavian languages and English. Certain colonial performances tend to be reproduced in this way, the only remedy against this being, as far as possible, to adopt a critical and self-critical approach to research: to take nothing for granted, but to investigate critically how certain societies, physical items and cultural meanings come into being, change and may be changed. As stressed in the preface, nobody does this alone. Research depends on supportive networks. Another unavoidable question is where and when this book claims to pose valid analyses. It suggests a general approach to the production of society using the idea of ‘coping with distance’, but it only claims to document use of this approach with regard to, broadly speaking, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway. More precisely, fieldwork was undertaken by the author on a number of occasions from 1989 to 2001, and much of the research by others cited here stems from the

Coping on the Margins

7

1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century. However, historical developments a thousand years ago, together with greater emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially since the Second World War, play a crucial role in the chapters of this book. Knowledge is contextual. As such this book is a situated piece of research about certain processes in the Nordic Atlantic by a male, Danish geographer. But no contexts are isolated. They are not only connected – in itself an odd formulation since contexts are not containers. There are connections everywhere, and nobody can give a full account of the content of a territorial area. Various perspectives are involved, and they always give incomplete analyses. The consequence is that there are neither universal nor unique analyses. We analyse specific features of societal organisation, but these features do not just belong to an isolated container. Just as societies are (ontologically) connected, merged etc. in complex ways, this is also the case with research (epistemologically) that studies these processes. Therefore, while this book is about coping with distance in the Nordic Atlantic, it also claims a broader relevance of its findings. It even claims that the peripheries may have more to teach social theory than is often expected in the social sciences, where we are used to urban studies setting the standard and trends theoretically, while rural studies stay stuck in their backward areas. Rural peripheries may have more to contribute to social theory than we normally think, while we must also question and reconsider the often all too dominant image of rural peripheries (Cloke and Little 1997; Therborn 1999). These words are, of course, easy to write, but quite another thing to do, and it is for the reader to decide their effectiveness in the last resort.

Society Making The history of the socio-spatial practices of people living along the Nordic Atlantic coastal rim of Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland includes remarkable cases of local empowerment, entrepreneurship and cultural identification. Settlements inscribed in the space of remoteness, harsh climate, dangerous seas and rich marine resources prospered in the twentieth century. These practices were important not only for the people living in the settlements, but also for the whole modernisation process that produced Nordic Atlantic societies as specific variants of what is known as the Nordic or Scandinavian model of social integration and welfare. Humans and non-humans have spun connections across the northern part of the North Atlantic Ocean from the Davis Strait in the west to the Barents Sea in the east. Whether we are speaking about the sea and its currents, the winds, the long journeys of Norse to the west or Inuit to the east, colonialism, monopoly trade, warfare or the development of

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transatlantic flights, we are speaking of important mobile forces. Many of these North Atlantic forces have far-reaching consequences, such as the dynamics of global oceans, marine resources, transport routes, emigration or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). There would be no Nordic Atlantic societies in these areas if there had not been odysseys, migrations, journeys and communications involved in both nomadic and settled ways of life among the Inuit, Sami, Norse and other newcomers, occupiers and colonisers, and the mobile so-called ‘natural resources’ involved in their endeavours. Of course, this point is self-evident to a degree. But much social science research, though perhaps less so that of geographers, has tended to see processes of mobility, transport and ‘natural resources’ as a field other than that of societal construction or organisation. Most often, if formative processes are considered, it is typically a question of how the present, wellestablished, societal system was produced in historical pasts. The continual processes of societal construction, production and reproduction are most often approached in terms of systems or even their functions. Most studies fall into the categories of either the ‘micro’ ethnographic, thick descriptions of practices and performances, or the ‘macro’ studies of political, economic and social structures. Only a few have taken a practice approach to societal construction. Some of these tend to focus more on mobile practices that deconstruct and destabilise societies, where societies are seen as more or less the disparate efforts of states to regulate the complexity of flows and fluids (Urry 2000). Other ways of understanding how people actively produce societies are populist, community approaches, which do not always arrive at the productive role of mobilities (Brox 1966). Alternatively they are more programmatic ambitions of the shaping role of human practices, such as Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ concentrated in the first theses: ‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstände], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’ (Marx 1998 [1845]: 569, original emphasis). But these ‘construction’ studies, despite their differences, stress the shaping, social role of human practices, and thus, in spite of their problems, inspire my work in this book. ‘Society’ is the axis of many recent debates, even though they are drifting away from the concept of society itself. In anthropology, the debate is whether the concept of society is theoretically obsolete or not, but across the disagreements there is agreement that the Durkheimian dichotomy between society and individual has become obsolete (Ingold 1996: 59ff.; see also Elias 1978: 113). This may either lead to the conclusion that the concept of ‘society’ was bound to this dichotomy, so that it lost its relevance with the dichotomy, or that the concept’s continued scientific and political relevance is obvious. This is especially the case in the wake of the East

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European 1989 revolutions as explicit projects of society formation based on collective non-agreement with state structures. Urry’s critique of the concept of society, suggesting that sociologists had little valid response to Thatcher’s ‘There is no such thing as society’ (Urry 2000: 5), rests on the concept’s affinity with the nation state, together with the notions of citizenship and sovereignty. Few would think of notions of ‘mobile sociations’ or ‘Bunds’ to describe societies. Indeed, some sociologists, anthropologists and geographers have tried to discard core concepts such as ‘society’, ‘culture’ or ‘space’, thus depriving debates of former centres of controversy. But a wheel often tends to rotate around a missing axis, with the risk of losing rotation or assuming new shape. These rotations may lack theoretical brilliance and novelty. Rather, they take their energy from people’s coping practices and their engagement in creating societies as forms of solidarity or collective agency that are more than justifications of other ends. This book seeks to show the significance of this finding in the Nordic Atlantic, including the cases of nations without states. Giddens’s now classical work, The Constitution of Society (1984), addresses the notion of society and how societies are produced. He introduces two notions of society, one as ‘the generalized connotation of “social association” or interaction; the other is the sense in which “a society” is a unity having boundaries which mark it off from other, surrounding societies’ (Giddens 1984: 163). He finds it ‘essential to avoid the assumption that what a “society” is can be easily defined, a notion which comes from an era dominated by nation-states with clear-cut boundaries that usually conform in a very close way to the administrative purview of centralized governments’ (Giddens, 1984: 283). There can be other notions of ‘society’ than that of the nation state. Giddens defines societies as ‘a specifiable overall “clustering of institutions” across time and space’, characterised by: (1) association between a social system and a specific ‘locale’; (2) normative claims of legitimacy in occupying the ‘locale’; and (3) ‘some sort of common identity’ (1984: 164–65). Thus, indirectly drawing on all the disputed concepts of space, power and culture, Giddens acknowledges that societies can be of many kinds, explicitly including nomadic societies and non-Western societies such as those in China. However, Giddens’s structuration approach and its notion of duality seem problematic when it comes to understanding the intertwining of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, of the traditional notions of ‘social’ and ‘system integration’, since his own studies do not show how the duality works in practice. Giddens states: ‘I think it is a mistake to regard encounters in circumstances of co-presence as in some way the basis upon which larger, or “macrostructural”, social properties are built’ (Giddens 1984: xxv– xxvi). Instead, Giddens suggests that the objects of macro- and microsociological analysis are both substantial, and that they should be connected in terms of connections of system and social integration.

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Furthermore, Giddens adds that system integration only emerged with cities and urbanism. There are a number of reasons why this book disagrees with these positions. One question is whether Giddens’s dualities succeed in transcending dualism, as they were meant to do. One solution is to study formative practice, forgetting about micro–macro distinctions, and thus taking Foucault’s implicit ambitions as valid (see Chapter 2). Urry (2003) has demonstrated the problems with notions of micro and macro, and points to the important relationality of social and material practices, as well as the essentially integrated character of social and material relations. Thus, the societal forms that Giddens calls ‘system integration’ are more or less generalised effects and contents of relational practices, including nonhuman devices, and Giddens might agree with this. But to conceive of societies as political ‘systems’, as something only possible with cities emerging, is not well argued, and this book will present evidence to the contrary, in so far as it is precisely not the concept of ‘system integration’ that is confusing our understanding of society. A more dynamic approach to how societies are produced is required. Although temporarily stable, the figuration of societies is always open to change; their genesis is a never-ending process of deconstruction and reconstruction. These processes are also material, as societies’ physical organisation contributes to holding them together, ‘drawing order from their environments’ (Hornborg 2001: 43). This does not mean that societies are formed by their environments, as is argued in geographical traditions of physical determinism, but that their production has important material dimensions (see Chapter 4). Thus we are not only transcending Durkheimian dichotomies of society versus the individual, but also Cartesian dichotomies of society versus nature. Ingold’s anthropology draws our attention to the material aspects of human life and social organisation, since ‘it is through the activities of the embodied mind (or enminded body) that social relationships are formed and reformed’ (Ingold 2000: 171). Latour (1993) and the tradition of Actor–Network Theory (ANT) see networks and flows as simultaneously involving nature, society and culture, sharing a relational materialism with Ingold, in spite of other differences between ANT and Ingold’s phenomenology (see Chapter 5). ANT studies also try to overcome distinctions between the individual and the collective in Euro-American thought, using claims of the coextensive reach of persons and networks when acting (Callon and Law 1997). ‘Societies’ are stabilised networks that become black-box entities, translating the materials they are made up of, so that for a moment the societal units stand out from their surroundings with their own identities, until they become destabilised. Latour (1986) suggests changing the concept of society into one of association. This makes it clearer that the powers producing societies are

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not the effects of past processes of diffusion or transmission, but that there are ‘present-day origins for society’ through translation or transformation. In Latour’s translation model, neither ‘power’ nor ‘society’ explains: they are the phenomena that need explanation. He suggests a ‘performative definition’: societies are defined in practice; society is ‘performed through everyone’s efforts to define it’ (Latour 1986: 275). This definition somehow challenges Giddens’s general definition of ‘clustering institutions’ quoted above, especially when non-human resources are brought in to ‘reinforce, underline and stabilise’ definitions of human societies. This is indeed a materialistic definition of society, made clear by this (very French!) analogy: ‘Making society hang together with social elements alone is like trying to make a mayonnaise with neither eggs nor oil – that is, out of hot air alone’ (Latour 1986: 277). Latour’s suggestion could be seen as a specific version of Giddens’s first point in defining society as association between a social system and a specific ‘locale’. But there are also problems in this definition: we need to elaborate further how practices work together with the material ‘holding together’ of associations. Some societies are barely held together materially, but defined by legitimacy, networking and identifying practices of mobile, imaginative or virtual associations. We must acknowledge that the materials holding associations/societies together are made or remade by humans, and thus can also be superseded. After all, eggs and oil do not make mayonnaise by themselves. Neither do mobile phones make associations themselves – but still the human practice of making some kinds of association would have the mobile phone as their condition of possibility. Therefore, coping with distances through mobile phones can easily reshape societies, but this would never happen without the socially constitutive ‘activities of the embodied mind (or enminded body)’ (Ingold 2000: 171) of humans. Latour is right in pointing out that ‘society is not what holds us together, it is what is held together’ (1986: 276), and human practices depend on the use of materials, things, objects, buildings and technologies to link us together. Latour’s ontology suggests that we privilege neither minds, nor bodies, nor tools. Societies are made through hybrid performances, which I see as material constructing practices (see Chapter 2). And we need to investigate how this happens concretely. In doing so, my reservation with Latour’s approach is that he does not make it clear that technologies and objects are not independent actors. Their importance lies in their integrated role in socio-material practices, which also depend on humans. Furthermore, the ‘present-day origins of society’ do not erase the tracks of past social-material practices. Tracks are not simply routes of diffusion of transmission. They are the material, social and cultural connections and distances that people make use of in shaping societies. This book argues that societies are reproduced through continuous practices. Spatial organisation in places, territoriality, mobility and flow,

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and normative legitimacy, identification, imagination and materiality come together in shaping societies. Nobert Elias (1978) argued for a similar reorientation of the concept of society, away from hierarchical models of concentric circles surrounding individuals and towards understanding how people ‘are directed and linked with each other in the most diverse ways. These people make up webs of interdependence or figurations of many kinds’ (Elias 1978: 14–15). Elias argued for non-abstract studies of how people relate to each other through relationships of power and form ‘figurations’ of productive tensions. In his engagement with the historical contextuality of social figurations, Elias criticised sociologists for ‘their flight from the past’ (Elias 1987: 223). His implication is that too much abstract, non-contextual, social ontology is of little relevance. For Elias, most of the sociological tradition and social theory had been too obsessed with causal explanations of historical development. Instead he stressed that much of the historical formation of societies happened by way of unintended processes, and he investigated the historical processes that had led to the ‘figuration’ of societies, thereby also anticipating the later, historical investigations of Michel Foucault (Bogner 1987). Elias thought of societies as networks, which are formed by and involve everyday practices; he would not accept dualistic contrasts between what he called ‘figurations’ and everyday life, since social figurations were practised by people (Haldrup 2001). Elias thus approached the formation of societies as a historical process of group formations among humans, where groups were becoming larger and larger. To Elias war and violence do not belong to exceptional moments of history; shared physical survival was the primus motor in the social formation in what he called ‘survival groups’ (Elias 1978: 138, 1987: 225). People bond together in social groups to survive. Such a grouping ‘knits people together for common purposes – the common defence of their lives, the survival of their group in the face of attacks by other groups and, for a variety of reasons, attacks in common on other groups’ (Elias 1978: 138). Societies are thus a variety of types of networks connecting people in what are in fact mundane practices of survival. These practices, I suggest, are coping practices. In search of conceptual understandings of how, more concretely, people produce societies in the Nordic Atlantic by linking and connecting people in regions, networks and flows, the following sections first introduce the concept of coping, then critically discuss the concept of social capital and finally discuss the roles of regionalisation, territoriality and mobility in the spatial production of societies. The discussion of the concept of society reemerges with a broader range of references in Chapter 2, following the more contextually informed introduction to the coping approach here in Chapter 1. From the inclination to understand how people’s mundane practices of connecting with each other make societies follows a methodologically grounded orientation to the localities where people live

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and work. After all, the approach of this book is situated in particular transformations in the north.

Dimensions of Coping1 In Northern Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, some people live in concentrated towns, others in scattered rural settlements. Some localities have road connections; others can only be reached by sea or air transport. Dependency on natural resources and redistribution by the state and global markets differ locally, while political structures such as municipal government are a rather general feature. Nonetheless, this still leaves space for interesting differences that emphasise how coping practices matter. It is these practices, rather than specific resources, political systems, markets or physical localities, that make the difference and thus constitute the specificity of social organisation. Basically, the network of the UNESCO MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Project (see preface) was aimed at explaining how and why people coped differently in the local setting. It departed from a broad definition of ‘coping’ as a dynamic concept of practice meaning ‘the politics of everyday life; it is the meaningful use of really historical possibilities. Coping is mastering of possibilities, or more concrete; how people engage in strategies which make sense to themselves’ (Bærenholdt and Aarsæther 1998: 30, original emphasis). This minimal definition shows that the concept of ‘coping’ has academic roots in social psychology, where questions of identity and meaning are major concerns. As such, the concept of coping has also been used to understand local dynamics among indigenous Inuit (O’Neil 1986). Stressing the active component in a social concept of coping, the concept of a ‘coping strategy’ was defined as a set of practices defined in three dimensions (economic, social and cultural). In the rest of this book, these dimensions will also be used for coping or coping practices, the word ‘strategy’ (and also ‘mastering’) being excluded because of problems with the concept’s instrumentalist or rationalist connotations (Wallace 1993). This is because the three dimensions of coping are more than an independent strategy but also more than the tactics of adaptation. Coping practices are ways of making a living. The three dimensions were defined this way: 1. Innovation: the process of change in economic structures resulting from new solutions to local problems, as responses to the transformations of a globalizing and increasingly knowledge-based economy. 2. Networking: the development of interpersonal relations that transcend the limits of institutionalised social fields. 3. Identity formation: the active formation of identities that can reflect on cultural discourses from the local to the global. (Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001a: 23)

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All of these three dimensions are about coping with the historically produced changeable possibilities and constraints of physical, social and cultural distances. In other words, coping practices are spatial (and temporal, of course). They are not only situated in space and time – coping means to practice space and time. Innovation includes the kinds of business development studied in institutional and evolutionary economics as well as cultural events, the activities of voluntary organisations and local political reform processes. All of these ‘economic’ practices cope with distances, since the potential benefits acquire impetus from connecting firms and other units over short or long physical distances, knitting together people with the dynamics of interactive learning, associative work and cultural performance. Secondly, networking stresses the socially embedded character of the production of societies, because social networks linking persons who are committed to each other have the potential to overcome barriers between sectors and agendas that are otherwise difficult to combine. But networking is spatially, and temporally, organised, as is also the case with social capital (see later sections). The formative effects of networking often come from their abilities to overcome distances, especially social ones. Questions of identity formation are posed in the context of cultural connectivity, which is often more apparent than the economic aspects of ‘globalisation’. On the one hand, this means a growing awareness of many alternative identities in the world; on the other hand, this can also lead to reflexive identifications with more or less localised ‘traditions’. Communities are becoming reflexive in the sense that people are reflecting on their own constructions and connections spatially (Lash 1994). Thus people cope with cultural distances, not only by overcoming distances, but also by enhancing them (Gregory 2004a). The socio-spatialities of innovation, networking and the formation of identities will be explained further and exemplified later in this chapter. Coping includes three dimensions, and the approach indicates that productive practices build on connections between them. Thus, the concept has normative connections with modern ideas of conscious and collective strategies. Meanwhile, there can also be disadvantages to conscious and collective strategies where innovation, networking and identity formation are also connected in paths of development that are too ‘one-way’. For example, major investments may be made in a single economic sector (mining, forestry, fishery, processing), and strategies work well as long as there is access to adequate natural resources, institutional regulation and markets. When such circumstances change for the worse, investments in buildings, machines and education are difficult to change. Here, we find materially and symbolically places of mining, forestry, fishing or processing where economic, social and cultural capitals cannot be exchanged, and local people are locked in a certain form of path dependency (there is more on ‘lock-in’ in the section ‘Territoriality and Mobility’). Such a situation is

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not the effect of practices that neglect the global nature of the economy. The problem is rather that heavy investment may prove futile, as changes in ‘natural resources’, the market and technology make it out of date. Since many circumstances change in unforeseeable and irreversible ways, there are no guarantees that coping practices lead to success. One question then becomes, if it is possible to conceptualise the social sources, where do the good effects come from? The concept of social capital is one possible way of answering this question.

Social Capital In Making Democracy Work, Putnam introduces social capital in broad and simple terms: ‘Features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’ (Putnam 1993: 167). This definition is highly implicit in the political use of the concept. The main focus is on coordination and problem-solving potentials as social functions of social capital. In his discussion of the content of ‘trust, norms and networks’, Putnam refers to de Tocqueville’s works on civicness as originating in ‘self-interest properly understood’ (Putnam 1993: 88). However, one problem is exactly the situations in which people are locked into more or less dead-end trajectories (as mentioned above), and in which social capital secures the coordination of non-innovative practices. In the introduction to Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) highlights the tension between the ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ elements of social capital, which implies that the element of creativity emanating from ‘bridging’ or ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter 1973; Putnam 1993: 175) is a crucial feature of social capital. Furthermore, Putnam admits that social capital is not always positive: the ‘positive’ consequences of social capital may be mutual support, cooperation, trust and institutional effectiveness, while the ‘negative’ consequences may be sectarianism, ethnocentrism and corruption (Putnam 2000: 22). Although Putnam has not really pursued the consequence of this insight in his empirical work, his statements open the door to a critique of definitions of social capital in terms of its function. For analytical purposes, the ‘trust’ and ‘norm’ aspects of social capital seem less central than the ‘network’ aspect. Of course, networks work due to certain levels of trust and types of norms, but, if we really want to include the ‘bridging’ element, this suggests that there are also limits to the extent that networks are based on trust and norms. In the more analytical definition of social capital put forward by Pierre Bourdieu, networks and the resources they open access to are the centre of interest: ‘Social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less

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institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 119; see also Bourdieu 1986: 248). This definition stresses that social capital is produced through networking practices. Networks have to exist so that connecting and ‘bridging’ can open access to resources that are otherwise not accessible (Putnam 2000: 411). This was precisely the role of the classical entrepreneur – to build such bridges and be a ‘trans-actor’ (see Barth 1972, 1981). Now we are approaching innovation as something more collective than was the case in studies of the single, determined entrepreneur. It is the processes, where the resources accessible due to social relations (conceptualised as social capital) may produce innovation and identity, that are important here. We should be aware that Bourdieu’s definition is more an analytical tool, and that it does not coincide with Putnam’s normative theory. For Putnam, not all kinds of network are equally ‘good’, as his endeavour is not to explain successful cooperation per se, but successful civic cooperation ‘that makes democracy work’. Putnam’s approach focuses less on non-formal and vertical forms of social capital. In fact, he does not accept all kinds of ‘trust, norms and networks’ as producing social capital. In Making Democracy Work (1993), he does not acknowledge certain network relations as social capital, namely those he considered important in Southern Italy, such as networks between neighbours, kinship, networks in bars and public spaces and networks associated with the church (Bull and Frate 2000). Only horizontal relations are acknowledged as social capital relations. His interest in civic cooperation is based on the study’s focus on the successes and failures involved in implementing a reform of regional government in Italy. The decisive form of social capital for Putnam is civicness as in voluntary organisations. This is the key to his theory. His image of Calabria as the bad case in Southern Italy fits his framework well: ‘An absence of civic associations and a paucity of local media in these latter regions mean that citizens there are rarely drawn into community affairs’ (Putnam 1993: 97). This image should been seen in contrast to his image of the successful regions in the Third Italy: ‘Collective life in the civic regions is eased by the expectation that others will probably follow the rules. Knowing that others will, you are more likely to go along, too, thus fulfilling their expectations. In the less civic regions nearly everyone expects everyone to violate the rules’ (Putnam 1993: 111). Bourdieu’s approach to social capital, as to all kinds of networks, is more suitable for studies of the production of society. What kinds of networks actually facilitate coping is an analytical question for empirical investigation and is not normatively pre-given. It is only through the complex practices of societal production, which can be called coping, that different kinds of capital become productive; these capitals are also (re)produced

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through the very same kind of practices. This is especially the case with social capital, since it is not a fixed stock that can be overused (Putnam 1993: 169). On the contrary, social capital is most frequently accumulated when used in networking practices. Therefore social capital tends to be more than an asset, as it also transmits or provides access to other forms of more ‘fixed’ capital. Social capital cannot be stored materially, institutionally, textually or culturally. Furthermore, it cannot be reduced to economic or cultural capital, as it works as a way of accessing these other forms of capital (Broady 1991: 177). Among the dimensions of coping, social capital clearly has a strong connection with networking. But the problem remains whether we need the concept of social capital if we have networking practices. Michel Callon’s criticism of the concept of social capital is that it makes network into dead entities, thus uncoupling agency from networks and making networks another form of structure. The agent, simply because she mobilizes a capital – of which the form and volume do of course depend on the form of the network and on her position therein – escapes, at least in part, from the network. Cast aside, freed from the network to which she is attached only by the resources it provides, the agent regains her autonomy. The monism of social network analysis is thus substituted for the traditional dualism of agencies and structures. The notion of social capital is the Trojan horse of dualism since it severs the formal identity between agent and network; it splits the agent-network again by introducing the usual opposition between the action and the resources of that action. (Callon 1998: 11–12)

This ANT, ‘monist’ critique of all approaches to social capital (including Bourdieu’s) raises an interesting question of how we perceive human practices in relation to networking and to society. In other words, it raises the question of why we should need to ‘black-box’ certain forms of networking practices into the assets of a form of capital when it is so obvious that this ‘asset’ depends to a high degree on how it is practised and to what kind of ‘harder’ capital the networking practices open up channels. If, on the other hand, social capital describes a more or less generalised situation, where people are connected or knitted together, why do we not simply use the concept of ‘society’ for this? When there are relatively stable socio-material associations, or Eliasian ‘survival groups’, of people at stake, coping practices have produced societies. On the other hand, there are limits to monism: people cope – and are not only discretely networked without agents – with problems in their social and non-social environment that are less plastic than just the practices of other people. Societies can stabilise themselves in time and space, though this does not mean that they become essentialist, containerlike entities. This point will be elaborated further in the following discussion of the relationship between social capital and regions.

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Regions and Regionalisation; Essentialism versus Constructivism Putnam’s work (1993) has had a profound influence in debates in the social sciences on the causes of socio-economic and political success. This is not so much because of its theoretical contribution, but rather the comprehensive empirical study of regional government in Italy in the period 1970–89, with an imposing use of statistical correlations between institutional, socio-economic and sociocultural indicators. The data correlated in the book were collected at the level of administrative regions (almost always with Emilia Romagna as the winner and Calabria as the loser). But correlations do not say much about how processes actually work. Stressing this does not mean questioning the regional differences in institutional performances. The problem is that, without deeper analysis, the statistical method localises the causes of variations in institutional performance to properties of the regions in question. This is also the problem with Putnam’s comparisons of American states, with the northeast, the upper Midwest and the Pacific north-west as the winners on indexes of social capital (Putnam 2000: 291ff.). What is it about the regions that make a difference? Are the causes of regional differences necessarily regional themselves? Many regressions – for example, between indicators of ‘civicness’ in 1900 and economic development in 1970 (Putnam 1993: 156) – leave questions about the practices and historical construction of institutions, economic development and cultural identity unanswered. ‘Social capital’, as the theoretical concept behind ‘civicness’, seems to be a more or less permanent property of regions. But this is to introduce a kind of geo-historical determinism that fails to take into account the mechanisms behind the production and reproduction of social capital. To Putnam, it is fruitless to discuss causality, because it only ends up in chicken-and-egg circularities (Putnam 1993: 179). He concludes with well-formulated sentences that leave much to discuss: ‘People in Bologna and Bari, in Florence and Palermo, have followed contrasting logics of communal life for a millennium or more’ (Putnam 1993: 182). And: ‘Social context and history profoundly condition the effectiveness of institutions. Where the regional soil is fertile, the regions draw sustenance from regional traditions, but where the soil is poor, the new institutions are stunted’ (Putnam 1993: 182, original emphasis). Although Putnam’s use of the term ‘regional soil’ is only a metaphor, it is clear that causalities are being argued here. An extreme example can be found in his analysis of American states, where he refers to correlations between social capital and the proportion of the population that has Scandinavian ancestors (Putnam 2000: 294). Putnam reflects on the obvious despair among his readers in Calabria or Moscow. What can they do if their present predicament depends on processes that have been operating for centuries? However, he admits that ‘changing formal

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institutions can change political practice’ (Putnam 1993: 184). Of course, this might lead the reader to consider the causes – or the production and reproduction – of civicness in Emilia-Romagna once again. Putnam’s understanding transcends local, interpersonal contexts. Civicness in a liberal democracy is more than a community of friends – it is founded on principles of generalised reciprocity and rules that are universally valid for all members of the associational ‘community’, that is society. This is how civicness works. It is a political category concerning the regulation of power. How are the limits of validity for such norms defined? Civicness has more or less always been connected to persons who ‘belong’ to a specific territory, where a certain form of society has been defined. Now, it is the practices constructing these forms of territorial association, which we used to call ‘regions’, that need to be studied. We need to focus on the translations and transformations forming and holding together such forms of socio-spatial organisation. In other words, the phenomena conceptualised by Putnam as ‘social capital’ and ‘region’ are in fact not separate but two sides of the same coin, and the tricky question is how they came into being. In response to Putnam’s, and many traditional geographers’, essentialist definition of region, we need to address the human practices that construct regions as social formations together with various forms of ‘societies’, while acknowledging the use made of the material environment to hold them together. The concept of a ‘region’ is about parts of the whole, as demonstrated in the metaphor of intersections of regions, networks and fluids in the body (Mol and Law 1994). Fluids and networks cutting across regions and nation states are important social processes in the production of regional and national entities, defining demarcations and distances from other territories. For example, migrants are co-producers of the regions and nations they inhabit, whether or not this co-production involves exclusion or inclusion. Therefore, the making of socio-material regions is never a question beyond politics and the exercise of power relations, whether territorial or mobile. Regions are constructed and cut out as ‘territorial pieces’ of larger ‘cakes’, which are themselves no less constructed. This in no way means denying the materiality of either regions or societies (just like the arm or the leg as a ‘region’ of the body), but materialities are politically practised and used. As a consequence, just as territories are made by way of territoriality (see next section), regions do not presuppose regional policy but are exactly made and remade as the frame and instrument of regional policies. It is no coincidence that the word ‘region’ comes from the Latin regere, to rule. Regions are devices for rule by governments (Bærenholdt 1998b). These may be central or trans-state governments or ‘governance’ organisations, governing sub-subjects through various types of ‘subsidiarity’, but regional

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and local governments and authorities most often also participate in practising regional policies. Regional policy tends to deal with the integration of ‘regional parts’ into nation states or empires. In these processes, regional development and regional policies are questions about equity, restructuring, growth, innovation and political projects in respect of regions as parts of nation states. In the Nordic peripheries, there are many complexities and variations in such processes. On the one hand, we have the questions of autonomy and independence for home-ruled Greenland and Faroes within the Danish realm, but outside the European Union (EU). On the other hand, there are the EU-integrative objectives of EU regional policies in Sweden and Finland, including the eager pursuit of developing cross-border INTERREG projects, which make ‘nation states’ more porous (see Chapter 9). But regions are not only governmental ‘units’ from above. The concept of regionalisation is also used to address the results of everyday lifeproduction social-spatial formations in the search for ontological security (Giddens 1984, 1990; Werlen 2004). Between the regional policies of governments (as outlined above) and everyday tactics (in search of security), the concept of coping suggests mediating and understanding how societies are made as, and together with, (their) ‘regions’. Giddens (1984), as well as the geographer Paasi (1986), see this mediation process as a form of institutionalisation, but with a tendency to focus on ‘results’, ‘identities’ or ‘territorial containers’, however fragile they may be. The coping approach suggests stressing the dynamic side of this understanding by highlighting the practices and processes that are constantly involved in forming, reshaping and changing regions and societies. Many different practices and processes are involved in producing, sustaining and eroding a diversity of overlapping societal figurations that are spatially organised in various combinations of territorial and mobile forms of regions, networks and flows. The following sections will examine further the various spatialities of coping practices.

Territoriality and Mobility All three dimensions of coping are spatial. Innovative restructuring involves the spatial restructuring of localisation, connections and movements of activities. Networking relations imply specific forms of proximities between actors. And identities are formed with more or less explicit references to geographical imaginations. Space is neither a container nor an outcome of these practices. Coping practices are spatial, and all practices exercise power in one way or another. Territorial and mobile practices are two principal ways of exercising power spatially. Meanwhile, the exercise of power through mobility and territoriality is an interwoven process. For

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example, mobility is an indispensable technique of control along borders when there are not enough walls or guards to maintain permanent control (Bærenholdt 2001). Debates in the 1990s on regional development in Europe focused on institutions and localised learning, but there was little discussion of the spatial characteristics of such development. Amin and Thrift stressed that the ‘economic life of firms and markets is territorially embedded in social and cultural relations’ (1994: 16), but it is not clear what this meant. Are social and cultural relations – and institutions – territorial? Or is it only the embedding aspect that is territorial? We can experience some (but not all) aspects of current social life, networks and institutions as mobile and/or as transcending territorial boundaries. For example, Chinese business is ‘socially embedded’ in strong cross-border networks. Amin and Thrift outlined three significant problems in the relationship ‘between institutional “thickness” and economic development’: (1) institutional thickness does not explain all regional cases of economic development; institutionalised regions are in crisis. This is the problem of ‘overembeddedness’ or ‘lock-in’ (mentioned above); (2) institutional thickness does not need to be the advantage of ‘the wider local collectivity’, but may provide an advantage of location for the transnational corporation; and (3) local institutions might not be necessary ‘for a locality to find a home in the global economy’ (Amin and Thrift 1994: 17–18). Compared with much economic geography, which is oriented towards business development, there are reasons to stress the argument in the second point, namely that strong local institutions do not necessarily imply socially inclusive structures, and success for businesses does not necessarily mean success for the ordinary population. Some grim stories of footloose fishing industries in the North Atlantic illustrate this. Relations between power and space are central topics when considering ideas of territoriality. If power is understood as productive and relational (see Chapter 2 on Foucault), it is also obvious that we can discuss networks, relations and connections (social capital) that can be mobilised by actors (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Power is connected to the production of spatial orders: space can be used to exercise power. Sack defines territoriality as a strategy to control human beings and things through control of an area: ‘Territoriality for humans is a powerful geographic strategy to control people and things by controlling area. Political territories and private ownership of land may be its most familiar forms but territoriality occurs to varying degrees in numerous social contexts. It is used in everyday relationships and in complex organizations’ (1986: 5). Territoriality is socially constructed and entails a use of space where some actors are controlling other actors and other things (I would add information here) (Sack 1986: 3). I would like to stress the integrated

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socio-spatial character of practices that can be seen as coping practices rather than ‘strategies’. The important point is that territoriality is about the spatial aspects of exercising power. It is not the only intersection of society and space in terms of power. Mobility is also power, the only difference being that this form of power is exercised through movement instead of boundaries. As such, mobility can be defined as an incorporated social practice of influence and control through the movement of human beings, things or information. Not all of these practices are really productive. Territoriality and mobility only enable social capacities for a group of people if they develop innovative networks and connections. Connectivity and inclusiveness are crucial dimensions of societies, whereas exit and exclusiveness normally are not. One historical example would be emigration from rural Scandinavia to America in the late nineteenth century. Emigrants from small localities helped those left behind to enhance their access to natural capital (land). But if there are no social relations between stayers and leavers, the exit process may reduce the social capital for both. The means of transportation and communication did not facilitate much contact, leading to a loss of societal connection. In the rural economy of the late nineteenth century, this might be compensated for by the gains that the stayers made in natural capital. A different example would be present-day mobilities among Icelandic students who live in a milieu of connectivity between their native localities, foreign universities and corporations. The innovative role of migrant communities might be explained by the practices of creating ethnic communities abroad in order to compensate for the devaluation of social capital that is generally associated with emigration (see Putnam 2000: 390). Given current means of transport and communication, such ethnic communities abroad can establish valuable links to the people back home. This example shows the socially formative role of transport and communication technologies (see Chapter 4) in securing the production of society at a distance and across distances. The significant difference between connectivity and exit also seems to be valid in respect of territorial practices. If social communities try to define themselves and protect their resources by means of boundaries that exclude immigrants from a locality, they may be able to protect their resources. But to keep the immigrant outside also means preventing the possible production of new social capital and societal links. Of course, to let the ‘others’ just live in a locality does not produce social capital or society by definition. But it does facilitate the possibility of inclusive territorial coping that defines all local inhabitants as citizens and human resources, where networking and the formation of multiple identities are able to produce social capital.

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The understandings presented here contradict any notion of space as an essential or ontological entity. It is the spatiality in practices of bordering and moving people, things and information that makes the difference. Meanwhile, the features and processes of material objects and space are components of this (physical distances, built environment, natural ‘borders’ such as mountains and seas, environmental processes, hazards). It is obvious that technologies of mobility changed the possibilities of spatial control dramatically throughout the twentieth century; some socially produced environmental processes are irreversible. Other features include the symbolic uses of landscapes, and these kinds of ‘cultural territoriality’ can also be communicated through electronic means. Thus, the spatial is important to both innovation (the spatial restructuring of economic and cultural capital and technology as assets of production) and identity formation (making sense of spatial borders or movements). Central questions to reflect on are the location of assets of production (in the broad sense) and the use of space as a marker of identity. Following the reasoning of Amin and Thrift discussed above, there is no simple answer to the basic question of how ‘institutional thickness’ relates to space. The discussion of territoriality and mobility as complementary coping practices challenges the most common (sense) understandings of regions. There is a tendency to understand ‘regions’ as actors with stocks of institutions or of social capital. Such an understanding is problematic if we want to investigate processes that include social change over time in an environment of increasing mobility. Relations at a local, face-to-face level have a certain importance because of the trust embedded in proximity, but it is in fact often not possible to categorise relations as either face to face or otherwise. It seems that most dynamic social relations are hybrids, like inside and outside, face to face and far away, intimate and distant, concrete and abstract. Amin and Thrift’s later work (2002) also points to this by stressing the role of meeting places. Hence, coping always combines territoriality and mobility.

Territorial-Mobile and Bonding-Bridging Implicitly, Sack (1986) and Putnam (1993) agree that territoriality is a question of the use of space in strategies associated with the validity of rules and citizenship. As such, territoriality seems to be very much affiliated with association as a form of social relation. For one thing, associations, be they local government or sports clubs, can define their aspirations symbolically, their rules of membership and the range of their actions, such as a football club, the municipality of Båtsfjord in Northern Norway, the Conservative Party of Iceland or a cooperative in a specific region. All these associations may be produced by the use of mobile strategies in relation to both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

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Social figurations may also be created through networking with loose or no territorial links, based on personal mobility as well as the extensive uses of modern communications technology. Even though such networks operate across territorial borders, they are not omnipresent or accessible to anyone; to be a participant or a member, you have to share more than merely ‘living near by’, whether there be a concern for business, ethnic, professional or religious commonalities that define the networks. The inclusiveness of the network is important: identification associated with networks can be crucial markers of inclusiveness. Do the symbols and discourses that are produced invite outsiders to participate, or not? The concept of embeddedness has a tacit spatial component. What defines embeddedness is the use of territoriality as a strategy of control and networking within certain borders. Within these borders certain rules and norms are applied, and the social organisation has strong associative and reciprocal elements. In the same way, autonomy is affiliated with mobility. The tacit role of territorial principles of social organisation in economic sociology and political science is now being challenged by the increasing awareness of the socially constitutive meaning of mobility in late modernity (Bauman 2000; Urry 2000). The power of mobility is obvious in a number of recent cases, where territories are only a source of problems. ‘When velocity means domination, the “appropriation, utilization and population of territory” [quote from Friedrich Ratzel] becomes a handicap – a liability, not an asset.’ (Bauman 2000: 188). The associational synergy and integrity of organisations are affiliated with the form of social capital that Putnam (2000) calls ‘bonding’. I suggest that bonding and bridging are viewed as coping practices instead of features of social capital. We cannot judge how stable networks and connections bond or bridge by themselves. The very same resources, accessible due to a ‘durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 119), can be used for practices producing both bonds within groups and bridges between persons and groups. It is coping practices that bond or bridge. Of course, these concepts are complementary, just like territoriality and mobility. The initial bonding might well be the result of sequences of overlapping bridges, just as bridges are based on the difference between bonds. In fact, it is only possible to differentiate between bridging and bonding as a direction of a practice, as we cannot define any basic differences between a bond and a bridge per se. In other words, the difference is in socio-spatial practices in all dimensions of coping, not in forms of social capital. In sum, a matrix of socio-spatial coping practices illustrating continua between extreme types can be produced (Figure 1.1). Mobile bonding represents the practices of ‘communities’ that are not based on proximity or geographical inscriptions, such as international NGOs or international religious congregations. These are ‘mobile

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Territorial bridging

Mobile bridging COPING

Territorial bonding

Mobile bonding

Figure 1.1: Socio-spatialities of coping.

sociations’ or ‘Bunds’ that people join reflexively (Urry 2000: 142–43). The social capital produced within such organisations (such as Greenpeace) is greatly facilitated by mobility and a lack of territorial commitments, as described by Bauman above. They work as powerful global communities with techniques similar to those of multinational corporations, building on direct mail rather than interpersonal solidarity (Putnam 2000: 156). These communities would not be able to work without specific identifications (for example, with animals). Mobile bonding also applies to many nations, where membership is defined through sameness in culture, heritage or ancestry. Meanwhile, bridging practices are connecting ‘us’ with people unlike ourselves (Putnam 2000: 411). As such, bridging lacks exclusionary identifications and symbols. In the case of mobile bridging, we may even talk about some kind of virtual co-presence, but such practices will most often also be conditioned by at least moments of physical proximity. Mobile bridging is the less stable of the four types. It includes relationships between persons who know each other as somehow distant friends, family members and professional contacts, a relationship that can be mobilised for certain, often rather instrumental purposes. Some of these relationships recall those in the market, but there can also be reciprocal aspects. But, since they do not include any form of association that would require either bonding or territoriality to stabilise themselves, mobile bridging practices cannot produce societies themselves (see Chapter 2 on association, reciprocity and market). On the other hand, mobile bridging can add an innovative, competitive element to social relations, being stabilised by coping practices with other socio-spatialities. Territorial bridging covers a multitude of social formations that combine inclusiveness with the use of territorial borders to define its potential members. The obvious example is political citizenship in a modern state that does not use cultural identifications as a means of definition, apart from the criteria of territorial inclusion used. Thus, territorial bridging is meant to overcome and potentially level out conflict and injustice among people living in the same continent, country, region or municipality. The normative markers involved are restricted to more or less ‘universal’ ideals

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of civil and human rights, democracy and the like. Physical proximity is not a condition for territorial bridging practices; it can work at various scales. In contrast to this, territorial bonding is the social and political form that is associated with strong identifying concepts like community (Gemeinschaft), but such communities can be expressed at various scales, including that of the non-face-to-face national ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). Still, the use of spatial boundaries to identify social groups by making locality equal to community plays a significant role. Coping and the ways it uses and produces societal formations have often been perceived as a matter of the local community. But in fact it is often territorial bridging that is the critical aspect when it comes to bridging different villages, social groups and cultural communities politically. Introducing themes running through the rest of the book, the following three sections present some examples of socio-spatialities of coping in the Nordic Atlantic within each of the three dimensions: innovation, networking and identity formation.

Innovation: Combining Mobility and Territoriality Fisheries were crucial to livelihoods in the Nordic Atlantic in the twentieth century. While neither fluctuating fish stocks nor international fish markets can really be mastered, the innovations performed in response to ‘outside’ transformations are emblematic cases of coping. This is also true in the growing new economies of tourism; tourists are no easier to catch and control than fish. Tourists may come on their own initiative, and this may even happen more than once, but they also tend to escape more easily than fish. Due to the very mobile and international character of fisheries and the fish trade and the relatively dispersed character of settlements in the Nordic Atlantic, people have been used to finding local solutions to problems of a non-local character for centuries. Coping with increasingly knowledge-based economies is a further challenge, where the problems of the brain drain and of attracting the educated back are on the agenda. Here, the development of means of mobility (bodily, virtual or imaginative: Urry 2000) plays a crucial role in innovation. Innovations in economies of mobile categories such as fish and tourists are often about the spatial organisation of flows more than the ‘processing’ itself. The value of the fish to the consumer or of the experience to the tourist is very much about ‘being in the right place at the right time’. Since spatial framing and movement tend to constitute the ‘production’ as such, combinations of different types of territoriality and mobility are crucial aspects of business innovation. Another basic innovation involved with Nordic Atlantic strategies relates to social organisation. In economic geography, there has been an interest in

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explaining the economic performance of firms embedded in associational economies (Cooke and Morgan 1998), and it seems that associational capacity is a matter not only of firms but of social organisation in a broader sense. Cases of innovation in Faroese, Icelandic and Greenlandic fisheries always combine moments of informal networking, municipal entrepreneurship and the ability of mobile professionals to commit themselves to local development.2 In one Faroese case, the buildings for a new internationally oriented firm in a small village were constructed through voluntary work in the village, what may be described as the normal ‘Faroese way’ (Hovgaard 2002). In such cases in Iceland and Greenland, municipal authorities played crucial roles as facilitators for new business developments. Links to international markets are often in the hands of a few businessmen who somehow commit themselves to local development. In the end, much Nordic Atlantic experience points to the importance of ‘territorial capital’. While the control of mobile marine resources is, as far as possible, a matter of national schemes of resource management, local actors who have control of financial capital locally are likely to be powerful enough to influence resource allocation policies in favour of their own interests. Nordic Atlantic resource-based economies, fisheries, tourism and the like have often been socially organised in combinations of mobile bridging and territorial bonding. While territorial bonding is used to defend and manage natural resources, mobile bridging organises contacts with international markets. The organisation of such contacts is mobile because people exercise their power by means of movement, and it is bridging because people establish new social relations in marketing and sales. Cooperative and municipal organisation has been used to enforce local and regional economic regulation to secure stability and, in some cases, distributive justice. Innovation in the Nordic Atlantic is less about Schumpeterian technological development than social innovations introduced to deal with the dynamic complexities of natural resources and international markets that cannot be controlled. These are innovations affecting regulation and stability in conditions of disorder. The spatial organisation of social relations is at the centre of interest in such innovations. When much ‘production’ is about the careful transport of fish and tourists, mobile bonding with people ‘from here in other places’ (diasporas) and mobile bridging to new business partners are crucial. However, associational organisations of voluntary work, territorial control of financial capital and the territorial commitment of professionals are all about the territorial bridging of different social and cultural groups according to some kind of local citizenship. Therefore, territorial definitions of micro-societies are not taken for granted but produced as part of their social construction. Territorial practices, such as the commitment of diasporas to their ‘place of birth’ and the innovative capacity of commitments to do something for

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the inhabitants in one’s place of birth, rely on a combination of mobile bridging to other places and territorial bonding with that ‘place of birth’. If you cannot visit, communicate or transport across distances, committed actions by outsiders are of little value. Still, the innovative capacities of such ‘mobiles from here’ would be of little use in producing local societies if they were not subject to principles of territorial regulation. New interventions in fisheries and tourism by mobile capital with no territorial commitment present challenges to the ‘traditional’ social innovations (associational organisation, territorial control) that have been inherited from the twentieth century.

Networking: Easy Bridging versus Normative Bonding Since networks are also innovations, the distinction between innovation and networking is not total. This point is further stressed by the experience of studying the time and space development of specific local projects. Coping is very much a matter of connecting and securing access, and it can be facilitated by powerful municipal authorities and other local actors taking part in multi-level governance relations in regional development and policy (Jessop 2000; Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001b). Bonding networking is normative, and much networking is about working. In Nordic countries, there has been an ongoing production of community (Gemeinschaft) based on the participation of everybody in work, historically based in seventeenth-century Pietism: ‘To see that everybody works is the main principle of Nordic societal organisation and that force that holds association together’ (Stenius 1997: 164). Whether networking is territorial or mobile, the work is also about the control and definition of deviance. So far, we have considered bonding networks: it is bonding networks that are normative. The central feature of bonding is that it clearly defines who is included and who is excluded. As such, bonding networks are not open-ended. Independently of their spatial organisation, they work due to a distinction between who are ‘insiders’ and who ‘outsiders’ (see Chapter 8). In bridging networking, directions and routes can easily be redirected to exclude some and include others in the net-at-work. Bonding networking is opposed to this: exclusion from bonding networks is harder to enforce. Exclusion from mobile networking is also easier than from territorial networking. While the distinction between bridging and bonding is a difference in the normative power of networking, the distinction between mobility and territoriality lies in questions of proximity. Although the spatial tactic used in exclusion from territorial networking is not that different from exclusion from mobile networks, the uneasiness comes from the bodily proximity that

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is often involved in territorial networks: the deviants must be moved or borders redrawn. There is a principal difference in the character of normality/deviance mechanisms between bonding and bridging networking. The relatively more innovative character of bridging networking has to do with its weaker normative power. The strength of cross-cutting networks or weak ties can be said to lie in their ability to bridge diverse, normatively institutionalised social fields. Whatever the value measure, ‘exit costs’ are lower in bridging than in bonding networks, as bridging networkers do not identify so much with the specific network as with the practice of networking in general. On the other hand, bridging networks are more cynical and less safe, secure or certain for the meaningful reproduction of everyday life, where loose connections can be easier but also less productive and secure than bonding ‘marriage’. Nordic Atlantic strategies include mixes of bonding and bridging, but the Lutheran formulation of associationalism and individualism has a rationalist taste of the hard-working, cynical individual (see Chapter 8). While many have been involved in the religious and political revival networking of mobile bonds (there are similarities between twentieth-century religious revivals and contemporary non-governmental organisations (NGOs)), Nordic Atlantic twentieth-century economic and political life has been based above all on the territorial assocationalism of local, as well as national, citizenship. This territorial definition of citizenship builds on a certain mix of bridging and bonding: while the individual citizen has the right to build different kinds of bridging networks in the private and business fields, the individual is also committed to the strong and bonding local and national state.

The Sense of ‘Communal’ Identification Identity formation is already on the agenda in the discussion of the more or less normative character of networking. Bonding networking and bonding identification intersect. While the coping approach to networking emphasises the less normative, bridging networking across institutionalised social fields, the approach to identity formation is also focused more on the production of meaning than on institutionalised cognitive identities and identifiers. This implies a focus on projects for the construction of societies. The socio-spatialities of coping (Figure 1.1) vary among innovation, networking and identity formation. Whereas the features of innovation are very much about combining mobility and territoriality, and while networking is located more in the social difference between bridging and bonding, identity formation involves the full complexity of the sociospatiality of coping. In relation to coping, the kinds of identifications that have our interest are those that attribute meaning to coping processes

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involving innovation and networking. In other words, identity formation is about making sense of coping. Local entrepreneurship, empowerment and culture in the Nordic Atlantic can hardly be understood without reference to crucial local– national nexuses. The meaning of social innovation has frequently been linked to national identity in opposition to Danish dominance. Few cases of entrepreneurship do not have an implicit reference to nation building. Locally, empowerment by ‘managing affairs ourselves’ has been linked to national independence from colonial rule (see Chapter 8). Municipalities (communes) are the most powerful regional parts of Nordic Atlantic nations (see Chapter 7). Municipalities are identifications of communal political practices linking locality, community and place into territorial units. Rural municipalities in Norway, Iceland and the Faroes, as in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, have their historical roots in parishes. Many Icelandic and especially Faroese municipalities are still equivalent to parishes. This is an example of how the Protestant Church has been integrated into the socio-politico-cultural organisation of Nordic societies in a very specific way. In opposition to ‘the supraterritoriality of the Roman Church’ (Rokkan and Unwin 1983: 33), Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists) merged ecclesiastical and secular administration. ‘Protestantism strengthened the distinctiveness of each territorial culture by integrating the priesthood into the administrative machinery of the state within the confines of local languages’ (Rokkan and Unwin 1983: 26). ‘Communal’ identification with parish municipalities has thus been strong in nineteenthand twentieth-century Nordic peripheries, where schools, churches and local associations have also overlapped one another as social fields. Territorial identifications of this kind are bridging if they do not define people by their membership in kin networking, congregations or the like, but as citizens who have their own direct relationships with political (as well as religious) authorities. Meanwhile, the rationalist Protestant staging of reflexivity also implies moral obligations through bonding commitments to territorially defined local and national forms of citizenship. For those who are neither bonded Protestants nor territorialised local/national citizens, ‘integration’ is not easy. The weight of bridging and bonding varies, but Nordic Atlantic coping has indeed been a modernity project of territorial citizenship. This tradition is the opposite of what could become twenty-first-century trends of ‘dealing with people’ merely as professionals, taxpayers and consumers in regimes without territorial responsibilities (Bauman 2000). I have suggested that the coping practices that have produced Nordic Atlantic societies have their historical roots in the moral economies and generalised reciprocities of parish councils embedded in religious and national projects. The implicit regulative, normative and cognitive practices have to be seen as ways of exercising power through territorial boundaries

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at the municipal and national levels. For example, earlier Icelandic rural municipalities used to have laws to ensure that every inhabitant had work (Bærenholdt 1991). The real challenge is whether or not this mode of socio-spatial organisation is viable in an increasingly globalised world. Addressing Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Bauman raises these questions in terms of sameness: ‘the sameness evaporates once the communication between its insiders and the world outside becomes more intense and carries more weight than the mutual exchanges of the insiders’ (Bauman 2001: 13). Territorialities defined through the power of distance are leaking not only people’s bodies but, first and foremost, information. This affects not only small communities but the entire construction of a local-national nexus in Nordic societies. Some might argue that cultures and identities exist despite these trends. However, Bauman makes a crucial point with reference to works by Fredrik Barth (see Chapter 8 for a detailed discussion). Boundary drawings are not effects of identities – the opposite is the case: ‘the ostensibly shared “communal” identities are after-effects or by-products of forever unfinished (and all the more feverish and ferocious for that reason) boundary drawing’ (Bauman 2001: 17). ‘Communal’ identifications are challenged, and it is not obvious how mobilities should be bridged or bonded territorially.

Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies: A Plan of the Book The spatial production of societies in Nordic peripheries is about reshaping place in international relations. It is about coping processes that are aimed at producing social orders on the move. Connections, flows and multiple places are involved. Urry argues that there are ‘societies’, but that their societal capacity has been transformed through becoming elements within systems of global complexity. These systems possess no tendencies towards equilibrium and all sorts of social relationships get ineluctably drawn into the attractor of glocalization. There are various networks and fluids roaming the globe that, unlike societies, possess the power of rapid movement across, over and under many societies as ‘regions’. (Urry 2003: 106–7)

However, I would like to stress here that systems of glocalisation are not beyond the control or actions of societies, but are co-produced by the engagement and enforcement of social strategies of becoming involved and building fluids and networks. Glocalisation is practised, and many actors in the Nordic Atlantic contribute to this. We need to develop the notion of ‘society’ beyond the metaphor of ‘region’. Coping with distance means producing societies of different kinds: associations or Bunds, socially distinctive socia(bi)lities or mobilities of

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privileged people, and building societies, but also countries, nations, states and transnational cooperation. At least two notions of ‘society’ can be distinguished. On the one hand, societies are associations of actors; on the other hand, they are political entities, the latter being associated with the metaphor of the ‘region’ (in line with Giddens 1984). While social theory has traditionally understood societies as territorially defined and socially bonding, this book underlines the mobile character of many associations and acknowledges that political systems (should) bridge across social and cultural distinctions, rather than bonding them into sameness. Thus, in contrast to traditional foci on the intersection of the ‘territorial bonding’ of local communities and the ‘mobile bridging’ of external linkages, there are the crucial dynamics of the intersections between the associations produced by ‘mobile bonding’ and the political systems produced by ‘territorial bridging’. There are tensions between mobile associations and networks that are committed to common goals and identifications, and the attempts of territorial states and municipalities to moderate, control and regulate these flows and bonds to secure and bridge citizens. The book also investigates the networks and flows involved in interpersonal reciprocal relations and in market relations that cross-cut and transcend traditional, bordering definitions of societies. Since societies, associations, communities, states and powers are not given, their genesis and restructuring are investigated here through the practices by which they are defined, performed, stabilised and eroded. The book consists of nine chapters. Chapters 2 and 3, together with this chapter, set out the theoretical and historical framework of the analysis. While the present chapter has introduced the key theoretical ideas concerning the concept of ‘coping’ and given some indication of the use the book will make of them in understanding the making of Nordic Atlantic societies, Chapter 2 provides a broader review of a few more relevant theoretical approaches and research traditions in studies of society making, thus adding to the concepts of society introduced at the start of Chapter 1. The review starts with community studies based on the social anthropology of Fredrik Barth and his influence in social sciences in Norway, including research traditions concerning Northern Norway. Chapter 2 continues with economic anthropology, economic sociology and economic geography (with Karl Polanyi as one inspiring figure) and more recent contributions to the study of regional development in geography. The chapter concludes by discussing practices, power, space and time, networks and mobility in more detail (making use of Michel Foucault among others), ending up with the methodology of the research. Chapter 3 then presents a general, long-term background introduction to Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland from the perspective of historical geography. While a number of more specific historical routes are also pursued in the chapters that follow,

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Chapter 3 only targets certain selected, general pathways in the historical development of Nordic Atlantic society, giving specific emphasis to the ways in which history is used to bridge distances in time. In the rest of the book, empirical case material from the historical geography of the Nordic Atlantic and from selected contemporary locality studies is used in analysing the theme of each chapter. Since this book is not an attempt to write a comprehensive regional geography or comparative analysis, these chapters do not cover Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland equally. Northern Norway has been the target of much interesting research using approaches equivalent to those in this book. Greenland, on the other hand, differs in many ways from the others, because of the continued presence of colonialism and its very isolated situation. Greenland is more or less the opposite extreme to Northern Norway. This justifies the greater emphasis I place on case material from Northern Norway and Greenland. However, in respect of certain themes, the specific histories and case studies from Iceland and the Faroes provide some of the material that is most critically important to the analysis. This is, for example, the case with Iceland with regard to transport and fisheries and with the Faroes regarding municipalities and national ambivalence, as will be spelled out in the following plan of the second and third parts of the book. It is simply worth stressing that case material from one locality in one country is not meant to represent that country as such. Often studies from one locality recall the features of processes and relations that pertain to a locality in another country rather than, for example, the neighbouring locality in the same country. Since the generalisations I do suggest are theoretical in character, the reader should not be confused by an idea of generalisation that is only valid in respect of certain territories. This is especially the case since the processes constitutive to societies are spelled out, travel, inspire, connect and are communicated across countries. These are (with chapter numbers in brackets) transport (4), fisheries (5), tourism (6), municipal government (7), colonialism (5, 6 and 8), nationalism (8) and transnationalism (8 and 9), to give just an idea. Especially the second part of the book, Chapters 4, 5 and 6, underlines the mobile practices that are constitutive in the formation of various societies in the Nordic Atlantic. Chapter 4 deals with the formative role of transport and communications. It draws on the history of transport of Northern Norway, but also discusses the critical importance of transport systems, especially in the building of the Circle Road in Iceland and in the always disputed use of sea and air transport in Greenland. Chapter 5 then deals with fisheries, including reciprocities and associations performed at a distance. Research from Northern Norway in particular shows how these work in everyday life, but this is again supplemented with materials from the rather different fisheries of Greenland (field study from Uummannaq) and Iceland, both of which are restructuring themselves into more liberal,

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if not neoliberal, regimes, though on rather different paths or stages. Chapter 6 analyses tourism development as a potential society builder. While it takes off from the background to the history of Arctic exploration around Greenland, it examines contemporary cases from Greenland (field study from Ilulissat) and Northern Norway. Each chapter is introduced by way of conceptual and historical discussions that are central to their respective thematic foci, their conclusions being the building blocks to our understanding of the variety of social figurations that are produced. While Chapter 4 is more descriptive, introducing infrastructures in each of the four countries, Chapters 5 and 6 are also occupied with developing conceptual understandings together with specific cases. The third part of the book, consisting of Chapters 7, 8 and 9, seeks to investigate the territorial practices of municipalities, nations and states, and transnational cooperation, by which people have established territorial societies in response to networks and flows across the Nordic Atlantic. Chapter 7 examines the manifest society building in the form of municipalities, a crucial backbone in Nordic Atlantic social organisation, seeking to show how municipalities combine their own organisation, their territorial responsibilities for welfare and the place where people live. A contrast in ways of doing this is shown by comparing the municipalities of Storfjord in Northern Norway and Klaksvík in the Faroes. Chapter 8 broadens the theme to the Nordic welfare model and the connections between Nordism and the various nationalisms in Nordic Atlantic countries. The first part of the chapter analyses several aspects of Nordic nationalism, from cultural boundaries to socio-economic development. The other part of Chapter 8 investigates the historical making of nationalism in the four Nordic Atlantic areas and Nordism, in more detail than in the historical overview in Chapter 3. The book concludes with Chapter 9, which discusses various, rather different attempts to build transnational cooperation in the north, with most emphasis being placed on the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, and analysing how policies of ‘sustainable development’ are exploited in order to make and sustain cross-border connections. While each of the chapters can also be read separately with their conclusions, the end of Chapter 9 also provides a short, general conclusion to the whole book. It does not summarise chapter conclusions as such, but draws lines along the territorial–mobile, bridging–bonding terminology used throughout the book and critically considers its potential contribution to the social sciences and to policies in the Nordic Atlantic.

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Notes 1. This and the three following sections are based on parts of an article on ‘Coping Strategies, Social Capital and Space’, with Nils Aarsæther of the University of Tromsø as co-author, in European Urban and Regional Studies (Bærenholdt and Aarsæther 2002). I thank Nils for his support and our cooperative work over many years. 2. Here I am drawing on case studies of projects of local development in Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes from the NORDREGIO (Nordic Centre for Spatial Development) project, ‘Coping Strategies and Regional Policies, Social Capital in Nordic Peripheries’ (Benediktsson and Skaptadóttir 2002; Hovgaard 2002; Bærenholdt 2002a, b; Jóhannesson et al. 2003). I thank Karl, Unnur, Gestur and Gunnar for fruitful cooperation and inspiration. I make further use of their materials in later chapters.

2 EMPOWERING RESEARCH


Introduction Investigating how societies are produced by way of people’s coping raises a number of crucial questions in social theory. To insist on the historical and geographical context of these processes does not make theoretical considerations irrelevant. On the contrary, it raises specific requirements regarding the ontological, epistemological and methodological grounding of research. Whereas Chapter 1 introduced the framing concept of coping together with an initial discussion of the concept of society, this chapter focuses on the approaches that are relevant in researching the processes and practices through which societies are produced. The presentation of the three dimensions of coping, innovation, networking and identity formation gave an idea of the synthesis that this research is aiming to produce. It is an understanding of the production of the variety of societies in the Nordic Atlantic, where the spatial and temporal organisation of social relations (networking), the production and distribution of wealth (innovation) and the production of meaning and definitions (formation of identities) are all at centre stage. We may anticipate that the constitution of societies implies a combination of networking, innovation and identity formation, with the intersection of networking as the central process. One of the classics of social theory, Georg Simmel’s two essays, ‘Das Problem der Soziologie’ and ‘Exkurs über das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’ (1959a,b) proposed a wide definition of society as what exists when a number of individuals enter into interaction with one another. Such interaction can be due to certain instincts or purposes, where people develop ‘specific forms of being with and for one another’, rather than just being beside one another. ‘It becomes a society only when the vitality of these contents attains the form of reciprocal influence; only when one individual has an effect, immediate or mediate, upon another, is mere

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spatial aggregation or temporal succession transformed into society’ (Simmel 1959a [1908]: 315). Societies are made through these ‘interactions’, without the society as such being the purpose of the concrete actions. Societies thus include both everything contributing to their production and the total effect of this, though the latter is more or less abstract. While sociology as a science is defined in relation to the conceptual totality, Simmel’s examples are about relations ‘momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, ephemeral or of grave consequence, but they incessantly tie men together. At each moment such threads are spun, dropped, taken up again, displaced by others, interwoven with others’ (Simmel 1959a: 328). Relations are made into what are nowadays called networks, or what Nobert Elias called ‘social figurations’ (see Chapter 1). To understand the formation of societies in this way, I suggest drawing inspiration from a number of theoretical traditions. The first is generative social anthropology and the tradition of community studies, especially in Norway, which took off with the works of Fredrik Barth. On microsociological grounds, this approach and tradition have been central in research on social processes in the Nordic Atlantic. Secondly, there are the traditions of economic anthropology, economic sociology and economic geography with regard to the production and distribution of wealth. One important writer in these traditions is Karl Polanyi. However, economic geography adds more specific and specialised discussions of the spatial organisation of industrial activity that has been formative in the regional development of society. Regional development research has the potential not only to study the distribution of more or less already existing social, political and economic resources, but also to approach regional development as a central aspect in the constitution of societies as such. In other words, since we cannot understand the making of societies without its spatial and temporal dimensions, the processes of regional development, the distribution of wealth, social interaction and technologically mediated connections have to be understood as ontologically much more important than many have seen it hitherto. However, neither generative social anthropology nor the various more or less economic approaches to regional development have really addressed questions of how spatial practices inherently exercise power productively, including the use of mobility. The third stream of theoretical inspirations thus seeks its groundings in especially the later works of Michel Foucault on productive power relations, but adding to this discussions of Actor–Network Theory and of a (critical) mobility paradigm. With inspiration from Foucault, it is argued that societies are produced by relations that are immanent in the coping practices of everyday life. This third approach conceptualises space and time as integrated aspects of coping, opening a space for empowering research methodologies, where the role of practice is highlighted. In a number of cases, later chapters of this book readdress

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theoretical issues in relation to specific fields; in the present chapter I am simply seeking to establish a broader background.

Society as an Unintended Consequence of Interactions The work of the Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth is one central reference point in research on local and community development in the Nordic Atlantic, especially with regard to Northern Norway. It was Barth’s achievement to frame generative understandings of the making of society locally. In his three classic lectures, published as Models of Social Organisation (1966), Barth stressed how to understand human choices through a processual model. He argued that ‘Explanation is not achieved by a description of the pattern of regularity, no matter how meticulous and adequate, nor by replacing this description by other abstractions congruent with it, but by exhibiting what makes the pattern, i.e. certain processes’ (Barth 1981: 35, original emphasis). Barth was thus inclined to investigate how social relations come into being, and he therefore criticised structuralist and holistic/functionalist approaches (Barth 1994: 11). His focus is instead on interpersonal relations understood as transactions guided by reciprocity. But in these transactions each person is seen as acting strategically, since single partners or actors ‘in the course of their interaction systematically try to assure that the value gained for them is greater or equal to the value lost’ (Barth 1981: 38). This presupposition of the utilitarian maximising of values is a problematic feature of Barth’s work. The approach is made even more explicit, almost resembling the notion of ‘economic man’, in some of the works of Ottar Brox, the single most influential researcher in Northern Norwegian social sciences, particularly in his studies of how people seek to maximise the values they are attached to (Brox 1978). The key related issue is thus where these values come from. Both Barth (1981) and Brox (1978) tend to argue that transactions produce a consistency of values among those who interact, while in his later writings (as published in Barth 1981: 85; see also the discussion on boundaries in Chapter 8) Barth weakened or even contradicted this idea. The generative model of social processes leads to an understanding of society as the aggregate of people’s actions, since Barth stressed that all thoughts, in any cultural tradition, are performed by individuals (1994: 13). In his more applied and political writings, Ottar Brox explained his populist alternative to technocratic planning as follows: The populist, in contradiction [to technocratic planning], would conceive of Northern Norway as composed of local communities [lokalsamfunn in Norwegian], which are then again composed of families. From this it follows that if one were to have an economically successful Northern Norway, one has to start up economic development in each of the local communities, meaning that

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one has to maximize the economic possibilities for the each of the families. (Brox 1966: 179, my translation from the Norwegian)

Through such programmes, Brox managed to set a research agenda, as well as political agendas that became influential during the 1970s. The theoretical criticism of him was that he overlooked the dynamics of larger societies, and especially of capitalism, from the position of what critics called an anti-modern politics of survival (Asheim 1985) – though Brox would present his own position as anti-capitalist and modern. This debate between Broxians and ‘modernists’ is still haunting debates in political research, especially regarding Northern Norway, which I will not engage in here. Here we are seeking the conceptual foundations, since Barth’s and Brox’s ’bottom-up’ approach has obvious similarities with the coping approach. Barth has often been accused of methodological individualism, and in one passage he accepted that this might be a valid term for the perspective he adopted in many of his essays. He insisted on not seeing human action as predetermined and on seeing human interpretation as individual, and he suggested building bridges between micro- and macro-perspectives by way of generative models (Barth 1994: 13–15). Barth’s approach reminds one of Goffman’s works, and Goffman is also a key reference for Barth. Goffman, again pointing back to Simmel, was probably neither a methodological individualist nor a methodological collectivist, but rather a methodological relationist, arguing against a radical interactionist approach (in line with Giddens’s later argument; see Chapter 1), where all social phenomena emerge with face-to-face interaction (Goffman 2004). However, Barth would still argue that societies emerge only with human action, and he was therefore perhaps more of a methodological individualist than his predecessors (Simmel and Goffman). The question of how society should be conceptualised was addressed in a key essay by Barth (1992), where he discussed the difficulties in the often common use of the concept of society as a given overall frame. We assume societies to be orderly and closed entities, together with an all too simple distinction between endogenous and exogenous processes, and thus in subtle ways permit the nation state to become the implicit model of society (Barth 1992: 18). Barth listed six non-valid imaginations of society. First, societies are not only the aggregate of social relations: relations are much more complex. Secondly, societies are not only the sum of institutions, since this approach limits our understanding to more or less normative and formal relations. Thirdly, it is too simple to describe societies as the whole constructed from smaller parts. And, fourthly, it gives little meaning to conceive of only one global society or world system. Fifthly, societies cannot be defined in contrast to the environment; materials are directly engaged in social processes. Finally, the concept of society, just like culture, tends to

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homogenise and essentialise the social, while societies are in fact conflictridden. Thus Barth maintains his critique of an understanding of society as a closed, holistic system, equivalent to the model of the nation state (Barth 1992: 18–21). Interestingly, then, Barth has little to contribute to an alternative definition of society. He focuses on social actions and the need to follow the flows and circulations of social activities and networks, and he develops his critique into one of community studies, where anthropologists have been guilty of producing perverse understandings, obstructing the fieldworker’s research. He explained the obsession of researchers with local communities as based on over-simple pre-understandings, the excessive thinness of materials collected only allowing for holistic generalisation, and not least on the fact that much fieldwork was conducted in colonial situations, where external relations were uneasy to analyse. He argued that data had been filtered so that ‘all links beyond the local community could be ignored as distortions and dilutions of a pristine state of cultural purity and homogeneity. Behind the above, however, I sense a fear of the destruction of a simple template of “society”, with the loss of innocence and the frightening enlargement of ethnographic and analytic tasks that would entail’ (Barth 1992: 31). These warnings derive to a high degree from the studies by Barth and his colleagues in the Middle East, including Afghanistan among other areas, where his work represents an early and remarkable critique of essentialism (see Chapter 8), since he departed from the research context that ‘the constitution of ethnic groups and the nature of the boundaries between them, have not been correspondingly investigated [as ‘the difference between cultures and their historical boundaries and connections’]. Social anthropologists have largely avoided these problems by using a highly abstracted concept of ‘society’ to represent the encompassing social system within which smaller, concrete groups and units may be analysed’ (Barth 1969: 9). In a much later reconsideration of these works, Barth maintained his earlier position, while now also addressing the use of the widespread term ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). He accepts that we need to analyse how people ascribe qualities to ethnic groups, and thus, in practice, make them homogeneous essentials, thus shaping a fiction with consequences, by acting from these. But Barth stresses, in a realist sense, that this does not mean that people actually acquire the quality that has been ascribed to them (Barth 1994: 176). Barth’s concept of society remains unclear, and this may also be intentional, since societies need to be studied through the concrete processes that make them. Unintentionally, this does mean, however, that Barth’s approach is often taken as an understanding of society as an aggregate of discrete actions. However, his interaction approach would stress that the outcomes of processes are more subtle than simply their aggregate.

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Processes and transactions make a web of relations and even conflicts that are both material and attributed imaginations with consequences. This inclusion of materialities and imaginations in the approach to relations and transactions, which is implicit in Barth’s considerations (as referred to above), helps our understanding of how societies are stabilised in time and space. In other words, societies are also politically made, but this too happens in an unintended manner. Brox stresses how making society by means of politics is in no way a question of publicly discussed objectives. Societies are made through the means that are set in motion, under the umbrella of whatever stated objectives (Brox 2003). Brox’s emblematic example is the political decision to introduce transferable quotas in fisheries, where the overall stated political objectives dominate in such a way that the discrete consequences of the means (converting fishing rights into quasi-private property) are not properly addressed or investigated. In line with Barth’s arguments, Brox thus stresses that certain means have consequences that are independent of the qualities ascribed to them. Interestingly, Brox’s (later) political writings are not much linked to the methodological individualism ascribed to his (earlier) community research. Practices become institutionalised into various forms of system (such as transferable quotas) that are responsible for the making of social distinctions, but they remain open-ended. Therefore, the practical consequence of the generative approach to making society is still to conceive of research as something to be used for political constructive work. Brox has been seen as the incarnation of this type of politically engaged intellectual. Another international example in planning would be John Friedmann, who also coined the notion of empowerment. Like Brox (2003), Friedmann early advocated ‘interrogation’ as a consequence of his post-positivism but also realism. In the epilogue to his classic Planning in the Public Domain, Friedmann stated that ‘the world is real, and that it can only be known – to the extent it can be known – through a form of empathic inquiry, which is a way of interrogating a social reality that has the capacity to answer back’ (Friedmann 1987: 415). Though Barth’s approach does not necessarily lead to Friedmann’s empowerment, there is a meaningful connection. For, if societies are made by discrete interactions that are not always acknowledged, then research can claim relevance by pointing to its ability to make people themselves acknowledge how societies are made, and that societies can therefore also be remade by people. Research is seen as a potentially empowering practice, provided that researchers communicate with people on these possibilities. On the other hand, Brox’s generative planning and Friedmann’s empowerment also contain within them the problem of implicit dichotomies. In Brox’s work this is found in the contradiction between people living in

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the (especially marginal) communities, on the one hand, and the state apparatus with its colonising bureaucracy of the welfare state, on the other (Brox 1984), while in Friedmann’s approach to planning the contradiction is between people who are territorially embedded in their communities and the economic forces of functional integration that tend to unite capital and the state (Friedmann and Weaver 1979). Thus, the generative and empowering approach tends to built on an ‘us from below’ versus a ‘them from above’ dichotomy. This can be questioned since it does not really critically question the formation and position of the ‘we’, especially when intellectuals claim to be the spokesmen of the unprivileged. Also, ‘from below’ politics may have unintended consequences, which are often associated with the formation of economies, as will be discussed in the following.

Societies by Means of Economy and Regional Politics No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets. (Polanyi 1957: 43)

Karl Polanyi’s work The Great Transformation has been influential in traditions of economic anthropology, economic sociology and economic geography in investigating the various kinds of means, mentioned by Brox above, that are more or less discretely involved in the making of societies. While many of these traditions have become more specialised into fieldspecific research questions, Polanyi was particularly interested in studying the relationship between economy and society. While it can indeed be asked whether the distinction between economy and society is theoretically viable (Callon 1998; see also below), Polanyi’s work has proved fundamental in researching how the organisation of economy and society intersects. His work was driven by his interest in deconstructing the obsession of neoclassical economics with markets. ‘Our thesis is that the idea of a selfadjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness’ (Polanyi 1957: 3). Polanyi argued that economies are more substantial than the formal and abstract conceptions of neoclassical economics imagines. Social ties are critical to economic life in at least two principal ways: reciprocity and redistribution (Polanyi 1957: 47). While these are two fundamental forms of social integration, it is debatable to what extent markets are forms of social integration. Polanyi (1957) is somehow ambivalent about this question, since he criticised the idea of market integration as being abstract and as lacking social relations, while he also approached markets as a

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certain form of social integration, re-embedded into society. Enzo Mingione, in his Fragmented Societies (1991; see also Mingione 2004), argues that markets are not socially integrative, thus challenging Polanyi’s ambivalence. In Mingione’s and, in part, Polanyi’s view, markets do not constitute societies; they are only nourished from the social relations that are performed by way of reciprocity and redistribution. Mingione in his work exchanged the concept of redistribution for a notion of association to make the process aspect more apparent. Relationships of reciprocity are affective and most often lasting relationships between family members, friends and members of other social groups, among whom networks are based on the assumption of the mutual exchange of affection, services and even gifts, a classical theme in anthropology. Redistribution or association is about citizenship or the membership of states or other forms of association, including voluntary ones. It is a form of social integration that, through political regulation, permits the redistribution of economic resources among members or citizens, where there is often some sort of hierarchical social organisation involved. Market relations, then, are short-term agreements about prices and the exchange of goods, services and money. They tend to have a devastating impact on the two other, more ‘traditional’ forms of social relations (Polanyi 1957; Mingione 2004). The concept of embeddedness is a legacy of Polanyi’s work (Hovgaard 1998, 2001). There are two traditions in economic sociology referring to this notion, otherwise broadly known through Giddens’s ideas of ‘disembedding’ and ‘re-embedding’ (Giddens 1990). The first form is a broader tradition of political economy, analysing economies and societies at the macro-level (for example, Jessop 2000). But it is more in the tradition of Granovetter’s ‘new economic sociology’ (1985) that the concept has been reintroduced. Granovetter interprets embeddedness as a network concept (developed from Granovetter 1973). This entails a focus at the micro-level, since he argues that sociologists have generated over-socialised understandings, as opposed to economists, with their under-socialised approaches. Granovetter and the ‘new economic sociology’ are also criticised for their lack of a more social perspective and for having a too static approach, as compared, for example, with Barth’s interaction analysis (Hovgaard 1998, 2001; Mingione 2004). Granovetter’s work has been further developed by Gernot Grabher (1993, 2001, 2004), who has stressed the open character of socio-economic networks, the risk of embeddedness becoming locked in industrial districts, and the various temporal forms of organisation in economies that are increasingly organised not only in networks but also in projects. There are also interesting works on the economic sociology of immigration (Portes 1995), contributing with questions of the territorial character of embeddedness that is often assumed (see Chapter 1). Portes, like Grabher, also

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presents critical questions regarding how ‘tight-knit groups’ can become problematic, since, although they may be innovative in one setting, in another they can undermine entrepreneurship (Portes 1995: 16). But the territorial assumptions of the embeddedness thesis have also been questioned in the context of more extensive cross-border regional networks, such as the Japan centre networks of the ‘flying geese region’ and the ‘Greater China’ network region (Sum 1997). This is to reintroduce a more comprehensive political economy approach, which is more in line with Polanyi than with Granovetter. However, none of these works really addresses the ontological questions of the formation of society that are implicit in Polanyi’s original contribution. However, ontological questions of how economies emerge have been addressed by Michel Callon (1998, 1999). Thus Callon charges that Polanyi and Granovetter work with a distinction between economy and society as two distinct fields, that is false, since it tends implicitly to take economies for granted as processes governed by markets. This problem is especially apparent in Granovetter’s distinction between over-socialised and under-socialised approaches to the economy, which seems to rest on the assumption that there could be a non-societal economy. Here Callon tends to agree with Polanyi that the non-societal economy is only an abstraction manufactured by neoclassical economics (Callon 1999). But, although Callon, with his Actor–Network Theory (ANT) approach, would not accept a taken-for-granted notion of society, he is more interested in the relationship between economies and economics. Provocatively, he argues that economies can be embedded in economics rather than in societies (Callon 1998), meaning that markets can become working social relations if they are enacted and stabilised (see Chapter 5 for further discussions on this). Of course, for ANT approaches, the stabilising of economic relations is not only a question of the committed social relations of reciprocity and association. Material artefacts, buildings, financial systems, etc. can also stabilise economies, for example, in performing markets. However, I would argue that such stabilisers have also been produced through social relations and human practices, including those performed over distances. I shall return to ontology more precisely in the section ‘Across Distances’. Economic geography has addressed the spatial aspects of the organisation of innovation processes. In particular, economic geographers have been interested in how firms work in agglomerations of industrial districts, in clusters or via localised learning based on tacit knowledge to explain either how agglomerations appear or how firms become innovative. There has been a long-term dominant interest in territoriality and localised processes in economic geography (Amin and Thrift 1995; Storper 1995; Asheim 2003a; Malmberg and Maskell 2003). Many of these studies have rested on assumptions about innovative abilities in milieux of proximity,

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while the ways in which economic practices have coped with distance have been of less interest in the clustering literature so far. However, there are exceptions to this, some of them included in works by Peter Dicken and his associates. In continuing discussions of his widely read (and much revised) work Global Shift (2003), he and his associates have recently engaged in discussions on commodity chain analysis and ANT (Dicken et al. 2001). One of their central points is the need to understand how economies are performed at a distance. It is important not only to broaden the agenda of interest in regional development further than just successful agglomerations of firms (or agglomerations of successful firms) to understand regional development with regard to the gains for inhabitants (see Amin and Thrift 1994, as discussed in Chapter 1). Economic practices that cope with distance are also central in understanding how societies are produced and stabilised by means of the networks and flows that are performed and by the wealth thus created and circulated. The substantive content in many innovative practices consists to a high degree of how certain resources, goods, services, bodies of knowledge and images are transported over distances most effectively. Economic practices cope with distances in substantive ways, both in between firms and between firms and consumers or final users, and to a high degree it is through these practices that the phenomenon of markets is enacted. Though still thinking in terms of inside–outside or endogenous– exogenous as critiqued by Barth, many recent studies in economic geography have placed a new emphasis on the role of social fields performed over distances, for example, in fish processing in Norway (Fløysand and Jakobsen 2002). Michael Taylor and Simon Leonard have raised important questions regarding the widespread combination of the embeddedness thesis and the thesis of localisation. They point out that ‘The assumption implicit in the model is, however, that “embedded” equals “local”’ (Taylor and Leonard 2002: 3). Furthermore, economic geographies of localised learning have ignored the processes of exclusion involved in the cases they work with, since ‘economic relations involve more than a dynamic tension between collaboration and competition, they also involve the more brutal exercise of power, through the control of resources, the manipulation of relationships or the exercise of discipline’ (Taylor and Leonard 2002: 6). These blind spots, so central in making societies, are becoming especially problematic, with studies of embeddedness and localisation being turned into politics and built on overgeneralisations of findings in particular examples, which are not even sustainable over time themselves. Such analyses often reify institutions that turn out to be bound up in more specific paths of development than the generalisation of findings permits to be shown. It is, for example, problematic that the localised learning model has been used in generating policies in tourism development, since the model does not seem

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valid in this sector (see the discussion in Bærenholdt et al. 2004, Chapter 2). Although Malmberg and Maskell (2003: 14) have a point in stating that certain localised capabilities are decisive for success, thus linking firms to regions, it is debatable whether it is exactly tacit knowledge that forms the most localised factors in contrast to ubiquities. Admittedly labour markets have territorial limits, and this should be addressed in the politics of regional development (see below). It is striking, though, how the use of bare, physically fixed characteristics of places has been overlooked in theories, since these have mainly been developed from cases of relationships between enterprises manufacturing transportable goods. Summing up, firm-oriented approaches to economic relations between firms in economic sociology and economic geography have gone a long way beyond Polanyi’s interest in how economies make societies work and vice versa. Broader approaches, including more systematic and contextual studies of relations between the economy and culture and institutional regulations (Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2003), are required. Policies of regional development need more subtle discussions, taking into account how economies are performed at a distance. This must be the case, at least if the goal is to contribute with empowering research. One of the most remarkable contributions linking the discussions in economic geography above with regional development policies is found in Ash Amin’s article, ‘Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Place’ (Amin 2004), in which the author addresses the pertinent questions of how to develop politics in relation to the presence of strong, non-territorial economic and cultural relations. It is an important example of how one can think of the politics of innovation, networking and identity formation together. Amin takes as his point of departure the ‘spatial stretching and territorial perforation associated with globalization’ by way of international transport and communication, but also ‘faith communities, dream worlds and cultural domains that cut across lines of longitude and latitude’ (Amin 2004: 33). This means that the territorial integrity of regions, cities or, I may add, even societies can no longer be taken for granted. He evokes a contrast between territorial and relational space that looks problematic, since I would argue that territorial space can easily be relational (as defined in Chapter 1). However, various new forms of regionalism responding to these challenges are ‘based on the assumption that territorial autonomy will: 1) restore local control and democracy; 2) increase economic returns; and 3) strengthen sense of attachment’ (Amin 2004: 34). These expectations are all problematic, he argues, and he gives reasons similar to those presented above. Instead he suggests developing ‘a politics of place that is consistent with a spatial ontology of cities and regions seen as sites of heterogeneity juxtaposed with close spatial proximity, and as sites of multiple geographies of affiliation, linkage and flow’ (Amin 2004: 38).

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These, then, become both a ‘politics of propinquity’ and a ‘politics of connectivity’. Amin does not regard it as realistic to have public spheres defined territorially, but he suggests, that whatever the spatial organisation of economies, cultures and politics, there are differences between a growthbefore-equity and a growth-for-equity type of policy. It is this second form of regional policies, growth-for-equity, that addresses the issues raised by Polanyi. By implication reciprocity, and especially redistribution, are meant to produce obligations among people and solidarity in the circulation of wealth. Such perspectives are crucial for regional development in the type of periphery studied in this book, as are the needs of innovation. In practising economy–culture in meaningful ways, there will most often be an intrinsic ambivalence between securing reciprocity and redistribution among a well-defined territorial or bonded community of particular people and the more porous and innovative relationships, mobile or bridging, that secure connections and inspirations. This is in many ways more complicated than just the mobilities of capital and the territorialities of politics, since the coping strategies involved combine these in complex ways. No general model applies, but some are definitely more to the benefit of the marginal than others, though the strict integration of all in the same project does not need to be beneficial. Social formations may be performed within the remittances of migrant workers, and societies are also performed along routes of movement, but they are also about politically defined entities committed to the redistribution of wealth and welfare, thus making questions of inclusion and exclusion pertinent. These are not only questions about socio-spatial justice, but also about socio-temporal responsibilities and affiliations. In reformulating a politics and economies of empowerment based on a relational approach to space and place, which I prefer to characterise in terms of the more mundane coping concept, Doreen Massey (2004), like Amin’s article discussed above, suggests ‘Geographies of Responsibility’. Interestingly this does not mean a relational definition of responsibility that is open only to extension in space, but also one that is open to extension in time. It includes what I would call temporal reciprocities and redistribution, but also responsibilities for past events. These could be responsibilities connected to a colonial legacy that we cannot easily escape, in spite of not having been directly involved in them (Massey 2004: 9–10). Such responsibilities can result in forms of redistributive transfers, like those from Denmark to Greenland (discussed in Chapter 8), which are pivotal to societal figurations. However, this also implies more complicated socio-spatial-temporal organisations of societies than could be envisaged in Brox’s or Friedmann’s approaches to territorially embedded empowerment (discussed at the end of the previous section). Empowerment becomes more relational and cross-cutting, certainly more than one unitary concept, but is rather a plural and active concept of

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empowering practices, including those of research and the invention of new concepts. A very central challenge, then, is to approach the concept of power relationally, as is also implicit in the work of Amin and Massey, to be discussed in the next section. So far, I have argued that societies are produced through processes and relations by way of coping practices, in part as unintended consequences. How humans engage in the economies of reciprocity and redistribution is decisive to the economies and regional policies that are central in the production of societies. A central feature in so doing is how people cope with distances, since it is an open question to what extent the formative relations and processes are practices in proximity or at a distance. In other words (e.g. Amin’s), what becomes of the relationship between the ‘politics of propinquity’ and the ‘politics of connectivity’? Add to this reciprocities and redistribution not only in space but also in time. Along these lines, how should one approach power that is practised relationally?

Societies Practised by Way of Power Relations It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (Foucault 1979: 92–93)

In his ‘political’ works of the 1970s (see Heede 1992), including Discipline and Punish (1991) and especially the ‘Method’ chapter in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1979), Michel Foucault famously outlined an approach to power relations as productive, thus inspiring my approach to coping as the contingent production of societies. To Foucault, power became a concept of practices or strategies, performed everywhere and on the move. Foucault stressed the mobile relations involved in power practices that are non-reducible to one central ‘Power’ authority – ‘Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations’ (Foucault 1979: 94) – and his propositions continued with the productive role of power relations, power coming from below, power relations being simultaneously intentional and non-subjective, and power always being in an internal relationship with resistance. However, it is still worth discussing how these immanent relations ‘constitute their own organization’ (from the first quote above). Foucault’s answer would

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probably be to investigate this in concrete terms, thus – in spite of his structuralist legacy – leaving questions of social ontology open. I shall return to this in the next section. In Foucault’s approach, the central ‘Power’ of authority is only an embedded effect, coming out of the complexity of power relations. He therefore makes an analytical distinction between inert ‘Power’ (with capital P) and mobile power relations. ‘Power [implicitly, relations] is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.’ And ‘“Power” [with capital P], insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement’ (Foucault 1979: 93). Therefore, for Foucault, especially in his later works, notions of central ‘Power’ and authority rest on the complex movements of practices working by way of discrete power relations from below. Foucault thus wished to replace the prevalent conceptualisation of power as sovereignty ‘with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced’ (Foucault 1979: 102). This did not, however, prevent him from working precisely with concepts of sovereignty, territory, government and society, though always, as I shall show later, demonstrating how these concepts emerged historically together with certain social transformations. Foucault used to demonstrate his approach with the example of how families and states are co-performed through what he called ‘double conditioning’ (Foucault 1979: 99). The relations between the family, and typically the dominance of the father, and the state and its governance should be seen neither as a discontinuity between micro and macro, nor as a homogeneous projection of one another, but exactly as both-ways practices conditioning each other. Gilles Deleuze, in his appraisal simply entitled Foucault (Deleuze 1988), clearly explains these ways of thinking about power, which are already presented in Discipline and Punish. Deleuze saw Foucault’s approach as a commentary on the persistent problems of power for Marxian approaches. For Foucault, then, power ‘is less a property than a strategy, and its effects cannot be attributed to an appropriation’ (Deleuze 1988: 25), since it is rather a question of exercise, of tactics, of techniques, since ‘Power has no essence; it is simply operational’ (Deleuze 1988: 27). ‘Therefore we should not ask: “What is power and where does it come from?”, but “How is it practised?”’ (Deleuze 1988: 70). Power relations are practised in nonstratified and flexible ways, and involve resistance of what I would call a fundamental or ontological character, since Deleuze proposed seeing ‘life as the set of those functions which resist death’ (Deleuze 1988: 93). This recalls my initial definition of coping as handling a problem successfully, though not a problem of the actors’ own making. It is something people

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have to contend with, something they cannot escape. That is, life is a way of coping with death. But coping should be understood as being relational like the power relations and practices in Foucault’s approach. Coping deals with ‘relations between forces’ distributing, ordering and composing societies in space and time. Another close reading of Foucault is found in Stuart Elden’s Mapping the Present (2001), which in particular sees Foucault’s overall project as one of ‘spatial history’. He dates Foucault’s reorientation from language and discourse to non-discursive practices and power, the shift from archaeology to genealogy, to the events of 1968. Foucault then became more political, more interested in how societies emerge historically and transform themselves with changes in how power is exercised. Foucault’s concept of power is connected with the particular French wording of pouvoir, rather than the other word for power (Power above), equivalent to the German Macht, namely puissance (Elden 2001: 106; see also Allen 2003: 106). This is no coincidence, since pouvoir is also a verb meaning ‘to be able to’. Foucault thus understands power and resistance as empowerment, and power is thus something other than just dominations. As Elden remarks, ‘we must recognize what Foucault means by power. Foucault’s suggestion is that there are relations of power because the subjects are free: were they not free there would be no need to use power’ (Elden 2001: 106). Foucault’s approach to power as pouvoir is thus contextualised as an approach to how people socialise in a modern, post-absolutist, situation. The provocative and also obvious point in this approach is to acknowledge how ‘empowerment’ is deeply embedded in the whole Western, modern, democratic tradition, where people are not forced as such to obey but themselves exercise the force relations that form societies. However, this also means that political systems are fragile and porous, since they can be changed in unforeseeable ways through people’s actions. One example of this could be the rather spontaneous transformations in Eastern and Central Europe in and around 1989. Foucault’s approach to power as pouvoir has particularly been discussed in geography by John Allen (2003, 2004). Allen’s aim is ‘to argue that neither a centred nor a decentred view of power is particularly helpful in terms of understanding the spatial trappings of power’ (Allen 2004: 19). Much of his Lost Geographies of Power (2003) is therefore ambivalent with regard to Foucault’s notion of power as pouvoir, since he also wants to sustain a more centred view of power as puissance, that is, capacity or in Italian potenza. Throughout his work, Allen consistently wants to sustain the distinction and develop both concepts in parallel, as both the instrumental ‘power over’ others and the associational ‘power to’ act (Allen 2003: 5). Meanwhile, he is sceptical of various notions of fluid power or power as a thing or an attribute, since power ‘cannot be possessed as resources can’ (Allen 2003: 63). Power can be networks but not flows of

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things. But Allen criticises Foucault’s ‘immanent’ approach to power, since Foucault does not distinguish distinctive, different ways of exercising power (such as manipulation versus authority, domination versus coercive threat, seduction versus persuasion), nor is he really able to determine ‘what is not a relation of power’ (Allen 2003: 78). Allen then distinguishes between four modalities of power: manipulation, authority, domination and seduction (Allen 2003: 102). For the approach and analysis in this book, Allen’s sceptical remarks on Foucault are not very relevant, since my project is to perform a kind of historical geography (‘spatial history’) of particular societies, not write a book about the concept of power. However, this also means that I see Allen’s ambivalence with Foucault’s approach disturbing, since the idea of introducing a number a different notions of power is exactly to take away (or undermine, some would say) the point in Foucault’s concrete, historical analysis of how, of the ways in which, power is exercised. To Foucault it would be nonsense to discuss various types of power as part of a general and principal framework, as he would respond with questions of historical contexts and transformations, where such variations may apply in practice. In contrast, then, one could ask whether Foucault does not generalise historical transformations too frequently, or at least whether his works are not given an overgeneralised interpretation. But, in Foucault’s analysis, it is not meaningful to operate with central-instrumental concepts of power, such as authority and dominance, alongside power relations, since it is exactly his point that these centred Power forms could not work in the modern world if they were not conditioned by power relations (also domination) among people. In understanding how people came to the idea of having to defend a society, Foucault lectured to his students: In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty … rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all powers drive, either by way of consequences or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their difference, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another’. (Foucault 2003: 265–66)

Power as a resource or capacity can be interesting, but only in so far as it can actually be shown how it is mobilised, since there are so many examples of resources, capitals, instruments and laws etc. that have proved to be of no use, since they collapsed in not being operational. Therefore Callon’s (1998) critique of the concept of social capital for reinstalling a dualism between practice and structure (see the section ‘Social Capital’ in Chapter 1) is also relevant to a suggestion that we should operate with both power as capacity and power as action or exercise. You do not have networks if you do not network. And the power involved in specific networks depends on how they are practised. This is something Pierre Bourdieu also seemed

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to acknowledge implicitly when he wrote: ‘The reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed’ (Bourdieu 1986: 250). Like social capital, power cannot be stored; the power of power lies in its being practised. Likewise, the spatiality of power does not come with the spatial form of some specific resource or flow, but with the spatiality in the practices that exercise power relations, thus also performing societies. Stuart Elden sees Foucault’s historical studies as being spatial ‘through and through’ (Elden 2001: 152). His reading of spatiality or geography in Foucault is more complicated than the rather ironic 1976 interview, where geography interviewers were obsessed with reading Foucault as a geographer because of his use of geographical metaphors. He answered: ‘But can you be sure that I am borrowing these terms from geography rather than from exactly where geography itself found them’ (Foucault 1980: 169), thus stressing the historical context of the production and the use of concepts, a history where geography itself is a player (Bærenholdt 1998b). Although there is no reason to attribute a certain spatial approach to Foucault when he did not (want to) make such an approach explicit, I derive inspiration from understanding the spatiality of power and society in his work. Likewise, both Elden and Allen argue for understanding how power, politics and the making of society are intrinsically spatial, inspired by Foucault. Thus coping is also intrinsically spatial in its combination of various forms, among others, territoriality and mobility (see Chapter 1). In Foucault’s work the spatiality of power relations is expressed not only in the endlessly quoted architecture of the panopticon, but also in his thoughts about states and societies as constituted through the ‘bio-power’ that began to be applied with the introduction of the terms ‘population’ and ‘territory’ (Foucault 2003; see also Stone 2004). Societies became historically defined through commonalities in manners and customs and in nationality and race, a new discourse beyond the authority of the sovereign thus coming into life. The idea of society comprising a population implied the empowerment of the people against their sovereigns, as they introduced the principle of territoriality, which in fact – and in contrast to many common interpretations – is different from that of sovereignty (Elden 2005: 13–14). In this way it became possible to think not only of wars between sovereign kings, but also between peoples ascribing to the notion that ‘Society must be defended’ (Foucault 2003). In this way, societies are ‘assembled’ through the power relations that people engage in as ‘the population’ of a ‘territory’. This is particularly important in understanding how modern states operate with the diffusion of what Foucault called ‘governmentality’ (2003) among people. Hansen and Stepputat thus stress that ‘the intensified regulation of modern societies was not a result of the penetration of the state as a center of power, but the

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other way around: the modern state was an ensemble of institutionalised forms made possible because of the general “governmentalization” of societies, that is, the specific way human practices became objects of knowledge, regulation, and discipline’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 4). Government thus becomes an immanent affair, in contrast to the direct repression of the sovereign (Allen 2003: 80). Government is affiliated with education, technical supplies, welfare provision, trading standards, heath regulation, infrastructure, lighting, etc. People govern themselves, but they are also governed by the ‘pastoral’ state and, importantly, agree to be governed. In his remarkable ‘Governmentality’ lecture, Foucault (1994) linked the modern, actually ‘post-sovereign’ state to the self-conduct or selfgovernment of people, morality and the extrapolation of the principles of the family or household economy to society at large: the national economy. As already stressed above, territoriality is a very central, more or less implicit spatial practice here. Also in this text, Foucault connects family/ household/patriarchy with the state: ‘To govern a state will mean, therefore, to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods’ (Foucault 1994: 234). These notions are central to this book, both to the understanding of how economies emerge (from Polanyi to Callon; see above and Chapter 5), and to the analysis of the various scales of ambivalent territorial economies in the Nordic Atlantic (see Chapters 7, 8 and 9). It is worth stressing that this is much more than a discursive exercise, through which people in power implement concepts, but rather it constitutes power relations practised by people in general in the name of the government of the people. Though empowerment does carry meaning in Foucault’s universe, it is more complex and less normative than in John Friedmann’s planning approach. This is because power relations are recognised as basic in almost all social relations, but also because productive processes actually produce the societies we live in. Empowerment loses its utopian, external relation to present practices and thus also becomes affiliated with the dark sides of social production. Foucault’s approach to surveillance and discipline has often been associated with repression and suppression, but his mode of analysis could also be seen as a very concrete, descriptive engagement with the world, without any illusions of how societies can work on the basis of people’s active contribution. It does not have the kinds of normative engagement it has in the case of Doreen Massey’s responsibility, since Foucault also showed how social responsibilities and responsibilities among people, conditioning each other, were governmentalised. Thus, in contrast to, for example, Habermas’s interest in ‘what should be done’, Foucault instead considers ‘what is actually done’ (see Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2004).

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As we saw above, Foucault offers, more or less implicitly, an interesting perspective on space together with power. This is due to his constant interest in the materiality and embodiment of social relations (Pratt 2004), but also his engagement with how concrete policies and measures shape societies over time. Both of these traces will penetrate the argument in the rest of this book, and they are spelled out as a relational understanding of power, along with society and space. I suggest that there is a certain similarity in the historical, relational approaches of Elias and Foucault, as I mentioned in Chapter 1. Elias stressed connections and relationships in his outline of the concept of power: The word ‘power’ again is usually used as if it referred to an isolated object in a state of rest. Instead we have shown that power denotes a relationship between two or more people, or perhaps even between people and natural objects, that power is an attribute of relationships, and that the word is best used in conjunction with a reminder about more or less fluctuating changes in power. That is an example of a concept traditionally based on static components being turned into a concept of relationship. (Elias 1978: 116, original emphasis)

From Elias (see Chapter 1) to Foucault – and with the additions of Barth, Polanyi/Mingione and Amin/Massey – there is a line of argument for relational and thus also kinds of ‘generative’ concepts of society, economy, space, time and power, facilitating integrated analysis of how they are practised. However, in order to outline more precisely the implications of a ‘coping with distance approach’, there are questions about the character of human relations and of relations among humans and non-humans where Foucault does not provide much clarification. The next section therefore discusses the materiality of social relations and reciprocity among humans in order to sum up the ontological points of departure of this book.

Across Distances The fundamental argument of this book is that societies – at least, as I shall show, those in the Nordic Atlantic – are shaped by way of people coping with distances. Distances are material, social and cultural, and importantly exist in both time and space. Societies, associations and power are thus performed, but not prescribed, the question being how they are performed (Latour 1986). Non-humans should not be confused with human actors, but it is a central characteristic of human societies (also in contrast to the societies of various monkeys) that their associations are supported by the active and creative use of objects, infrastructures, buildings and the like, and that social bonds among humans would not work without such nonhumans. In his study of the collapse of the ARAMIS transport system project, Bruno Latour suggests that social theory should ‘welcome crowds of nonhumans with open arms, just as it welcomed the working masses in

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the nineteenth century. Our collective is woven together out of speaking subjects, perhaps, but subjects to which poor objects, our inferior brothers, are attached at all points. By opening up to include objects, the social bond would become less mysterious’ (Latour 1996: viii). The study of ARAMIS was then performed in an interesting, descriptive, montage-like genre combining very different kinds of materials. This book also studies coping with material distances, through, for example, various mobility systems and the attempts to construct them materially, but this is strongly tied to the study of coping with social distances. Coping with social distances between people also implies vertical mobilities through social systems of redistribution, which are, of course, also materially performed by municipal authorities, state welfare agencies, etc. However, social distances are intertwined by cultural distances among various formations of identities, projects of identification and sameness. Therefore a central question becomes how people cope with cultural distances, where the wording ‘coping with distance’ should not make us believe in distance as absolute. On the contrary, as Derek Gregory has stressed, the point is that distances are produced, practised and reshaped, and, as we have learned since 11 September, physical proximity can easily stage the performance of increased cultural distances. Cultural distances are performed, and therefore changeable: ‘distance – like difference – is not an absolute, fixed and given, but is set in motion and made meaningful through cultural practices’ (Gregory 2004a: 18). Coping with distance is, then, not only spatial but also temporal. A very central question is how social relations make societies spanning distances last. In a recent article (2005), Clive Barnett discusses responsibilities and the acknowledgement of otherness, developing ideas about responsibility taken from Massey (2004). He takes as his point of departure the problematic trend in much geography and moral philosophy to value relations either in proximity or at a distance. Most often relations in proximity are valued, while caring at a distance is regarded as problematic. However, such assumptions and dichotomies rest on a lack of consideration of the temporality of social relations. Barnett suggests, with inspiration from Levinas and Derrida, that ‘the focus upon temporality is significant because it emphasizes the degree to which responsibility is motivated in response to the activity of others’ (Barnett 2005: 6), and he therefore ask questions about memory, inheritance, anticipation and surprise. He deconstructs post-structuralist ideas of identities based on the conditions of difference in relation to the other, and criticises the confusion of empirical findings and theory that results from taking the principle of exclusion in space for granted, where findings of cultural othering are used to subscribe ontological priority to exclusion and closure. Inspired by Levinas, Barnett suggests an ethics of always already existing responsibility for the other, built on the temporal principle of patience and a form of passivity. These

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ethical ideas correspond to the humility associated with the concept of coping in this book. For Levinas, responsibility is not based on instrumental assertions of recognition and reciprocity. Instead, ethical responsibility – or, as Barnett prefers, acknowledgement of the other – is exactly based on the absence of criteria for recognition, calculation, validity or the like. This leads to an acknowledgement of ‘responsibility as a virtue that exceeds reciprocal obligations’ (Barnett 2005: 11). The forces involved here are based on accepting that duties exceed rights. However, this generosity come from Levinas’s argument, which Derrida seeks to deconstruct in the classic debate over the gift: ‘As soon as a gift is given knowingly as a gift, the subject of generosity is always anticipating a return, already taking credit of some sort, if only for being generous. This relationship between giving and taking, anticipation and return, therefore inscribes the gift within a circuit of utilitarian exchange that it is supposed to exclude’ (Barnett 2005: 13). Importantly, Derrida does not deconstruct generosity as such, he merely questions the extent to which it lasts in time during the gift-giving sequence, thus keeping open what will happen in the future. It is not the intention here to go deeper into Levinas or Derrida; but Barnett raises important questions. To me, the ironic point is that recognition and reciprocity, tolerance and hospitality, are concepts premised on a strategic way of thinking, where the recognising, reciprocal, tolerant and hospitable person is a master, controlling the time–spaces involved. Unconditional hospitality is only for the sovereign to perform. With Foucault, hospitality easily affirms governmentality. It is about asymmetric power relations, which are also stabilised, if not by material gifts, then with material, social and cultural hospitality, a form of which is always performed by colonisers in their intricate power relations with the colonised they depend on. But other forms are possible. There are various forms of obligation that last over time, most often requiring mobility and meetings to make relations endure (Urry 2007). Though not free from strategic practices, mobilities of humans and non-humans allow a multitude of relations to emerge. This is acknowledged in the ‘new mobility’, or perhaps better ‘critical mobility’, paradigm, studying the plural and complex ways in which people connect, thus superseding dichotomies between propinquity and connection. Studies of this sort reject sedentarist ideas locating bounded and ‘authentic’ places at the root of human identity. Secondly, it also criticises nomadic celebrations of all flows and flights, where borders and places are always seen as regressive closures. And it also differs from cultural critiques of ‘non-places’ and the like, since it sees places as being performed and stabilised alongside mobile practices (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 137). In this book, mobility thinking inspires the study of how societies are produced through mobile practices in complex combinations with territorial practices (see Chapter 1).

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ANT approaches and their rather ‘neutral’ and ‘democratic’ descriptions provide one inspiration for the approach taken here, but, if we want to study the transformation or translation and not only the transmission or diffusion of societies (Latour 1986: 268), we also need to consider how people acknowledge each other over distances, and how non-humans are used to do so. This leads us back on the track of gift exchange, namely to Bourdieu’s fundamental discussion of it, and his critique of both ‘phenomenological’ and objectivist analyses, in the opening of his seminal Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977: 3–9), discussed by Bent Flyvbjerg (2001: 40–42). Bourdieu seeks to carve out his position between Mauss’s ‘phenomenology’ of the gift and Lévi-Strauss’s objectivist theory of gift exchange as a reversible operation. Where the first position seeks to understand how gift giving is perceived, the second is concerned only with explaining and predicting exchange. The fundamental step forward in this argument is that the context, which is excluded and must be excluded in the theory, does more than add the necessary meaningful (verstehen) perception or experience of exchange to the formal theoretical skeleton. Context, sequence, tempo, and rubato in the gift exchange determine what counts as a gift at all. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 41)

Time and temporality are central moments of the context, where processes and relations are performed. They do not have an abstract logic for objectivistic research to release. Nor can the process of exchange be reduced to the experiences of interacting actors. Acknowledgement across distances is therefore more than a question of subjective perception. The forms of ethics involved are relational and practised, a position that is obviously more affirmative of Bourdieu than of Levinas. Such practical ethics are performed as various forms of obligation that make use of a certain mobility system to connect and confirm relations (Urry 2007). Societies are thus made of networks or associations beyond levels, scales and structures. But approaching these relations as in ANT gets us into the problem that ANT is not really a social theory with claims about the character of specific durable or stable practices (Albertsen and Diken 1999: 33–35). However, such an approach has its ontological consequences. And since I have already, thus far, taken inspiration from authors with rather different positions, let me carve out my ‘coping’ position by responding to the three following questions. First, on objectivism versus subjectivism: in continuation of the above discussion, the coping approach is based on the same in-between-practice ontology as Bourdieu’s concerning the notions of incorporated dispositions (Bourdieu 1977). Barth’s penchant for methodological individualism is thus problematic, since it tends to take stable, subjective actors for granted. On the other hand, both Latour/ANT and Foucault may have a problematic objectivism together with their structuralist legacy, which Bourdieu shares but tries to cope with, as in his discussion of the gift with Lévi-Strauss. This

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means that relations are not self-propelled, sort of automatic, material/ semiotic structures, constituting their own organisation. Furthermore, the use of the concept of performance does not imply pre-scripting or overdetermination by already existing discourses; performance is rather meant as the concrete forms and ‘doing’ of practice. Across their differences on the objectivism–subjectivism front, Barth, Bourdieu, Foucault and Latour do in fact agree on the relative instability of social relations, opening for the relational, ‘generative’ or ‘practical’ understanding of society. Secondly, on deep versus flat ontology: the coping approach, together with Barth and Foucault, seems to be more or less in line with the kind of flat ontology stressed by Latour and ANT. This does not seem to be the case with Bourdieu, and certainly not with critical realism. This point is also epistemological and methodological, since it means accepting the lack of a general social theory. The implication is a methodology of contextual studies (Jóhannesson 2005b) similar to the principles of Bent Flyvbjerg’s approach to planning as phronesis, to be discussed in the next section. Since ANT is often associated with mere descriptive practices, it is worth stressing that the flat ontology does not render explanation as such; it only sees explanation from structures, mechanisms or the like as problematic. The methodology is rather to base the explanation of processes and relations on how they happened, rather than references to ‘outside’ abstractions. That is, to go from how to why, as Barth explicitly recommended. This also means theorising in analysing, in contrast to ‘using a theory’. Thirdly, Latour and ANT inspire the kind of materialist constructivism employed in this book, and I have also illustrated the indications of Elias and Foucault in the same direction. John Law talks about ‘materialist relationalism’, and I have nothing against this notion. Nevertheless, the use of constructivism together with materialism stresses the concrete constructedness of societies (including the constructions made with concrete!), and I wonder how they happen in time and space. It is crucial to stress that some stabilisers of societies are actually produced, and that they may sometimes endure longer than their initial process of production. As a consequence of the first point above, ‘materialist relationalism’ implies the risk of an objectivist reading, while the paradoxical formulation of materialist constructivism points to practices of making societies materially. I shall return to a further, more concrete discussion of socio-material practices in Chapter 4, while also stressing that the materialist components of coping are more important in some chapters (4–6) than in others (7–9).

Paths and Methodologies in Research This book is an attempt to assemble into a synthesis a variety of research accumulated over the years since my PhD thesis (Bærenholdt 1991), which

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concentrated on Iceland and the Faroes and only included a few indications regarding research on Greenland and especially Northern Norway. It involves an engagement and use of multiple networks with researchers and their discourses, involved in political constructive efforts in the area under study. Theoretical discussions are situated in many of these research efforts, and their approaches will be discussed in the following chapters. Leaving theoretical questions aside for a moment, the book refers to two pillars of research: overall historical studies, and detailed local studies. Both these pillars ask how specific social figurations were made and done, in terms of their genealogy or the ontological politics involved. The ‘overall’ historical studies cover the genesis of (North) Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic societies respectively. Little of the research has been presented in comparative frameworks, leaving most of this work to me. This is especially the case within the more specialised parts of these works, on transport, fisheries, tourism and municipalities, where much of the existing research is of a rather descriptive character. My ambition in writing up these genealogies has been to produce historical geographies, or spatial histories, claiming some inspiration from the modes of working with long lines and transformative processes in the works of people like Fernand Braudel and Michel Foucault. However, it is also my intention that this kind of research should condition, and be conditioned by, the presentation and discussion of a variety of local studies, where detailed accounts have been given on processes of social transformation based on fieldwork, with the main emphasis being on qualitative research interviews. My network with these studies varies in degree of intensity. First I have conducted some of these field studies myself over the years, and I make special use of my 2001 field studies from Greenland in the NORDREGIO project, ‘Coping Strategies and Regional Policies: Social Capital in the Nordic Peripheries’. Secondly, I have made use of some of the studies of my research partners located in Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway who have been engaged in the UNESCO MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Projects (coordinated by me in cooperation with Nils Aarsæther and four skilful research officers in Tromsø), starting in 1996 and producing numerous spin-offs, including the above-mentioned NORDREGIO project. This means studies sharing some conceptual ‘coping strategy’ frameworks with my own work, and in, the case of the NORDREGIO project, being based on the research design I produced. Thirdly, there is a wider group of rich local studies from the region, though all referring to some of the key theoretical positions and traditions presented earlier in this chapter, ranging from Barthian social anthropology to ANT, as well as additional post-colonial work on Greenland. In addition, Chapter 9 in particular is also based on transregions dealt with in my work on the project ‘Conditions for Sustainable

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Development in the Arctic’ from the mid-1990s, which included fieldwork in Greenland in 1996. Many of these ‘local studies’ focus on connections, and especially on how local and non-local networks combine. Locality studies were performed in the MOST CCPP, though remaining conscious of not taking a locality as a case as such, but rather using locality studies as methodological devices to ensure direct interaction and interviews with actors at home, before also focusing on the lines and connections out. Localities are much more than the insular narratives that have been so dominant in the history of anthropological fieldwork, since it is true that ‘field work is less a matter of localized dwelling and more a series of travel encounters’ (Clifford 1997: 2). Efforts were put into following mobile connections (this has especially been part of Marit Aure’s work with Norwegian–Russian labour migration; see Chapter 5), but more studies on connections on the move would be beneficial. Further developments in mobile methods (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 148–50) are needed, including ones taking a more active interest in material aspects, but these will continue to be ‘local studies’ in the sense of working in specific fields, however mobile they may be. Research needs to approach ‘the “field” as a habitus rather than as a place, a cluster of embodied dispositions and practices’ (Clifford 1997: 69, original emphasis), including not least the embodied and accumulated dispositions of the researcher. A closer look at some research project experiences may be illuminating. The research design for the NORDREGIO project, ‘Coping Strategies and Regional Policies: Social Capital in Nordic Peripheries’ (2000–1), focused on analysing the networking involved in specific processes of innovation (as broadly defined in Chapter 1) ‘that involves the practices of several local actors and can be identified as a common project by these actors’ (revised research design, 6 December 2000, words mine, italics in the original). In this way, the coping (strategy) approach (see Chapter 1) was made operational. The purpose was to highlight the specific (as opposed to either general or unique) character of each project, studying the processes enacting the projects as cases. This meant interviewing people about the practices and processes of the projects in concrete terms, with questions asking who, what, where and when. The NORDREGIO project had no ambitions to claim general validity in the way claimed in extensive research designs. With some inspirations from Andrew Sayer (1984), the focus was placed on the intensive research design in order to document just the existences of specific processes (see also Tykkyläinen 2000: 24–25). The case projects were therefore not means of generalisation, but precisely interesting cases to be documented as examples regarding the broad and explorative NORDREGIO research question ‘Whether, how and why regional policies work in concert with coping strategies locally’ (the research design). Projects were thus seen as identifying a possible nexus

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between coping strategies and regional policies, and they were chosen, among other criteria, on the basis that they made a difference locally. Bent Flyvbjerg’s pragmatic social science principles of phronesis (Flyvbjerg 2001) were explicitly made the methodological point of departure. Studies were concrete and practical. Validity is understood as emerging with the possible use of the knowledge that is produced. Therefore, as with the MOST CCPP, the NORDREGIO project and the two follow-ups on ‘Innovations and Institutions’ and ‘Place Reinvention’, the research includes meetings, workshops and user conferences with practitioners from the localities studied, or, perhaps more exactly, the actors who were studied also acted in the project. The dialogues performed in such encounters proved valuable both to the validity of the research and to the practitioners (municipal leaders or the like), who were often more interested in the structured narratives of the concrete experiences of others (other localities) than in abstract generalised findings. The NORDREGIO project also sought to respond to some of the challenges raised in the original MOST CCPP project description (written by myself in discussion with Nils Aarsæther and accepted by UNESCO in 1996), which aimed at a relatively large-scale comparative analysis. The problem was, as Anniken Førde clearly stated, that ‘comparative analyses often miss the processes, and process analyses are often restricted to one case and are therefore not seen as comparative’ (Førde 1998: 192). The aim therefore became one of structuring the comparison of the description of case processes within a common framework. However, locality studies across several countries increasingly stressed the importance of the historical-geographical genesis of certain generalised features such as national or even Nordic institutional set-ups (Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001a). In this way, it became increasingly obvious that comparing projects performed locally should also entail comparing the broader contexts staging the projects. Though all studies of concrete processes have an implicit or explicit comparative momentum in making clear what was specific to each case, the normal inclination of comparative methods towards generalising societies emerged here too (Førde 1998). But, instead of generalising from cases, the ambition became one of studying the genesis of North European social figurations as such, thus situating the local restructurings of the 1990s that were studied in the context of broader social transformations (as explained in another grand project proposal, ‘North European Coping with Peripherality’ (NEUCOPE), which was accepted but in the end not funded by the EU Framework 2002 programme). From these outlines developed one line of thinking that is important to this book: the combination and integration of the pillars of historical and local studies, already introduced earlier. This line of thinking also responds to certain difficulties in coping with the NORDREGIO ‘in-concert’ research question, which attempted to link local strategies and regional policies by

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way of projects, when the formative role of various kinds of regional policy in making societies was not really taken into account. Or in other words, What happens to our understanding of how societies are formed in Flyvbjerg’s phronetic approach? Are we beyond social theory as theories about the formation of social figurations? The local studies of relations and processes, as conducted with such brilliance in anthropology too, using the approaches of Fredrik Barth and others – where do they lead us in understanding political systems, political cultures, economic systems, social institutions, institutionalised practices, nationalism, in short, governmentality? As I shall show in Chapter 8, and as Flyvbjerg also argues, social anthropology and the Foucauldian approach have something to offer. Foucault’s historical works have often been challenged because of their lack of any mainstream ‘scientific method’. His response was his exploitation of a large number of sources to document his findings, where the quality of sources is not theoretical or scientific, but valuable because of their proximity to regular daily life (Flyvbjerg 2001: 133). Another response worthy of consideration is the advice to follow the networks, discourses and mechanisms that we can observe actually at work in order to generalise, structure and stabilise practices, among which are the material construction of societies by means of infrastructures and the like. This is in a way obviously implicit in Foucault’s historical studies. And, while ANT takes the materialist inspiration from Foucault to greater heights, on the other hand Latour, Callon, Law, etc. are trying to keep their fingers away from social generalisations, theories about transformations and the like, because these are outside the scope of their theory of how to study, that is, of their methodology (Jóhannesson 2005b). There is no privileged point from which to monitor or produce comprehensive comparative analyses of social totalities. Rather, ‘comparative knowledge [is] produced through an itinerary, always marked by a “way in”, a history of locations and a location of histories’ (Clifford 1997: 31, original emphasis). Knowledge should be grounded and concrete, thus opening up the possibilities of the future. ‘The establishment of a concrete genealogy opens possibilities for action by describing the genesis of a given situation and showing that this particular genesis is not connected to absolute historical necessity’ (Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2004: 11). This said, I still need to envisage how the broader historical and the more (spatially and temporally) proximate local studies intersect in the attempt in this book to understand how people’s coping with distances makes societies, how concrete practices intersect with the longue durée of institutions. However, one challenging response is Foucault’s, namely that institutions are practised and thus can be studied as such. Another is to accept certain forms of stabilising ‘black-boxed’ institutions of a certain social epoch, trend or region. Henri Lefebvre suggested a progressive-regressive methodology, moving back and forth between the case and the epoch. His

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suggestion was a research process moving from, first, ‘descriptive’, participant observation, interviews etc., via, secondly, an ‘analyticalregressive’ analysis of the phenomena described in time and space, to thirdly, and ‘historical-genetically’, relating the phenomena studied to structures of the whole (Lefebvre 1971: 187–88). Again, this formulation leaves open what is the whole. Meanwhile, my rather ‘traditional’ suggestion would be that societies imply the performance of certain forms of coherence, whatever their porosity, fragility and the like. The very reality of societies can be experienced by way of the regularised practices, routines and regulations that most people perform in their humble everyday lives. I suggest that they thus perform societies of various kinds, the stabilisation of which is not in the least of a material character. Nonetheless, I take the risk of arguing that how people produce societies in their coping with multiple kinds of distance can be studied; humility and ambivalence should follow. The insights provided by any research are always only partial, non-complete and open-ended. It is thus acknowledged that others will have other perspectives, new findings and challenges to cope with, and so on.

3 NORDIC ATLANTIC SOCIETIES EMERGING


Introduction How did societies emerge in the Nordic Atlantic? And how did societies reproduce and stabilise themselves over distances in time and space? To give just a glimpse of an answer to these large questions involves invoking historical geographies in two senses that cannot escape being interwoven. First are historical geographies of how it happened. This means providing an account of the coping practices and processes that made societies, though any account of this will also relate to the second sense: What are the historical-geographical discourses involved in stabilising societies through the stories and accounts that connect events into the narratives of particular societies’ history, geography, their institutionalised heritage, making societies meaningful? While these are immense questions, this chapter is only intended to provide a brief overview of more than a thousand years of the histories of Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland. Since, therefore, the chapter can in no way be comprehensive, it will seek to provide some glimpses of the ‘long lines’ of the formation of the various Nordic Atlantic societies and of how these histories are made into heritage. To do this I need to give priority to particular materials that have been selected, the criteria for their selection being either that they illustrate central points in the making of Nordic Atlantic societies, or else that they play a public role in Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes or Greenland. Societies are constructed by coping with distance not only in space, but also in time. Social, collective memory is crucial, especially in stabilising societies. In Connerton’s words (1989: 3), ‘Concerning memory in particular, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order. It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.’ Memories are thus institutionalised as heritage, made into stable narratives and objects providing

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images of permanence. The desire to remember is, on the one hand, a rather fundamental aspect of human coping, since there seem to be certain requirements for orientation and ontological certainty. On the other hand, these forms of stabilisation involve social connections not only between people of the same generation, but also between generations. Knowledge about the past, that is, memory, is passed on in order to connect people in time. As Waidacher points out (1997: 102), ‘Community is the result of a contract between generations where the essence is the passing on of knowledge.’ Historians and museums define their social roles along these lines and therefore have to involve themselves in processes of selection: What is it important to remember, and for whom? There is an intricate ‘where’ question implicit here, since the question of whose history is being made into heritage addresses how and to what extent immigrants and emigrants are part of that history. Most often, heritage has a rather obvious territorial foundation, defined through forms of nationalism that have played a crucial part of the production of territorial societies (see Chapter 8). But there can also be intra-nation-state, regionalist historical narratives, narratives of nations of immigrants or local history projects involved in place, and municipal, construction. Meanwhile, trans-nation-state histories are most often produced in congruence with transnational projects such as the Nordic and European projects, which are attempting to produce new international or transnational territorial societies. In this respect, attempts to construct a Nordic Atlantic or West Nordic society with a common history have only been weak, weaker than the attempts to build the Barents Euro-Arctic region (see Chapter 9). History is, so far, a means of stabilising the spatial frames of society by invoking connections with the territorial past. The Nordic countries, or more usually ‘Scandinavia’ (leaving the West Nordic countries and Finland aside here as more marginal), are often ascribed a common history and characteristics. One example of this (among many others) is the short-box presentation of ‘Scandinavia’ in the twentieth century in a recent Danish/Nordic history of Europe (Berntson et al. 2003). In line with many other narratives, the text seeks to explain how, since the nineteenth century, the Nordic countries have managed to keep the peace in their marginalised situation following the Napoleonic wars. While the peoples in the Balkans continued their wars, this did not happen in Scandinavia, since, ‘in part, the Scandinavian countries were unusually ethnically and socially homogeneous, and in part the borders between them followed “natural” lines’ (Berntson et al. 2003: 246, my translation from the Danish). This is an image of countries each consisting of ‘one’ people, and each nicely separated by seas, mountains or rivers. Already in the 1920s, moreover, democracy had become established and the social classes and political parties prepared to accept compromises, which became especially important with the seminal parliamentary deals between workers’

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and peasants’ representatives in Denmark and Sweden in 1933, Iceland in 1934, Norway in 1935 and Finland in 1937 (Berntson et al. 2003: 246). This provides a historical explanation for the striking fact that the Nordic countries, from being poor and conflict-ridden until 1864, managed to become some of the richest welfare societies of the twentieth century. But the narratives about this also form, of course, part of the political kit used to sustain the social bridges that were created (see Chapter 8). Where are the Nordic Atlantic societies in all this? One might expect a rich history of Nordic colonialism, but this is not how it is most commonly expressed. Some would argue that the term ‘colony’ was never applied to Iceland or the Faroes, and that Greenland was only formally a colony in the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the colonisations of Iceland and the Faroes, like that of Greenland, took place long before the era of European exploration and colonialism. One should also add to this Danish–Norwegian complexities and rivalries since it was Norse people from Norway who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, settled the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, which then became part of the kingdom of Norway (the Faroes in 1035, Iceland in 1262). Although this greater Norway fell under Danish rule from 1380 to 1814, Denmark kept control of the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland after Norway’s independence in 1814 and subsequent liberation from the union with Sweden in 1905, and so far only Iceland among these territories has achieved national independence (in 1944). Still, colonialism is certainly an issue in those areas where the settlers colonised not only lands but also indigenous people (indigenous nowadays defined as having been colonised), depending on natural resources, that is, colonisation of the different Inuit and Sami groups. However, the predominant histories told about the Nordic Atlantic (in schools and the mass media) are less about colonialism than the image of the Vikings created by nineteenth-century nationalism, in which Viking victories and territorial claims became important signifiers (on the use of the Viking heritage, see Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004). Even though the etymological background of the word ‘Viking’ is debated, it has become an icon used alongside ‘Norse’ and ‘Atlantic’ in recent scientific publications of cultural history (Mortensen and Arge 2005). Alongside this are the stories from the famous Icelandic sagas (simply meaning ‘history’ in Norse or Icelandic), which also concern Norway, the Faroes and Greenland, as well as Denmark, Sweden, Britain and Ireland (see Pálsson 1995: 75–80), and which play a (if not the most) central role in Nordic heritage. Vikings and the sagas are the cornerstones of contemporary Nordic narratives about early medieval society and life, stories about the formation of the Nordic empires, including the British Isles and the Baltic, and extending, with trading posts, as far as Russia, Istanbul, Baghdad and North Africa, not to mention Newfoundland. Apart from the colonisation of the Inuit and Sami, originally regarded as ‘primitive’ others, the history of Nordic

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colonisation has been constructed as a story of settlers in frontier communities. Of course, among the Inuit and Sami the Viking heritage is problematic to an extent that makes the Nordic image equally problematic (see Bærenholdt 2002c). In any case, there are now attempts to reconstruct a common West Nordic, if not Nordic Atlantic, history (Thorleifsen 2003a), which raise interesting questions about the common Norse history of the tenth century, which was possibly more connected than the image of the later sagas of distinct peoples (Nielssen 2003). There are indeed similarities in the histories of Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland that can be traced back to the common Danish or Norwegian colonisers. These similarities include the introduction of Christianity around 1000, the common use of marine resources in the seas – which were seen as the ‘streams of’ the King of Norway (Jóhannesson 2003: 63) – the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, trade monopolies from the sixteenth and seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (until the twentieth century in Greenland), nationalism and the campaign for independence, cod wars over the control of marine resources, the social ordering of the state and municipal administration, the development of the fishing and tourist industries, and so on. While some of these historical processes will be analysed in the following thematic chapters (for example, nationalism in Chapter 8), the rest of this chapter is devoted to short histories of Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland.

Northern Norway: a Regionalist Society? Northern Norway is a region of Norway, which became independent from Denmark in one of the first democratic constitutions in 1814, but was in union with Sweden (under the King of Sweden) until 1905. Whether something specifically North Norwegian does exist, and how it has been constructed, was the central question in the remarkable North Norwegian Cultural History in two volumes (total 940 pages), Nordnorsk Kulturhistorie (Drivenes et al. 1994: 9). This seminal work was produced as an explicit identity project initiated and financed by the Regional Committee for Northern Norway and Namdalen (an area just south of Nordland), ‘Landsdelsutvalget for Nord-Norge og Namdalen’. The approach adopted is rather similar to that used in the present book and implicitly refers to some of the same roots, including Barth. For example, in the caption for the first plate showing an elderly North Norwegian couple, it is stated that ‘culture is about life, about what forms us as human beings and how we cope with [or manage, mestrer] the challenges of everyday life’ (Drivenes et al. 1994: 9, my translation from the Norwegian). Searching for a North Norwegian identity, the connection with the south of Norway is described as an old North Norwegian trauma, while North

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Norwegians, on the other hand, also share the common experiences of the ‘stubborn [gjenstridige] land of mountains, endless wide expanses, sparse [karrige] beaches and an enormous ocean’ (Drivenes et al. 1994: 11) and wealth of natural resources, that others – the Hanseatic merchants and later Bergen – would like to acquire. Certainly North Norwegians have experienced international markets since the Middle Ages. While the ‘stubborn land’ is one keyword and the title of the first volume of this cultural history, the other and second volume is subtitled ‘The multifarious people’. The authors stress non-synchronism [utakt] and a culture of rebellion, which has been manifested in ethnic mobilisation and resistance by coastal fishermen since the Second World War (Drivenes et al. 1994: 12). The authors also reflect on how their own work is situated in the stabilisation of regionalist and local history writing from the 1970s onwards. But it is worth adding that since the nineteenth century Norway has had a strong tradition of local history, which began as part of the nationalist, romantic, people’s education, learning about ‘the native soil’ (Hjemstavn, in German Heimat) (Slagstad 1998: 93–106). For a long time, the northern coastline of the North Calotte had been populated by Sami, Norse, Russians and others. Then the Norwegian Viking King Ottar is said to have reached the White Sea in the ninth century. Norwegian settlers may well have been the first ‘Pomors’, or ‘people living by the sea’ in Russian, in the White Sea area. But the Viking expansion came to an end, and Finnish and Russian colonisation followed (Niemi 1992). The political and economic history of Northern Norway thus became one of integration into Norway. This is the narrative adopted in the North Norwegian Cultural History. Before the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, Northern Norway or ‘Hålogaland’ was conceived as a Freestate (see the section on Iceland on this concept) ruled by chieftains. Historians are uncertain whether there was any central rule in North Norway, but, according to Ottar’s account (from the 890s) and the later sagas, chieftains were in place around 800, taxing catches of fish. Whether this form of society of the ‘Viking Age’ also included state formation is an open question, but Bratrein and Niemi adopt a controversial point of departure in their history, writing from the perspective of the North, by mentioning that ‘few have asked whether the realm came into existence from the North’ (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 153, my translation). However, in the years following the 1030 Battle of Stiklestad, the Northern chieftains lost their autonomy. Christianity was used to unite Norway and its chieftains into one country (Nielssen 2003: 24). Northern Norway became part of the European Catholic community, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Northern Troms and Finnmark were also colonised, followed from 1350 by disintegration and immigration from Karelia. From here the main organisers of society became the Hanseatic

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League and the powerful Catholic Church under the Archbishop of Nidaros (Trondheim). Meanwhile a thriving coastal economy and culture also developed (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 158–66). As we shall see later in the history of the Nordic Atlantic (and many other places), the competing social organisers were trade (mobile) and religious (territorial) formations. With the coming of the Reformation in 1536, the collapse of the Catholic Church also had severe economic consequences, since it had been such an important landowner. Meanwhile, the centralised state of Denmark– Norway (united since 1380), along with Russia and Sweden–Finland, increased its interests, presence and organisation of the Northern peripheries, and, in many places on the North Calotte, people had to pay taxes to more than one state (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 169). The three centralised states became rivals, including in the struggle over whom the Sami people would belong to. Denmark–Norway won the coastal Sami people, thus gaining full sovereignty over North Norwegian coasts and seas. State control enhanced with the development of Danish absolutism from 1660, with more central rule from Copenhagen, pursuing mercantilist economic and political-administrative control over its territories. The territorial integration of the far northern area became so important that the state introduced exemptions from taxes and military service in these areas (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 172–75). Trade in Northern Norway was linked especially to Bergen, which in 1681 was given not only monopoly over trade in Finnmark (which had a larger area than the present-day county), but also over its administration, thus strengthening its colonial status (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 174). The organisation of the trade monopoly was changed several times in Finnmark, as was the case in the other Nordic Atlantic countries. In some periods the monopoly was given to specific merchants or cities and in other periods to trading companies (1702–15, 1745–58 and 1763–74 for Finnmark; see Feldbæk 1986: 14), and in yet others was managed by the state itself. However, from the North Norwegian point of view the important thing was that the Finnmark monopoly was managed from Copenhagen for sixty years (1729–89). This meant that all trade administrators were sent out from Denmark in ships sailing direct between Finnmark and Copenhagen. Meanwhile, in Nordland (including most of present day Troms) a class of local merchants with trade privilege emerged from the late eighteenth century, often becoming very dominant local ‘kings’ called Nessekonger in Norwegian, who were not always considered innovative. Meanwhile, other connections had also emerged to the east in the form of the informal Pomor trade with Russia in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This trade had been perceived as a threat to the Finnmark Trade Monopoly, but the Monopoly was abolished in 1789, thereby legalising Pomor trade with Russia. The abolition of monopoly trade paved the way for the establishment of market towns in Troms and Finnmark (Niemi 1992:

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11–14), as well as for the export of fish to Russia, which became important to the development of fisheries in Northern Norway in the nineteenth century (see Bærenholdt 1996b). ‘Integration’ of the Sami was another, parallel issue, pursued by missionaries, who therefore also socialised the Sami into Denmark–Norway, as opposed to Russia or Sweden. In the 1770s the language of the mission changed from Sami to Danish–Norwegian, but it was Norwegian nineteenth-century nationalism that led to the political efforts to make the Sami Norwegians in the period 1851–1940. The construction of schools, churches, chapels and roads was officially regarded as creating ‘cultural fortresses’ and boundaries to the east, but also a means of breaking down the isolation of Sami and Finnish (Kven) settlements from the rest of Norway (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 180–86). The socio-economic formation of Northern Norway took off with the expansion of the fisheries from the 1820s to the 1870s. Many Norwegians migrated to the north, from where emigration to America came later. But from the 1870s, the fisheries began encountering problems in respect of both markets and resources, and political tensions in the social organisation of the fisheries emerged. The Labour Party won much influence among small-scale fishermen, who often combined fishing with farming. A certain form of ‘fisher–peasant socialism’, anti-capitalist but modernist, emerged, resisting the introduction of large-scale capitalist fisheries, while a number of industrial and mining towns developed in other areas, based on international capital. Together with small-scale industry, all this provided a labour market from which households could create a combination of incomes, the terms ‘household economy’ and ‘combination of industries’ themselves becoming part of North Norwegian history writing and social science up to the present day. Many people depended on these combinations, but as many as 44,499 migrants left Nordland, Troms and Finnmark for non-European countries (especially North America) from 1866 to 1920 (Fulsås 1995: 6). Following the Russian Revolution, the Pomor trade also stopped. However, Finnmark still had the open access to resources making possible a growth in population. And the 1930s brought state intervention in support of small-scale economies, in line with the tradition of ‘fisher-peasant socialism’. The German occupation during the Second World War did not change these forms of social organisation, although it produced a steady and certain demand for fish and for labour for construction (including fish processing) and speeded up modernising investments in roads, railways and airfields. However, Northern Troms and Finnmark underwent a scorched-earth policy during the German retreat, which set the agenda for all post-war policies in Northern Norway aimed at reconstruction. The question was reconstruction, how and where. A number of plans for reconstruction, culminating in the 1951 Northern Norway plan, later became the object of

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much political and academic debate on the regional policies shaping Northern Norway, especially with Ottar Brox’s Hvad skjer i Nord-Norge? (1966; see also above, Chapter 2). The Northern Norway plan was part of the Labour Party’s modernisation project aimed at industrialisation, in order to replace the subsistence economy and what were seen as low productivities by creating new jobs and strongholds, partly also for military reasons (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 200; Fulsås 1995: 8–9). Whereas the plans were intended to reshape society in Northern Norway, this only happened slowly. Already in the first reconstruction after the war, people moved back to their old homes, and the desk-bound ideas of making people move to the towns did not materialise. Ottar Brox saw the Northern Norway plan as a definite break with the continuities of socio-economic development in Northern Norway, while a number of historians have produced accounts of more complex and double transformations (Tjelmeland 1993; Bratrein and Neimi 1994; Fulsås 1995). Whereas the Northern Norway plan was primarily aimed at state-supported industrialisation and succeeded in this in some respects, the 1972 attempt to plan settlement structures in the direction of concentrations of population was given up. The 1970s became a decade of the consolidation of the settlement structure, as Brox has shown (1982, 1984). This was due not only to the decentralising political efforts of the movement that this was part of, not least around the ‘No’ given to the European Community, but also to the actually decentralising effects of the consolidation of the welfare state, including the supply of services and jobs provided by local schools and social services. By the end of the 1980s, public-sector employment had become dominant, and the ‘welfare municipality’ had become a fundamental brick of society (Tjelmeland 1994; see also Chapter 7). Many of these possibilities had been achieved through political struggles that go way back in time and were always manifest in the dynamic ethnic mobilisations of the 1970s, especially among the Sami, and the struggles against the hydroelectric power construction at Alta. Since the 1930s, North Norwegian fisheries had been firmly organised within the scope of the Raw Fish Law, and the interest in protecting the fishing way of life was part of the success of the no-to-the-EU movement in Northern Norway. In both Norwegian referendums on European Economic Community (EEC) and EU membership (in 1972 and 1994), the result in the North Norwegian counties was decisive. The majorities against the EU were significant in Northern Norway (as in inland rural Norway), though less so in the second referendum. Had Northern Norway had home rule and therefore had it not participated in the national electorate (as in the case of the Faroes in 1972), the Labour (Social Democratic) and Conservative majority of the elected members of parliament (‘Stortinget’) would have succeeded in making Norway an EU member.

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Nonetheless, Northern Norway is being reshaped by the increase in deregulation and the opening of borders, the latter most significantly in connection with the Barents Euro-Arctic Region developments following the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union (see Chapter 9). In the 1980s and 1990s, marginal settlements and villages declined in population, and the counties of Finnmark and Nordland cannot keep its population like Troms (with Tromsø), although huge landings of fish from Russian trawlers in the 1990s postponed this trend for a while in Finnmark. While some commentators (e.g. Brox 1984) saw the development of the welfare municipality as a kind of new state colonialism, this did mean the influx and emergence of new social groups that increasingly contributed to interest in and work on Northern Norway’s heritage. Festivals, museums, cultural events, films and local history writing became part of the imagination of places and of the region of Northern Norway, including for people who had not remained in their place of birth. In this way many more people, in public too, articulated their engagement in the places and society of Northern Norway, which thus emerged more clearly. The history of Northern Norway, as told this way, is characterised by a firm interest in people’s practices (Bjerkli 1994; Wold 1994). However, it would be all too simple to state that Northern Norway is a regionalist society vis-à-vis many others. Northern Norwegian society is playing a role, but there are many other societies involved – national, professional, transnational, municipal, travelling and so on – though, not least because of the practices of historians and social scientists and their candidates, ‘Northern Norway’ has become a meaningful translator of many of these streams.

Iceland: the Insular Nation State? Iceland, it seems, was a region of Norway as well. Though normally described as a Freestate, it is called the ‘Old Commonwealth’ (930–1262), following the period of settlement in 870–930. But, formally under the King of Norway from 1262, and then ipso facto a region of Denmark from 1380, it was increasingly governed directly from Denmark under absolutism, but experienced rising nationalism from the late eighteenth century, followed by the reawaking of the ‘Althing’ in the nineteenth century, home rule in 1904, independence but in union with or under the King of Denmark in 1918, full independence as a republic in 1944, and in the 1970s the culmination of the cod wars to defend and expand national maritime territories against foreign fishermen. This is, of course, the usual historical account, which is given in a number of historical presentations by Gunnar Karlsson (2000a, b). It is a fascinating history, engaging readers with the strong ethos and remarkable events that it covers, which are also dealt with by the masterpieces of the sagas. As Karlsson wondered, and stated, writing in the introduction to his

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authoritative history of Iceland: ‘is this just the form that stories tend to take, whether fictional or historical: the romantic form of initial happiness, times of trouble and regained happiness? In this book the traditional romantic view of the history of Iceland will certainly be given its due weight, governing the basic structure of the book’ (Karlsson 2000a: 2). The Freestate period (called the Commonwealth in Anglophone writings), as in the case of Northern Norway, marks the ‘initial’ historical point of departure, for which the sagas are the main source and inspiration. The sagas are supposed to have been written down in the period 1120– 1350, but the events they record are supposed to have taken place in 930–1030. They provide an image of a society ruled by chieftains in constant conflicts that were in need of solution, ‘but without condemning the individual’s prerogative to defend his honour and that of his family by blood vengeance’ (Karlsson 2000b: 14). The Freestate is thus the Scandinavian term for a society, surprisingly without any central state, but regulated by laws promulgated by assemblies of chieftains, with the parliament or ‘Althing’ as the superior lawgiver, as well as being a court for conflict resolution. In his A Brief History of Iceland (also sold to tourists in museums and the like), Karlsson explains the ‘Old Commonwealth 930–1262’ as follows: No king ruled the country and no power existed to keep the peace, no army or police. In the 19th century this social system came to be known as thódveldi, the Icelandic word then used to denote a republic. Today thódveldi, which may be translated as Commonwealth, is used only of this decentralised social order that persisted in Iceland for more than three centuries. (Karlsson 2000b: 7)

This is the state of ‘initial happiness’ mentioned in sagas of conflict, violence and reconciliation. Jesse L. Byock has strongly argued in her work (1993) that the sagas should be used as a historical source, in opposition to other historians who, from more traditional or positivist ideals, have rejected them as such. Like Karlsson, she has pointed out the weakness of state structures and the freedom of the settlers constituting a social system, which was later destroyed by rivalries and by the interventions of the King of Norway. She does acknowledge the normative character of the sagas, but it seems to me that she does not explain their temporal validity as normative sources. What period are they concerned with, in what period were they written, and when did they later become part of the nationalist staging of Iceland’s historical fall and rebirth, as Karlsson hints in declaring his romantic inclination (see quote above)? On this question I refer to another Dane, the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup, who has published an interesting discussion of the definition of the society of the Icelandic Freestate, asking how much it was both a state and ‘free’ (Hastrup 1990b: 84). Her conclusion is provocative: ‘To put it bluntly, my conclusion is that the Icelandic Freestate, as such, is a literary product. By means of an optical illusion the authors of twelfth and

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thirteenth-century Icelandic literature created an image of an original “free state” as the essence of Icelandic social identity’ (Hastrup 1990b: 101, original emphasis). But illusion may be too strong a word, since on the next page Hastrup also acknowledges that ‘As a separate definition space “The Icelandic Freestate” was a reality generating unit.’ This is not to argue who is right and wrong, but simply to reflect on the repetitive use of histories, both in the Middle Ages, while writing, as Snorri did, about the period before the acknowledgement of the King of Norway’s sovereignty, and in later Icelandic nationalism up to the present day. Hastrup’s point is that Iceland, in the earlier attempt to create an abnormal society governed by law rather than the King, remained in a close relationship with Norway as part of a larger system of social reproduction. This suggests that the idea of Icelanders as a ‘people’ defined by the territorial borders of the island may have had little meaning at this time. Though critical of Hastrup’s work (see Chapter 5), the Icelandic anthropologist Gisli Pálsson agrees that it is misleading to conceive of the ‘Commonwealth’ period as one of an egalitarian society governed by a ‘free’ state and a national community identified as Icelanders (Pálsson 1995: 88, 127). The law was meant to be valid for anybody living in Iceland, and this situation could be termed territorial bridging. But this situation, as is also apparent in the sagas, was also one of mobility, not only within Iceland, but also because of certain mobile links across the Atlantic, sustained by long journeys and sojourns abroad. Though it seems to me that Hastrup’s essay to some extent confuses the cultural definition of a people with that of a society, the questions she raises are important, whatever the answers, because they highlight how history is, of course, used in defining societies through reality-generating practices, just as in the case of Northern Norway and its cultural history. From this point of view, it is interesting to examine the 2005 guide book for the new permanent exhibition in the reopened National Museum of Iceland, Making of a Nation (2005). As the director of the museum states in the preface, the National Museum of Iceland was originally constructed following the decision of the ‘Althing’, which proclaimed the Republic of Iceland in 1944. After years of reconstruction, the museum reopened with an impressive exhibition in 2004. ‘The museum’s new permanent exhibition, Making of a Nation: History and Heritage of Iceland, seeks to shed light on how the Icelandic nation took shape over time, from settlement to the present day’ (director’s address, Making of a Nation 2005: 7, original emphasis). This very modern guidebook sets out a story of immigrants in a multicultural and constructivist wording from the outset. Here, from the introduction by the exhibition manager, we read: ‘The museum is meant to make an important contribution as the Icelandic nation grapples with such

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questions as where did we come from?, who are we?, and what makes an Icelander?’ (Making of a Nation 2005: 8, original emphasis). And further: The basic premise behind the exhibition is to examine Iceland’s history in the context of other societies. The Icelandic nation is a nation of settlers and thus it is natural to examine it in this light. One of the features of Icelandic history is how late in world history the country was settled and how quickly a nation formed on the remote island in the middle of the North Atlantic. Inherent in the basic premise is that the Icelandic nation is still taking shape, and therefore the influence of immigrants is important. (Making of a Nation 2005: 9)

Interestingly, the framing ideas of ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘tolerance’, where Iceland emerged as ‘a nation of settlers, of foreigners who immigrated’, a ‘blend of Nordic and Celtic cultures’ (Making of a Nation 2005: 10), closely fits the substantial content of rather traditional presentations of ‘The Dawn of Icelandic Society’, 800–1000 (as discussed above). However, the new exhibition tends to transcend the formerly strong, usually nationalist historiography of the degeneration of Icelandic society from its early settlement (or the golden age of the Freestate) to the eighteenth century (as described in Karlsson 2000a: 186–92). Thus the King of Denmark forced the Reformation on the Icelandic church, which also meant the execution of the last Catholic bishop, and then the balanced headline is: ‘In the years after the Reformation, Danish royal power over Iceland was extended. The Icelanders grew less free, but the king’s power also led to progress’ (Making of a Nation 2005: 24). The King of Denmark took an interest in Iceland’s economy, which also meant the probably first, still surviving national census in the world in 1703 (ibid.: 34, 51). But the new multimedia-based National Museum exhibition may well frustrate public opinion, which has become socialised with the romantic drama of hardship under Danish rule. Let me end this section with a short, less reflexive, but historical account of the troublesome emergence of Icelandic society after the supposed ‘golden age’ of the ‘Freestate’. In the fourteenth century, Iceland began exports of stockfish. People moved for periods (often in the winter) from farms to seasonal fishing stations on the coast, and Icelandic fish was traded through Bergen. Fisheries with an international reach thus became an integrated part of the peasant economy. But, in the fifteenth century, the plague (‘Black Death’) reduced the population by a half, thus easing the pressure on land and the need for extra income from fisheries (Karlsson 2000b: 26). But people were also bound to agriculture through rules that made permanent settlement in the fishing stations illegal. From 1404 such rules continued, for example the 1783 Vistaband obliging the landless to enter into a contract with a landowner, which was not formally abolished until 1894, though it had been ignored for the latter part of the period (Hastrup 1990a: 67). Meanwhile, English, German and later French fishermen came to play an important role in the rich fisheries around Iceland, thus starting a long

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history leading up to the cod wars of the 1970s, when Iceland extended its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to 200 nautical miles. However, in between there was a period of the Danish monopoly trade on Iceland in 1602–1855, with various shifts in the organisation of the monopoly between private merchants, the merchant company and the state itself. From 1787 monopolies on trade were formally abolished, though until 1855 only subjects of the King of Denmark could legally take advantage of this. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were subject to trading monopolies, have been described as the ‘Dark Ages’ (Karlsson 2000b: 34–35), though this is not the case in the new National Museum exhibition and guidebook, mentioned above. Population fell from 50,358 in the 1703 census to 47,240 in 1801 and only reached 78,470 in 1901, in contrast to the Faroese population, which tripled during the nineteenth century (Bærenholdt 1991: 365). There were, of course, ‘the small ice age’, smallpox epidemics from 1709, pirate attacks, witch-hunts, serious volcanic eruptions causing famine, and earthquakes, but the question still remains as to, why the population of Iceland could not cope with these challenges. One explanation is monopoly trade and colonialism, which hindered innovation. Another, again represented by Kirsten Hastrup, is a kind of cultural blindness, which, in the attempt to continue the past, was responsible for the collapse in agricultural practices and technology. In this view, Icelandic cosmology continued to revolve around the peasant household, thus excluding the outer world of the fisheries (Hastrup 1990a). A commission of the Danish state even considered removing the entire population from Iceland to Jutland. However, fisheries did take off with the gradual abolition of monopoly trade and of bonds to landowners in the nineteenth century. The ‘rural society’ was in crisis, leading to migration to the emerging fishing villages and to the emigration of a total of 15,000 people over a century to America. Together with falling fertility rates, this actually led to a decline in population in the 1880s (Bærenholdt 1991: 216; Karlsson 2000b: 44). But the nineteenth century was also the century of nationalism (further discussed in Chapter 8). The ‘Althing’ was reassembled and given an advisory role in 1845 and legal power in 1874, all of which happened before urbanisation and industrialisation. Fisheries, trade and cooperatives did not take off before about 1900, along with the introduction of seagoing vessels. Schooners had been used by the English for centuries, but now they came into Icelandic hands, paving the way for the first stage of capitalism in Iceland (Karlsson 2000b: 47), followed by the introduction of trawlers from 1907 onwards. While exports were mainly salted cod, after the Second World War the government of the independent republic decided to make the construction of freezing plants the basis of modernisation (Durrenberger and Pálsson

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1989: 8). The more spectacular post-war history of Iceland thus consists of the 1970s cod war, following battles with British vessels and the introduction of the 200 nautical mile limit in 1976, which established ‘Sovereignty at Sea’ (Karlsson 2000b: 64–65) and led to the controversial introduction of quota systems, especially Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQs; see Chapter 5). Iceland in the twentieth century has seen a period of connecting nationally and internationally, where ‘nothing in Iceland underwent greater change than transportation’ (Making of a Nation 2005: 49). Politics in Iceland has been dominated by the right in the forms of the conservative Independence Party and the agrarian Progressive Party. The Social Democratic Party never became as large or as dominant as was the case with Labour in Northern Norway. In many ways, Icelandic society is both more liberal and more liberalist than the Scandinavian model. Welfare policy and especially regional policy never came to have the same role. Unlike Northern Norway, Icelanders never had very strong regional identifications. Apart from the (‘back to settlement’) heritage associated with the farms, Icelanders have a long history of internal and external mobility, so politically the ‘region’ to support is the nation state, since ‘nobody else pays for us’, as is often said. A scattered settlement structure is therefore not of political value in itself, as it has been in Northern Norway. Regional policy only seeks to develop certain areas if it is in the interests of the ‘national economy’. Since the 1990s, Iceland has continued to increase its population and engage in internationalisation driven by an often rather ‘wild’ capitalism, which not only mobilises fish, capital and workers to go to new places, but is increasingly involved with new industries in information technology, genetics, film, music, tourism and other cultural economies, where Icelanders have placed their performance on the world map. There is thus little question about the existence of an insular society of Iceland as such, but it is also evident that Iceland as a society is only meaningful when placed alongside the other forms of mobile societies that it works across and connects.

The Faroes: Nation Building in a State of Ambivalence? The Faroes have been a home-ruled territory, a self-governing ‘peoplesociety’ (folkesamfund) within the Danish realm, since 1948. Its population is significantly lower than Northern Norway’s or Iceland’s, and it is therefore no surprise that scientific institutions in its history and social sciences are also small. Faroese historiography mostly consists of descriptive narratives, which are often associated with village histories (Wylie 1987: 190–91). The lack of an independent state may well be the main

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explanation why we do not find the same kind of modernised, institutionalised or collective historical presentation of the development of the Faroes, as was the case in Northern Norway (cultural history from 1994) and Iceland (2004 exhibition at the National Museum). There are, of course, educational materials and museums in Faroese, a number of short presentations for foreigners (such as exhibition materials and leaflets presenting Faroese history in connection with the issuing of new stamps) and more specialised scientific publications (such as Mortensen and Arge 2005). The most recent thorough presentation of Faroese history in a nonFaroese language by a Faroese seems to be that by the historian Hans Jacob Debes (2001), which adopts a more traditional historical approach. In addition, there have been a series of earlier, more thematic publications by Joen Pauli Joensen (1980, 1985, 1987), as well as master’s theses, such as Haldrup and Hoydal (1994). Symptomatically, the most used historical accounts of the development of the Faroes Islands internationally have been written by Anglophone historians and anthropologists, namely West (1974) and Wylie (1987). For the Faroese people themselves, writing the history of the Faroes is loaded with tensions over the national question, attitudes to which were ambivalent throughout most of the twentieth century. Debes refers to the famous Faroese historian and author Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen, who in 1927, when he published the last Danish account before Debes’s own, stated that it was impossible to write about the question of independence without stating one’s own view (Debes 2001: 12). There is no doubt that the national question has caused bitter conflicts among Faroese politicians and between Faroese and Danish politicians, thus making the authoritative historical self-presentation of the Faroes as a society problematic. However, this is, of course, also a matter of resources being given a priority to deal with this problem, and Faroese academic milieux are small. In the following I shall trace some backgrounds to the present situation of Faroese society, nationalism being analysed in more detail in Chapter 8. There are relatively few sources for the early history of Faroese society at the time of their settlement around 800. One of them is the Færeyinga Saga, written around 1200 (West 1974: 15, Wylie 1987: 9; see also a number of more specialised papers in Mortensen and Arge 2005). Norse settlers seem to have come from Norway and the Scottish Isles, while, as in Iceland, an earlier Irish settlement was probably abandoned. In the late tenth century, the Faroes (meaning ‘sheep islands’) formed a polity organised around a ‘Ting’ on ‘Tinganes’, a peninsula in the present-day port of Tórshavn. However, a narrative of ‘an olden age’ of settlers does not play as important a role as in the Icelandic case. According to the Færeyinga Saga, Christianity was accepted in 1000 and, as a continuation of this, the King of Norway had his rights to tax the Faroese confirmed in 1035. The Faroes were tied more firmly to Norway, from where many settlers had

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arrived, and the ‘Ting’ probably became one of a number of others in the western part of Norway. The Faroes traded their wool, and increasingly also fish, with Norway, and apparently also with the British Isles. Trade with Norway went through Bergen. The King of Norway and Denmark became one and the same in 1380, but until the Reformation the Faroes were still regarded as part of Norway. With the Reformation, around the 1530s, the Faroes were increasingly governed as a province of Denmark, and the Faroese church lost status because it lost its bishop, then becoming part of the Norwegian and finally the Danish church in 1620, but even then the Faroes fell under the Norwegian law (Debes 2001: 83). Monopoly trade was introduced in 1524 and was not abolished until 1856. The monopoly trade rights were first given to private merchants, then to the Icelandic Company from 1619 to 1709, when the King of Denmark took over the administration. Church and trade became integral parts of state government. The social-material structures of the Faroes show a remarkable continuity in the organisation of the village community. Still today most villages have elements of the medieval divisions of the infield land tenure, which was, however, simplified during the Reformation. Here, church lands were made into what are still today called ‘king’s land’, the basis of a privileged class of tenants of larger plots of land, the so-called ‘king’s farmers’. The main difference was that freeholders shared less land and that their lands were divided among the owner’s heirs. Again, the Reformation in effect led to a strengthening of state power and state property, but, within the ‘Danish shell’, ‘Faroese culture’, with its ancient land-tenure system, ‘survived relatively unchanged’ (Wylie 1987: 31). This system was preserved through the Seydabrævid law, originally dating from 1298, but incorporated into later Norwegian and Danish laws. These laws claimed that only farmers with an independent household and land could marry, as was made precise in the 1777 version, which remained valid until 1856 (Wylie 1987: 37; Bærenholdt 1991: 216). This was a form of population control, in parallel to the regulation of sheep grazing on a kind of ‘carrying capacity’ principle (Brandt 1988). The poor were forbidden to have children. Meanwhile, with the abolition of the monopoly on trade, fisheries developed with a new class of merchants, in a socio-economic take-off that paralleled the Icelandic case (see above). However, the Faroese tradition of fisheries had probably struck deeper roots than in Iceland, which was also connected with the coastal location of the traditional Faroese villages. Contrary to the situation in Iceland, with its seasonal fishing stations that were considered non-social, in the Faroes fishing could most often be carried out from the village in combination with agricultural work, though some new villages developed alongside the fisheries (Bærenholdt 1991). In addition, the Faroese had conceived of fishing grounds as extensions of the

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land, indeed as part of the outfield, for centuries (Wylie 1987: 30), and still today Faroese politicians map their economic exclusion zone as the national territory in order to claim that the Faroes are larger than most people would think. The village social structure was not easy to change and only did so slowly. However, the tripling of the Faroese population in the nineteenth century allowed for more fisheries but also an expansion of cultivated lands and new land parcels, which were offered to smallholders for them to become crofters (Joensen 1987, 1989). As in Iceland, however, probably the most revolutionary decade was the first of the twentieth century, when Faroese fishers bought around 125 second-hand schooners from Britain and created 2000 new jobs (Joensen 1989: 17). Meanwhile, the agricultural and more or less subsistence economy continued alongside the development of capitalism in the fisheries (Joensen 1987; Wylie 1987). Nevertheless, the share of the workforce in the fisheries had passed that in agriculture by the beginning of the twentieth century, a change that did not happen in Iceland (Bærenholdt 1991: 222). Politically, Faroese institutions were not respected by the Danish colonial power to the same extent as they were in Iceland. The traditional ‘Løgting’ was abolished in 1816, having already lost most of its powers to the now absolutist King of Denmark. The Faroes became a county of Denmark, which made the Danish administration in the Faroes more powerful, since it could decide which Danish laws should be implemented in the Faroes (Debes 2001: 84). Debates on the status of the Faroes continued following the introduction of the 1849 Danish Constitution, which was extended to the Faroes in 1850 (though not to Iceland). The Danish priest, politician and poet N.F.S. Grundtvig was one of the supporters of the recognition of the Faroes (see Chapter 8; also Debes 2001, for a detailed account of the negotiations). The result was the further integration of the Faroes into Denmark’s new political structures. From 1854 the ‘Løgting’ became a kind of county council but with special competences (Debes 2001: 104). The national movement emerged in the later part of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 8). It started with language and culture, but part of it began pursuing political independence from around 1900, thus dividing the Faroes politically on the national question, in a way that has haunted the country since then. The crucial event here (see Debes 2001) was the struggle over the so-called offer of self-government from 1906. The Faroese politician and member of the Danish Parliament, Jóannes Patursson, who was part of the new political association, ‘Føroya Framburdsfelag’, negotiated an offer that would have given the ‘Løgting’ control of all taxes on the Faroes and thus also responsibility for the further construction of telephone lines, roads and harbours, as well as the possibility of negotiating further areas of local control (Haldrup and Hoydal 1994: 107). In the following election to the ‘Løgting’, two political parties with opposed

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positions on the national question emerged. The party for unity with Denmark won the election, as a consequence of which the Faroes did not accept ‘the offer’ of self-government. The next crucial event was the 1946 referendum on the ‘breakaway’ of the Faroes from Denmark. While Denmark was occupied by Germany during the Second World War, the Faroes were subjected to a friendly British occupation, facilitating intense (and risky) shipping connections and trade, but also a ‘jump forward in social development and mental independence’ in the Faroes (Debes 2001: 46, my translation from Danish). Following this period, with no connections with Denmark, political negotiations over the national question again came onto the agenda after the war. This led to a referendum that is still painful to the Faroese: the Danish government insisted in the voting alternatives being either the Danish government’s position or a ‘breakaway’ (løsrivelse in Danish, lóysing in Faroese, words that are still referred to) of the Faroes from Denmark. Surprisingly, the majority voted for the ‘breakaway’, though it was only a small majority. Since the turnout had also been small, only 33 per cent of electors had actually voted for the ‘breakaway’. In addition, some had voted ‘no’ as a protest to the alternative set-up, and the Faroes were again split. The King of Denmark did not accept the referendum result, dissolved the ‘Løgting’ and called an election (Debes 2001: 44–50). The Danish government and a new unity-oriented Faroese government then negotiated the 1948 Home Rule Law (see Chapter 8 on Home Rule). The last and still painful event demonstrating the ambivalence of the Faroese on the national question was the severe crisis at the beginning of the 1990s, which led to a number of seminars and publications in the middle of the political maelstrom, facilitated by Faroese candidates of Roskilde University in cooperation with myself (Johansen et al. 1993; Haldrup and Hoydal 1994; Johansen 1995). The starting point for these events was the deep financial crisis of Faroese banks in 1992, which, of course was mainly to do with over-investment and declining fisheries. However, it ended up being first a political crisis between the Faroes and Denmark, and then also a crisis for many people in the Faroes, leading to 10 per cent emigration in the mid-1990s, though most of these migrants moved back around 2000. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) became involved in the restructuring plan, which was forced through by the Danish government. The debts of the Faroese banks, Faroese private individuals and remarkably the Danish Bank (the largest bank in Denmark) were reallocated to the Faroese government to pay back over a number a years (Haldrup and Hoydal 1994: 182–84, Mørkøre 1996: 179–89). In this atmosphere of distrust, during which the Danish government of Prime Minister Nyrup Rasmussen lost all sympathy in the Faroes, a new Faroese ‘independence’ government came to power in 1998 (Debes 2001: 61). The new government quickly began negotiations with the Nyrup Rasmussen

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government in Copenhagen. However, the negotiations degenerated into bitter conflict (see Chapter 8), with the Faroese government losing the next election. The Home Rule Law of 1948 is therefore still valid at the time of writing, though the Home Rule government has taken over a number of further competences. In addition, the Faroese have paid off their debts, and the economy was expanding in the first years of the twenty-first century. Underlying these crucial political events, a transformation in Faroese society went on throughout the twentieth century, though the continuity of Faroese village culture has been striking. In the 1960s, numerous fishfreezing plants were constructed in the villages, most of them producing almost the same products, initially frozen fillets of cod and haddock. The Exclusive Economic Zone was extended to 200 nautical miles in 1977, a year after Iceland, thus ‘making a fence’ around Faroese fisheries, which were used to working at long distances. Infrastructural development was intense, connecting the villages and islands, and the Faroes became particularly well-known for their many spectacular tunnels (see Chapter 4). The tunnels proved stable and two undersea tunnels connect most of the Faroese mainland, but fisheries and especially fish processing were severely restructured in the aftermath of the 1990s crisis. Where the special Faroese form of ‘village development’ or regional policy – Bygdamenning – had been fundamental to the political culture in securing services etc. for every village, this had now been more or less achieved, ironically facilitating an enhanced mobility of people, who commuted increasingly in pursuit of the regional labour market of the Faroese ‘mainland’ (Kristiansen 2005). At last, there are signs of major socio-material changes in practices in Faroese village culture, which are not being disrupted but simply performed in new, reflexive ways. The obvious question is why the national question was dealt with so differently in the Faroes and in Iceland. Jonathan Wylie, in his comparison of the Faroes with Iceland, and with Shetland on the other hand, makes interesting suggestions (1987: 173–85). Iceland went through severe problems, especially in the eighteenth century, with a decline in population and little domestic development of fisheries (see previous section). ‘In short, Iceland remained more rural than the Faroes until the very end of the nineteenth century. Then it urbanized and industrialized more quickly’ (Wylie 1987: 176). Where Faroese nationalism referred to the still living village culture, Icelandic nationalism and separatism came much earlier (see Chapter 8), and Wylie argues that it gained much of its political strength from the saga literature rather than from the peasant way of life. With reference to unpublished work by Gudmundur Hálfdanorson, Wylie also notes that the programme of the Icelandic intelligentsia led by Jón Sigurdsson managed to appeal to both the administrative and educated elite and the agricultural elite, as well as to other classes, thus allowing for

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internal conflict, but achieving agreement on the national-liberal programme for independence. Iceland’s strikingly unanimous rejection of foreign rule allowed direct, open opposition on internal economic and social questions. The Faroese were less divided at first and less unanimous later, for the question of nationhood itself became a primary focus for debate and a ground for internal political differentiation. The reason for this contrast was that the Danish national-cultural ideology of the 1840s was domesticated and politicized in somewhat different social settings, during differently timed courses of socioeconomic development. (Wylie 1987: 180)

The Faroese economic take-off had been earlier, the cultural and political take-offs much later, whereas Icelandic nationalism was already in place as a common denominator before the economic take-off. So time and tempo matter (as Bourdieu 1977 and Flyvbjerg 2001 both stress; see Chapter 2). But Wylie also sticks to another explanation, which does not contradict, but supplements, the socio-temporal one. Put simply, even if Faroese nationalism had come earlier, Icelanders had the sagas, which became part of a colonial staging of Icelandic nationalism, since ‘the colonialists expected Icelanders to play the part of the ancestors of Norse civilization’ (Pálsson 1995: 12). The nineteenth-century national-cultural ideologies of Nordism managed to install Iceland as the role model of Nordic heritage. ‘As Icelandic culture was felt to embody all that was most noble about the common Norse experience, Icelanders became leading members of the North’s intellectual partnership’ (Wylie 1987: 177). Iceland became the inspiration, and most Danes ‘respected these proud descendants of the authors of the Icelandic Sagas and wished them all the best’ (Árnason 1997: 262). The Faroes could do the same in part, although the literary heritage was not so plentiful, but, once Iceland had taken the road, the Faroes would anyway only be the second to go along it. In fact, Faroese nationalism was much inspired by Iceland, as well as Norway (see Chapter 8). The strength of Wylie’s ‘saga argument’ lies in the double bind of the narrative fascination: it worked to calm tensions, both inside Iceland and between Iceland and Denmark. Who would regret a nation with such ‘a golden age’ (see previous section), self-government and later independence? And who would regret having taken part, across other social and political conflicts? However, I suggest that there is a social and political argument that is made tacit in Wylie’s argument, and I would like to add to his remarkable comparison. Iceland’s literary heritage was staged as part of an Enlightenment project in which the image of the Icelandic Freestate envisaged liberal political ideas, with an implicit claim of universal validity, thus making them even more irresistible to others in the major social and political transformations that took place in the Nordic countries in the nineteenth century. The Icelandic ‘national-liberal’ project was politically

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different from Faroese politics, which were always stuck in local political issues and references to the continuity of the village culture. So, while the Icelandic project had a universal orientation, the Faroese maintained their focus on their own particularities. Michael Haldrup and Høgni Hoydal pointed to the separation of (altogether four) processes of modernisation in the Faroes. In parallel with economic and technological modernisation, political modernisation remained unfinished, as it remained a totally pragmatic realpolitik. This was first of all due to the character of the sociocultural modernisation that took place within – and without breaking with – the village community. The interests of the villages were always placed above those of the nation as a whole (Haldrup and Hoydal 1994: 264–67). In contrast, Iceland never had agricultural village communities, only a relatively harsh transformation from single farms to fishing towns (see above; also Bærenholdt 1991). The political practices inherent in this Faroese disposition are physical, social and cultural at the same time. They are embedded in the long history of the Faroese village community, physically preserved, socially performed and culturally made into the history narrative of the ‘folkish’ Faroese public (Andreassen 1992, discussed in Kristiansen 2005), a narrative also performed by the intellectual elite in its obsession with culture and its potential continuity. As Wylie remarks (1987: 190–91, 197), there is little critical enquiry and social focus in Faroese literature and historiography, leaving open the question of whether the restructuring in response to the crisis in the 1990s will lead to new Faroese ways of coping with time, including, in the long run, in academic practices. The history of the formation of a Faroese society – its history back and forth – is thus unfinished.

Greenland: Colonialism and Self-governance The emergence of a Greenlandic society has been no less fragile than in the case of the Faroese, since Greenland comprises a hybrid of various streams of migration from both north and south. Many (especially eastern and northern) communities remained more or less isolated for a long time, and formally speaking, colonialism only ended in Greenland in 1953. As in the Faroes, the size of the population and of scientific milieux is small, and the future of Home Rule is still an open question. It is therefore no surprise that there is still no really comprehensive Greenlandic attempt to communicate a history of modern Greenland, though there have been approaches to this. Also in Greenland, writing history used to be a task performed by foreigners alone, but in this case by Danes, namely Finn Gad (1984, and as part of the large and detailed work, 1976) and Mads Lidegaard (1991), in works that have been translated into Greenlandic, partly for educational purposes. So the question of the colonisation of knowledge is present in

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complex ways, since Danish intellectuals have also been crucial in the construction of Greenlandic identity, which includes both non-Inuit and Inuit Greenlanders (R. Petersen 1991; Hansen 1992). It is only recently that an international post-colonial perspective has been launched as a programme for the writing of Greenlandic history (Manniche 2003). A number of Danes in proximate contact with Greenlandic research and policies, as well as non-Inuit Greenlanders, have published central works about the modern history of Greenland in relation to the introduction of Home Rule in 1979 (Dahl 1986; Lauritzen 1989; Skydsbjerg 1999). Among the more comprehensive Greenlandic history narratives that have been translated into other languages, there is the volume (in Greenlandic and Danish) edited by H.C. Petersen (1991) and the short history (in Danish and English) by Jørgen Fleischer (2003), both of which concentrate on the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In addition, there are enormous quantities of more specialised studies in various disciplines. Although ethnic boundaries are explicitly blurred and politically transcended, colonial knowledge practices are still present in the form of the know-all attitudes of people who would like to ‘help Greenland’, as stressed in reflections ‘by a former colonized’, the prominent Greenlandic academic Robert Petersen (1992: 194, expressions translated from Danish). For him Greenland has become a society of people of both Greenlandic and Danish ethnicity, but where there are still outside organisations trying to colonise the territory. Colonial knowledge about Greenland has a long history, including the era of explorations (see Chapter 6). The most general features seem to be the persistent Danish paternalism towards the Greenlanders, and it is worth asking if much has changed in this respect today (see Chapter 8). Historically speaking, one illustrative example is the presentation of the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. In the published report of the event by Captain Daniel Bruun (1901), the Greenlandic section in particular is devoted to normative evaluations in representing the ‘Eskimos’. I shall quote from this extensively: The purpose was, in this section, partly to give an image of the primitive culture of these peoples, as it were in the moment where Europeans came in contact with them, and partly the results achieved in their civilization under the royal Greenlandic Trade Administration. The Trade Department’s main task is namely of a civilizing character, and trade only comes in the second position, managed with the utmost regard for the well-being of the Greenlanders – in contrast to the case in other places in the world, in relation to peoples [folkefærd] like these … The Danish Greenlanders on the West Coast are a happy people [folkefærd] that have precisely the quantity of the goods of civilization they can bear without being less capable of resistance as hunters. (Bruun 1901: 33, my translation from the Danish, original emphasis)

The Greenlanders were presented as primitives being nursed with exactly the right amount of civilisation by a colonial trade administration to make

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them continue their hunting practices, which in fact were also crucial for export. Bruun’s narrative is strong in its reference to the colonial tradition of the Rink administration in Greenland (see also Chapters 5, 6). It stresses the unique abilities of the Royal Greenland Trade, ‘since our Administration of Greenland is unique, in the sense that it is the only place in the world where a primitive people [naturfolk] is closed out from the outside world, while one has at the same time raised it by giving it the amount of civilization that serves it best’ (Bruun 1901: 7, my translation from the Danish). This is exactly an expression of the kind of paternalism of know-all Danes that Robert Petersen stressed as representing the prevailing form of (post-)colonial continuity up to the present, though many later forms may be more complex, though difficult to escape for any Dane or Danish researcher, including myself. This is not only the immense problem involved in writing a history of the other, since the problem is that Danes are so much involved in the ‘Greenlandic project’ that neither they nor we can escape the responsibilities involved, even in the past. Let me therefore only refer to a few events in the history of Greenland, using The History of Greenlanders before 1925 (H.C. Petersen 1991) as a main reference. The Home Rule Minister for Culture, the Church and Education from 1983 to 1987, Steffen Heilmann, wrote in the preface to this work: Normally we have information about our history, when people from other countries have visited Greenland and written about how we live, how we perceive things, and how we see ourselves as a people. Until now we have lacked a presentation of our history, as we see it ourselves. I think that this book, written by our fellow countrymen, fills the gap and shows the way to understanding ourselves.’ (in H.C. Petersen 1991: 7, my translation from the Danish)

The first human settlements on the west coast of Greenland took place 4500 years ago. This was the Saqqaq culture, which arrived from the northwest, from Canada, but it is not clear whether it reached the west coast by passing Melville Bay or by skirting round Greenland’s north and east; their presence seems to have ceased around 800 BC. The next stream of migration from the northwest, around 600–500 BC, is called the Dorset culture, the period of its continuity not being known. Then the Vikings came in the tenth century. The people they encountered in Eastern Greenland were probably the Dorset people, still surviving there. The oldest heritage of Greenlanders is thus found in the traces of the Dorset culture, which are still present among Eastern Greenlanders (this short presentation follows H.C. Petersen 1991: 15–16 and will not go further into details of cultures). However, the heritage of the settlement of the Icelandic outlaw, Erik the Red, in 982–86 is better documented, and is often celebrated, as in the case of the Leif 2000 events, celebrating Leif Eriksson’s (a son of Erik the Red) discovery of America (Vinland) in 1000 (Bærenholdt 2002c). There were Viking or Norse settlements in Southern Greenland (Østerbygden) and in the fjords behind the location of (present-day) Nuuk (Vesterbygden). The

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exact fate of the Norse settlements is unknown, since contact with them faded out in the fifteenth century. Speculations concerning their fate include a colder climate, navigation blocked by sea ice, conflict with the Inuit or partial absorption by the Inuit. Whatever the case, yet another Inuit immigration, the Thule culture, had taken place from Alaska to the Thule area and to the northern parts of the west coast in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reaching the Nuuk area in the fourteenth century, and perhaps living peacefully beside the Norse, as oral tradition records. Meanwhile the Dorset and Thule cultures met in Eastern Greenland, but while people were mobile on both coasts, we do not know of any contacts between west and east. Then European explorations, whale hunting and trading began in the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century (H.C. Petersen 1991: 16–20). From 1261 Greenland was treated as being a Norwegian territory, paying taxes to the King of Norway, but, after the last recorded contact by ship in 1410, contact ceased, and Greenland did not play any role in the Reformation. Thus, when the Norwegian priest, Hans Egede, arrived on the ‘Island of Hope’ (as he called it) near present-day Nuuk in 1721, he hoped to find the descendants of the Norse, but also to re-establish the tax rights of Denmark–Norway, to disseminate Protestant Christianity and to trade in order to support his mission economically. Egede did not find any Norse descendants, but it was not until the re-establishment of contact with Eastern Greenland in the nineteenth century that the hope of finding any was given up. Until then the colonial history narrative of Greenland was one of continuity (Lidegaard 1991: 36, 161; Hansen 1992: 38–55). When Egede at last acknowledged that the pagans he had heard about from seamen were not Norse descendants, he addressed his mission to the Greenlanders. He was supported by the King of Denmark, since Denmark had considered Greenland to be part of the kingdom since 1387 (H.C. Petersen 1991: 22–25). His mission was supplemented by a Herrnhut (Brødremenighed) mission in 1733, which was much more successful in baptising Greenlanders in its early years. Greenlanders continued their seasonal migrations between their winter houses and smaller hunting sites in spring and summer. The purpose of this movement was to gather supplies for the winter. ‘But the cultural gathering and refreshing experiences of the travelling, strengthening health in body and mind, were also an important incentive’ (H.C. Petersen 1991: 30, my translation from the Danish). These forms of mobility were acknowledged by the famous inspector for Southern Greenland (based in Nuuk), H.J. Rink, who was given responsibility for most of the improvements in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rink introduced a number of ‘civilizing’ innovations, among them the so-called Forstanderskaber, a kind of local council (see Chapter 7). Together with a group of other Danes, the German Samuel Kleinschmidt and Greenlandic teachers from the teacher

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training colleges (opened in 1845) and artists, Rink is acknowledged among Greenlanders for his contribution to ‘the first steps towards a unification of Greenlanders into one people with a strong feeling of solidarity’ (H.C. Petersen 1991: 37, translated from the Danish). Rink was responsible for the slow and balanced adjustments, celebrated by Daniel Bruun (in the quotes above), as well as by Greenlanders themselves. He wanted to teach Greenlanders to govern themselves (H.C. Petersen 1991: 37). ‘Inspector H.J. Rink was a true friend of Greenland, and no other Danish official in Greenland before or since has done as much as he’ (Fleischer 2003: 43). The important characteristic of nineteenth-century Greenland was the use of the Greenlandic language in education, the mission and church services. Most people became literate. Economically, Rink’s policy was to let Greenlanders maintain themselves as hunters in order to secure an income from the trade and protect them (H.C. Petersen 1991: 63; see also the present volume, Chapters 5 and 6). However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of fisheries and of sheep farming in the south came onto the agenda, both prospering between 1912 and 1940 (Bro 1993: 147). For example, fisheries in Ilulissat (the colony of Jacobshavn) started with the small private trade in Greenlandic halibut (hellefisk), which had been run in parallel with the trade monopoly since 1776, and was taken over by the Royal Greenland Trade Department in 1903 (Mattox 1973: 89). In response to the reduced prices for blubber and whale and seal oil and declining catches of seals, new industries emerged, accompanied by a population increase from about 1900, at higher rates than before, doubling in the mid-twentieth century and increasing to around four times the 1900 level by around 2000 (more from immigrants born outside Greenland) (Rasmussen and Hamilton 2001: 16, 10). These developments took off around 1900, when a ‘mental revival’ began alongside meetings in community houses, and new industries were launched in the years until around 1925 (H.C. Petersen 1991: 105–13). Meanwhile, contacts were established with the Thule area during the 1902–4 expedition (H.C. Petersen 1991: 185; Walsøe 2003: 21). With the 1908 law on the administration of the colonies in Greenland, trade and administration were separated, and municipal councils and two provincial councils were introduced (see Chapter 7). New forms of social organisation, debates, official letters and so on emerged. However, suggestions made to abolish the trade monopoly were not accepted in order to protect the Greenlanders from trade (Bro 1993: 131–32), and the monopoly continued until 1950. At the same time, tensions between Denmark and Norway over the sovereignty of Eastern Greenland increased. Norwegians increased hunting in North East Greenland, and questions were raised concerning how Greenland could have become a Danish area in 1814, given that it was originally part of Norway under the King of Denmark–Norway. As part of

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the dispute, Denmark established a new colony on the east coast to claim economic and political rights, but the dispute ended in 1933 when the International Court in The Hague gave the Danes sovereignty over the whole of Greenland. Meanwhile Faroese fishermen also claimed fishing stations in Greenland (Lidegaard 1991: 177). As in the case of Iceland and the Faroes, the Second World War cut Greenland’s connections with Denmark. The administration in Greenland established contacts with the US, who supplied it, and among other things also developed interests in Greenland, in the first instance in supplies of cryolite, an essential mineral in the production of aluminium (Lidegaard 1991: 180, 184), and then later in the construction of several airbases. The Second World War broke Greenland’s isolation, and new consumer goods and habits from America were introduced into the country. Much of the subsequent fate of Greenlandic society was determined in this way. US forces stayed in Greenland after the Second World War, and the US even offered to buy the territory from Denmark (Grønland under den kolde krig 1997; Fleischer 2003: 62). The US presence in Greenland was among the reasons why plans for a Nordic Defence Union did not succeed (Lidegaard 1991: 192), and Denmark joined NATO, but with a reduction in its obligations because of secret agreements with the US regarding bases in Greenland. In the post-war atmosphere of decolonisation, and in response to a request from the UN, Greenland’s colonial status was formally abolished with the 1953 amendment of the Danish Constitution, which made Greenland an integral county of Denmark. Meanwhile, before this was implemented, Denmark had to accept the forced removal of the Thule people in May 1953 in order to make way for further American constructions at the Thule airbase (Walsøe 2003). The political integration of Greenland was followed by ambitious plans for economic modernisation in the 1950s and the 1960s, the introduction of a Danish workforce and a policy of making Greenlanders Danish, the latter policy not proving successful. Though much of the modernist, Social Democratic planning succeeded (Adolphsen and Greiffenberg 1998), Greenland was still under the remote government of Copenhagen (R. Petersen 1992: 185). Among trends triggering tensions were the claims of Danish trade unions for better wages and labour conditions for Danes who were born outside Greenland than for local people, and the urban concentration of the population. Another was the feeling of even remoter control induced by Greenland’s compulsory membership of the EU in 1973, in spite of a huge majority against it in the Greenlandic electorate. Together with the 1960s radicalisation of resistance to Danish colonialism, this led to the 1979 Home Rule Law (Thorleifsen 2003b; also below, Chapter 8), which was politically inspired by the example of Faroese Home Rule (Fleischer 2003: 66, 68). None of these home rule arrangements acknowledged either the Greenlanders or the Faroese as distinct peoples.

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Much was achieved with the Home Rule ‘revolution’, although the problems involved in building a new Greenlandic society have been immense, among them being the large-scale administration, based on Danish professionals and a new class of Greenlanders, and the public ownership of business (Dahl 1986; Lauritzen 1989; Skydsbjerg 1999). Socio-economic restructuring strategies since the 1990s have followed a national-liberalist course, where regional policies of village development have been given up in order to sustain Greenland’s road to further selfgovernance and independence, with obvious inspirations being drawn from the Icelandic example (see Chapter 8). The Home Rule Report from the Commission on Self-governance (2003) has set the course for incremental changes, through which Greenland will obtain greater and greater independence over time. Political consensus on these changes within Greenland is high, and the Danish government accepted the challenges by setting up a new joint Danish–Greenlandic Commission on Self-governance in connection with the twenty-five-year jubilee of Home Rule in 2004. These developments are not without links with the struggles of the Faroese (see above), but they are less ambivalent and more measured. Greenlanders know well that it will take many years to find alternative incomes to the annual DKK 3.5 billion block subsidy from Denmark, which contributes half of Greenland’s public expenses. But the Greenlandic course has been stabilised through a very high international profile, de facto achieving international positions that go beyond de jure Home Rule. Aspirations and connections with international indigenous peoples’ organisations and with the UN have been helpful in this respect (see Chapter 9), but above all Home Rule has enabled Greenland to play the US (Thule airbase) card, culminating with the signature of three Danish–Greenlandic–US agreements on 6 August 2004, opening up US support to the development of Greenland, including access for Greenlandic students to US universities (www.nanoq.gl). In coping with its colonial heritage, Greenland Home Rule has succeeded in placing Greenland on the international political stage by manipulating hybrid identifications as Inuit, Nordic, Christian and North American (for a critical discourse analysis of this point, see Bærenholdt 2002c). Compared with the ambivalence of Faroese independence policies, Greenlandic policies have been much more revolutionary. Since the 1990s, in its domestic regional policies, Greenland has followed the Icelandic nationalliberalist course, consequently giving a higher priority to national independence than to village development and culture, in spite of a strong Greenlandic orientation to these questions when the Home Rule was introduced. Urbanisation is continuing, with almost half (42 per cent) the population living in the three main urban centres of Nuuk, Sisimiut and Ilulissat (as stressed in fact sheets from www.nanoq.gl) and fewer people now living in villages. The migrant heritage of Greenland is obvious, but the

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policy of building one Greenlandic nation in practice means the subordination of the Eastern Greenlanders and of the Thule Inughuit to the Western Greenlanders, as became obvious when, in 2003, the people of Thule finally lost their case in the Danish High Court for compensation for the loss of their lands in 1953. Denmark recognises only one Greenlandic people. A firm course for self-governance has been set, based on the principle of ‘one people equals one society’.

The Colonial Traces: Trade, Christianity, Nationalism and SelfGovernance These short histories of Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, and the various reflections on their use, point to a number of common themes to be investigated further in the following chapters. However, despite the obvious differences between the four countries and their internal conflicts, the history of Danish colonialism had left common traces at a general level. First, many of the dynamics in the formation of societies have been played out through trade and the transport involved in it. Ship connections controlled by trading monopolies have played a significant role in stabilising relationships between these peripheries and the centre in Copenhagen. The economic, political and cultural responses to this situation have followed different temporalities and institutional paths, but one common feature is the stronger initial political organisation of all four countries that came along with the Reformation in Northern Norway, Iceland and the Faroes, followed by the Protestant mission socialising also the Sami and Greenlandic Inuit with governmentality. Trade and religion still carry with them colonial historical traces in present-day Nordic Atlantic societies, and we shall learn more later about how this happens. Nationalism in the Nordic Atlantic is thus not a different field of enquiry from colonial heritage, not only because peripheral nationalism is anticolonial, but also because it carries with it the colonial heritage that it set out to transcend. Therefore, Nordic Atlantic societies have not only been produced by people in the Nordic Atlantic. Colonial history is also a history of the mobility of goods, fishermen, craftsmen, workers and not least administrators from ‘outside’. Meanwhile, in all four countries the emergence of internal elites of merchants, teachers, priests and administrators has been important, and was facilitated by these mobilities. Also, connections across the North Atlantic have been crucial not only for trade, but also for political training and inspiration. The following chapter will explain in more detail, with further theoretical discussions and case studies, how various forms of society are produced. This includes the mobility of transport and communications, hunting and fisheries, exploration and

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tourism in the second part (Chapters 4–6), and the territoriality of municipalities, nation states, regimes of home rule, cross-border cooperation and trans-regions in the third part (Chapters 7–9). As this chapter has shown, history writing plays a significant but varying role in the making of Nordic Atlantic societies. For Northern Norway, history writing copes with distance in time by producing a regionalist account. In Iceland, the National Museum clearly displays the making of a nation. In the Faroes and Greenland, and for good reasons, a modern historical account of the making of society has not yet really been stabilised, but the accounts referred to above outline a path towards increased selfgovernance and independence.

4 FORMATIVE TRANSPORTS


Introduction Societies are formed by transportation, and this chapter presents evidence for this from the Nordic Atlantic. Nordic Atlantic societies are often associated with scattered settlement patterns and with challenging journeys across long distances, steep mountains, rough seas and ice caps to reach other settlements. This contributes to the making of societies in specific ways that are more than just variations in producing specific national, regional or ‘locality’ effects on social units that are already defined. Settlement patterns and journeys are not secondary to societies. They are parts of the production of societies, formed in the contextual complexity of relations, which needs to be studied in concretely (Bagguley et al. 1990; Bærenholdt 1991). Settlement patterns are incorporated into the habitus of the coping practices that produce societies, where certain senses of place are also crucial (Bærenholdt 1993, 1998a). Where and how people live, work and move are a part of habitus, defined as ‘conceptual schemes immanent in practice, organizing not only the perception … but also the production of practices’ (Bourdieu 1977: 118). Therefore, a settlement pattern is more than just material location and flows of houses, workplaces, roads and transport; it is primarily a pattern in the social-material practices of people that reproduce and change these materialities. Coping practices are thus subject to a process of regularisation, not only in space but also in time, and settlement patterns are such regularities. Settlement patterns are classical topics in geographical discourse because they seem to form a concrete nexus linking distinctions between nature, society and culture. Geographical discourse has often focused on resources and assets that are territorially fixed. The analysis of settlement patterns tends to focus on the location of dwellings and workplaces, transport routes to natural resources, markets and the like, less attention being given to

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people’s practices of moving around. Traditionally geographers might include roads, railways and airstrips, but they tend to forget about the socio-spatial coping practices of people moving along these routes. In fact, the practices of transport and communication across distances are crucial, as they are constitutive of society. Wires for the telegraph and Internet, roads and so on build societies not by their mere existence, but through the use people make of them: indeed, the construction of wires or wireless connections is immensely important, as they are conditions for this connectivity. In other words, routes of communication and the use people make of them are both foundations of societies. Dag Østerberg is one of the principal Nordic sociologists contributing to our understanding of the materiality of society. He stresses how ‘materials’ (materiell in Norwegian) affect possibilities for action, and how communication ‘materials’ mediate connections in ambivalent ways. Communication ‘materials’ fundamentally strengthen social ties and social collectivities, while their possibilities can also increase the burden of social isolation. It is not enough to have a telephone – you also need somebody to telephone you. Furthermore, infrastructure for communication and transport tends to be a common good that does not work well if it is only controlled as private property. Roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure tend to form societal (state-like) institutions at higher levels, while they can also provide the foundations for one of the most central means of transport: the private car (Østerberg and Engelstad 1984: 56–57). Østerberg uses the term ‘materials’ as distinct from ‘the material’. ‘Materials’ are the ‘material’ when marked by practices. ‘Materials’ possess spatiality, inertia and the like, while also communicating to those in action in their field. Østerberg presupposes a certain correspondence between ‘materials’ and practices, since the actor’s repertoire depends on the material field. Thus social relations are not only mediated through (material) practices, but also through the material fields that practices are performed in. Østerberg stresses this nexus between the social and the material in his concept of the ‘socio-material’ (1993: 129–30). Societies are practised, but they are more than practices themselves: societies are also the materials marked by practices and the impact of material fields on practices. These propositions are certainly relevant with regard to transport. The focus in this chapter on the socio-material practices and fields of transport has similarities with the book Splintering Urbanism by Graham and Marvin (2001). Their study of modern cities points to the crucial role of infrastructure in: (1) providing exchange over distance; (2) facilitating dynamic relations in exercising economic, political and cultural interests; (3) forming an immobile fabric for society; and (4) performing cultural imaginations (Graham and Marvin 2001: 10–12). They also argue that geography, sociology, architecture and urban studies have systematically

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neglected the role of transport and communication networks, in spite of their central formative power, and have left them to the technical field of engineering. Yet Graham and Marvin (2001: 21) also warn against the technological determinism that has been prevalent in transport research (see also Lash and Urry 1994; Gudmundsson 2000). These warnings are no less valid in the rural and peripheral areas studied here. Societies are fundamentally produced with the help of transport, but this involves a whole series of social practices in business, politics and civic life. These practices construct the exchanges, dynamics, fabrics and images through which societies are made.

Societies between Isolation and Connection Some of the Nordic Atlantic cases are obvious examples of societies being understood as islands. People living in the insular societies of the Nordic Atlantic tend to stress that they are living in countries (Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes) rather than on (Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe …) islands. Nevertheless, their claim to status as societies is based on the further claim that their territorially insular form makes them fit for modern statehood and territorial control of land and resources. The insularity of these small nations can be envied by Sami in Scandinavia and Inuit in North America. Their mobile intersections with other groups make claims to political territory problematic. The Canadian cases (Nunavut and Nunavik) are characterised by a sharp distinction between political self-government and corporate foundations rising from land claims, not to mention the complexities of the very many indigenous peoples in Northern Russia. In fact, territories make little connection internally in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes. The Greenland ice cap and the many (including ice) fjords connecting it to the oceans make land transport a little favoured mode, though there is some winter traffic by dog sledge, snowmobile and cars on frozen fjords. For example, snow and ice are the sine qua non for the military Sirius patrol that guards the vast uninhabited coastal areas of North East Greenland. The Faroe lands consist, in many cases, of steep mountains; land transport meant only walking until tunnels were constructed. Nor is the interior of Iceland an obvious highway; the deserted highlands, covered with snow in winter and spring, were and are well known for their challenges, which today are met in four-wheel-drive vehicles, following the few primitive roads and tracks in the interior. Ironically, the indigenous peoples, like the Sami, who lack territorial control, are exactly those who depend most on land mobility. In other words, the territorial connection inherent in the project of building a single society in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes rests more on nation building, language, cartographic imagination and coastal navigation than on direct

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connections overland. In addition, isolation was frequently a consequence of the difficulties in crossing the open seas. Today, however, many internal connections are producing or, in fact, feeding international connections, as much as constructing the domestic nation. A faster internal connection to the national hub may well result in more external, international, moves via this hub, as well as contacts with it. It is clear from this that the specificities of forming infrastructures are practices that are absolutely crucial to the production of societies of various kinds, transhumance routes, nationalised territory societies, or various scapes, ‘networks of machines, technologies, organisations, texts and actors’ (Urry 2000: 35), transporting people, objects and information. Isolation and connection intersect in the production of sociability and societies. This explains the widespread use of spatial concepts in the social sciences, but the spatiality of social relations should be conceived as being deeper than just metaphors. Ingold prefers to avoid overall, abstract terms like space and culture, and concentrates on place and landscape. Furthermore, he qualifies the much used distinction between global and local. The difference between them, I contend, is not one of hierarchical degree, in scale or comprehensiveness, but one of kind. In other words, the local is not a more limited or narrowly focused apprehension than the global, it is one that rests on an altogether different mode of apprehension – one based on practical, perceptual engagement with components of the world that is inhabited or dweltin, rather than on the detached, disinterested observation of a world that is merely occupied. (Ingold 2000: 215–16)

As Urry points out (2000: 48), here Ingold is reformulating Tönnies’s classical distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (see above, Chapter 1), by moving the distinction from a question of scale to a question of type of engagement, where the local for Ingold will be the substantial. Consequently the local, like locales (Giddens 1984), is not defined by territoriality per se. Practical engagement with the world can also be performed along the routes and scapes that bonding mobiles travel and meet through. In parallel, place-oriented socialities can also be detached, such as the type of abstract relations that cosmopolitans exercise with the places they live in (Friedman 1998: 147; Bauman 2001: 55). Both these are forms of society, meaning that ‘a society’ most often combines the two: Gemeinschaft-like and Gesellschaft-like relations, as Tönnies himself thought (Falk 1999; Hovgaard 2001: 61). But much present social science seems to rest on dichotomies, such as Manuel Castells’ concepts of ‘space of place’ and ‘space of flows’. Castells tends to stereotype the two, ‘space of flows’ being the concept for ‘exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors’ (Castells 1996: 412), while ‘space of place’ refers to local communities, which resist flows in making clusters marked by fundamentalist symbols such as ‘the community of believers, the icons of nationalism, the geography of locality’ (Castells

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1997: 65). Although Castells does also recognise the possibility of new ‘project-identities’, his dual concepts seem to return us again to a particular reading of Tönnies. The fault in such an analysis does not lie in showing the erosion of ‘traditional’ institutions of kinship, family, subsistence production and religion, but in making the dichotomy of place versus flow an external relation, and even a linear process from one to the other (Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001a: 20–21). New forms of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are constantly in the making, and they cannot be differentiated using spatial metaphors such as local versus global or place versus flow. Indeed, distance used to be the marker of so-called ‘traditional communities’ defined by their relative isolation rather than territoriality, as in the remote settlements and camps inhabited by Inuit from time to time in their seasonal movement. These communities were defined not by attachment to a single place or the territorial defence of an area, or by abstract flows and mobilities, but by routes of movement through places and by distance to others. But it was also through their ways of coping with distance that Inuit met each other, and other people. They now use electronic communications to facilitate their making of Inuit identification through connection. In general terms, Zygmunt Bauman expresses this clearly: Distance, once the most formidable among the communal defences, lost much of its significance. The mortal blow to the ‘naturalness’ of communal understanding was delivered, however, by the advent of informatics: the emancipation of the flow of information from the transport of bodies. Once information could travel independently of its carriers, and with a speed far beyond the capacity of even the most advanced means of transport … the boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ could no longer be drawn, let alone sustained. From now on, all homogeneity must be ‘hand-picked’ from a tangled mass of variety through selection, separation and exclusion; all unity needs to be made; concord ‘artificially produced’ is the sole form of unity available. (Bauman 2001: 13–14)

Isolation and connection are material, complementary forms of practices, in which people use ‘materials’ to make society, although this is not only a matter of their own making. Networks are led in particular fields and directions. In the case of the Nordic Atlantic, the formation of the written language, printed materials and the ability to read were indeed the early makers of information, connection and unity producing the imagined communities of Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic nationalism as well as North Norwegian regionalism (see Chapter 8). Furthermore, the loss of distance for many people in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes was also related to separation from Denmark in the Second World War. As with the German occupation of Norway, this war meant the construction of airfields to an extent never seen before, and the opening of new connections. Thus closing off particular networks may open others (Strathern 1996). Isolation from certain flows may easily mean the flourishing of

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other, much more connective flows. On another level, automobiles combine isolation in the vehicle with the connections the vehicle makes, much like the mobility of the Inuk hunter or the North Atlantic fisherman. Many examples could be mentioned, and other references in subjects like history, anthropology and geography document such cases. However, in general the social sciences have tended to neglect the roles of distance, transport and mobility in understanding the formation of societies, at least until around 2000, with the publication of works by Bauman, Urry and Ingold that are critical of the notion of ‘society’ as such. This seems to be a paradox: why can we not think of mobility and society together, when so much evidence points to the fact that they condition each other? It is only partly true that ‘“Society” was always an imagined entity’ (Bauman 2001: 111). Societies are also material and bodily relations and responsibilities, though certainly not only territorial and homogeneous in kind (Graham and Marvin 2001). The important connections and isolations that make societies are more than individual experiences. To be social, they need to be somehow regularised and collective, and thus also dis-embedded from the presence of immediate environments. Societies are not only made by the transport of the individual speedboat, snowmobile, dog sledge, kayak, fourwheel drive or super-mobile, ‘smart’ car: they are rather made through the negotiated coordination of routes and the dependence of these routes on immobile supports from homes, second homes, navigation stations, tracks, roads, lighthouses, ports, airports, cables, telephone masts and the like. It is exactly this intersection of mobility, immobility and place that is intended by the new mobility paradigm (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 139; Urry 2007). Societies are mobile and immobile, and they (should) include nomadic and pastoralist practices that are more regular and coordinated than the ideal types that Bauman seems to prefer (Urry 2000: 29; Juul 2001). But even tourists and vagabonds move along more or less coordinated, traditionalised or negotiated routes, thus forming their own specific societies. Coping practices connect materially, interpersonally and imaginatively, while also isolating from other people, things, lands, routes and so on. This does not happen without contest and conflict; we must rather acknowledge that transport is often a means of violence used by states to produce ‘societies’ as ‘survival groups’, making certain people unify in opposition to other groups (Elias 1978: 138). In his remarkable work The Colonial Present, Derek Gregory (2004a) points to one of the most obvious examples of this, the construction of the Trans-Israel Highway, which bypasses Palestinian towns, not to mention the Israeli construction of walls. For a long time, control of mobility has been at the heart of geopolitics constructed in physically determinist forms (Mackinder 1998 [1904]). However, new analysts are beginning to investigate more concretely how road construction both interweaves and separates social actors and thus constructs society. In other words, there are signs of a new scientific

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discourse that approaches transport neither as socio-technical questions of traffic regulation nor as cultural artefacts, images and experiences. This involves studying not only the images and plans of the powerful, but also the ‘actual, messy, untidy, conflict ridden, power-laden landscapes inhabited’ (Wilson 2004a: 136). In Peru, people in rural areas want roads to be built to secure access to lands and citizenship, and to counter the threats of civil war and terrorism: they want to end isolation with better schools, economic connections, and social justice (see also Wilson 2004b). This is not a question of connection with society, but of creating the networks that form society. Like property relations, these networks are simultaneously material and social (Strathern 1996). They form societies that combine mobility and territoriality, as well as bonding and bridging (see above, Chapter 1), by means of various forms of redistribution, reciprocity and markets that are performed in regularised flows. In this sense, societies are collective routes sharing transports, including those in the Nordic Atlantic.

Colonialism and the Making of Routes The history of the Nordic Atlantic is one of maritime connections, and, in good part, of the technological power of the ships of the Norse colonizers. For the Inuit and the Sami, transport was less a question of long-distance sailing; boats were means of coastal movement, not of cross-Atlantic transport. Sea mobility was the strength of the Vikings. In much European and Anglo-American discourse, the Vikings were non-societal like the horse-riding Mongols emerging from the Asian steppes, both of whom challenged European ‘settlement’. In Mackinder’s classic ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, we find this description of the Vikings, as a parallel to ‘the horse-riding people’ of the Asian steppes: A rival mobility of power was that of the Vikings in their boats. Descending from Scandinavia both upon the northern and the southern shores of Europe, they penetrated inland by the river ways. But the scope of their action was limited, for, broadly speaking, their power was only effective in the neighbourhood of the water. Thus the settled peoples of Europe lay gripped between two pressures – that of the Asiatic nomads from the east, and on the other three sides that of the pirates from the sea. (Mackinder 1998 [1904]: 28)

Yet these Scandinavian pirates, the Vikings, were also the Norse settlers in the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. And they were not alone. Competing networks and routes have been spun, especially several rounds of Inuit migration from North America to Greenland (see above, Chapter 3). In understanding the formation of societies in these areas, our interest is more than in understanding how networks and relations are sustained. We ask ‘how are new relations made?’ (Callon and Law 2004: 6,

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original emphasis), and pursue the question of the role of technologies in constructing societies. Hence the question of how Vikings were technologically able to spin connections across the Atlantic fascinates so many people: it is also a question of how connections were socially and culturally organised. Power relations are materially, socially and culturally embedded in all of these examples, along with colonialism. For example, networks of routes tend to have certain centres. Dominant cosmologies and imaginations in medieval Iceland were based on geographical orientation towards the centre in Reykjavík, which was associated with the ‘south’, so that any ship moving around Iceland in the direction of Reykjavík was seen as moving ‘south’ (Hastrup 1985: 52–56). Icelandic transport tended to work in circuits around the island, while crossing the interior represented risks and dangers as great as the oceans. Shipping routes implied the exercise of colonial power, as in the case of the Copenhagen-centred trade monopoly in Finnmark from 1729 to 1789. All trade administrators in local harbours were sent out from Copenhagen, and all ships made directly for Copenhagen, without calling at Bergen on their way back (Bratrein and Niemi 1994: 175). Another example would be the historical practice of ships plying between Denmark and Greenland, with ships spending longer periods ashore in Greenland, because smaller boats from the mother ship had to go out to the hamlets to collect cargo. In this case, the shipping crews used their time ashore for personal trade in goods that were not part of the monopoly (Tving 1944: 209). Transport routes had their specific colonial geographies of power, affecting the simple scale and magnitude of populations and transportation. Not only are economic and political links in the Nordic Atlantic, as elsewhere in northern areas, oriented towards more southern centres. Transport routes are constructed along traditional colonial lines, supplying the centres with raw materials and semi-processed products (fish, ore, and increasingly, tourist experiences) and the peripheries with goods. Regional cooperation in these areas cannot be based on intra-regional trade and transport, as there is little comparative advantage in exchange, and also a small population. The rich common tradition of fisheries does facilitate some common effort in education and recruitment, research and development, sales and marketing (see Chapters 5 and 9). However, they do not provide regular transport routes between Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent opening up of east–west connections between Northern Russia and Scandinavia, new air, road, train and electronic routes have been under construction. This construction was driven first by the new colonial trade extracting raw materials (fish and timber) from Russia for processing in Scandinavia, and secondly by the larger population, the Kola

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Peninsula (the Murmansk Region) alone having a larger population than all of Northern Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland put together. It is characteristic that nearly all the existing links between Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway are also links to southern centres. Iceland Air’s connections with Greenland and the Faroes are basically only one element in the company’s success in transatlantic flights between Europe and America. The Faroese Smyril Line ferry’s connections between the Faroes, Iceland, Shetland, Norway and Denmark are based on the continental links it provides with Denmark. The network of Icelandic shipping routes (including their cooperation with Faroese and Greenlandic partners) is oriented towards major ports in Europe and North America. The Kiruna–Narvik railway, which first opened Sweden and the far south as tourism destinations for North Norwegians, was built for quite different reasons, especially the shipment of iron ore from Northern Sweden through the port of Narvik. There are small, irregular, often charter-based air routes between Nunavut in Canada and Greenland, Greenland and Iceland, Iceland and the Faroes, and the Faroes and Norway. And there are maritime contacts in the fisheries from Northern Russia to Atlantic Canada, the routes of Sami transhumance in Northern Scandinavia, as well as routes by which Inuit from the far north of Greenland and Nunavut in Canada meet. However, the most regular and frequent passenger transport between Greenland, the Faroes and Northern Norway, as well as between these regions and the rest of the world, is still through the main airports in Copenhagen and Oslo. In contrast, Iceland, with Keflavík as a transatlantic hub, has many more direct international than regional connections. These examples of transport between Northern Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland illustrate the contextuality of transport routes and the formation of society. Although contexts should not be understood as territorial containers, the socio-material topographies of each of these areas have their specific features. Their diversity is due to variations in their natural histories (land and sea relief), their ‘indigenous’/’colonial’ histories and their environmental, social, economic, political and cultural creations of routine practices of settlement. Various methods of transport and communication intersect, local, domestic and international ones being interlinked. But the differences in the quantities and qualities of the distances that these transporting practices cope with matter. Indeed, each form of transport, such as shipping, driving, flying or the Internet, has the formative power to create specific societies and social groups across borders. This is especially the case with the elite flows of frequent air travellers coincidently meeting in airports and planes, continuing the earlier encounters through sea travel between colonial officials and ‘national’ students and elites on ships (Tving 1944). Meanwhile, these similarities did not produce exactly the same, single, Nordic Atlantic society. We must expect to find differences in ways of

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coping with distance between Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland. For each of these territories, we therefore now examine the formative powers in the opening and continuation of various forms of transport route. My analysis begins with the building of Northern Norway, before moving on to study the routing of a selection of localities in Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland.

Routing Northern Norway Regular connections along the length of Northern Norway began when coastal steamer routes were first created in the nineteenth century by the state to deliver mail, but also to provide transport for passengers and freight (Map 4.1). Private shipping companies opened up coastal routes connecting Northern Norway directly with Hamburg. Together with the introduction of larger boats in fisheries, these trends made the construction of harbours a requirement for local development. Harbour construction began with

Map 4.1: Northern Norway.

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cleaning up natural harbours in bays and fjords, and both central and local authorities played important roles in this development. To take one locality as an example, Magerøya Island in the far north, in North Cape municipality, was connected by regular coastal steamer in 1853. Telegraphy opened in the town of Honningsvåg in 1878, but there were discussions in the municipal council as to whether it was necessary to have the telegraph station open all year round. Road connections between the villages on the island were first suggested in 1869 and discussed for the remainder of the nineteenth century. A road was thought to be unnecessarily luxurious, since ‘everybody had boats’ (Hanssen 1990: 251–53). Further construction of harbours and roads did not take place until the beginning of the twentieth century, when sea traffic increased to levels where space in harbours became limited. The regular coastal steamer – Hurtigruten [‘The Fast Route’] – was introduced in 1893, and reshaped connectivity in Northern Norway (from 1936 there were daily connections). Shipping routes combined freight and passengers. Increasing the speed of connections was only possible by ending calls at smaller harbours and avoiding diversions into fjords and bays. Demands for better connections, among others from fishermen to ensure the sale of fish, were a constant issue, for international connections as well as the coastal steamer and local routes (Hanssen 1990: 305–9). The regular shipping routes for mail, freight and passengers (including tourists; see Chapter 6) were crucial in the modernisation of Northern Norway, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Although shipping was most often operated by private companies, this ‘routing’ and ‘scheduling’ of North Norwegian society was an intense public, political matter and, as such, also a central case in the modernisation practices that constructed Norwegian society and North Norwegian regionalism. Today, the Hurtigruten (Photograph 4.1), still runs a regular schedule calling at each harbour at the same time everyday between Bergen and Kirkenes near the border with Russia, though this is now mostly a tourist route, and the ship itself a mobile conference centre. By the 1920s and the 1930s road construction had become a central topic of public interest, generating mass meetings in the North Cape area (Hanssen 1990: 374–79). In the period after the Second World War, alongside the post-war rebuilding of houses, road connections became the major societal project in Northern Norway. Transport became the fundamental step in the process of modernisation and the central condition for the development of agriculture, manufacturing, administration and education. While there was a shift from sea to road transport throughout the 1970s, air traffic expanded in the same decade, followed by IT developments in the 1980s and 1990s (Tjelmeland 1994). But, among these changes, the expansion of automobility is the most prominent. The number of cars in Northern Norway increased from 2,387 in 1950 to 65,490 in 1970, and to 158,406 in 1991. According to historian Hallvard

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Photograph 4.1: The coastal steamer Hurtigruten (1989).

Tjelmeland: ‘The car is modernity in a nutshell: it represents individuality, growth, mobility and flexibility. But it also represents the ambivalence of modernity: both freedom and force, both closure and disclosure’ (Tjelmeland 1994: 351, translated from the Norwegian). Ottar Brox, in his book Nord-Norge: Fra Allmenning til Koloni [Northern Norway: from Commons to Colony] (1984), reported research by a University of Tromsø team on the ‘consolidation’ of settlement patterns in Northern Norway in the 1970s. The research concentrated on the Troms county area, where a pattern of regional labour markets was being shaped by road construction, which facilitated widespread commuting. Smaller localities in Nordland and Finnmark were connected by roads, ferries, bridges and tunnels to islands, but due to the longer distances involved, day-to-day commuting did not develop to the same extent as in Troms. Nevertheless, the Norwegian word for connecting a locality by road – vegutløysing meaning ‘road release’ – gives an impression of the political imperative involved in achieving it. The advocates of these projects were typically local politicians, and their work continued with efforts to secure snow clearing and lighting in villages, both of which are fundamental for life in winter in the far north. Road building was a planned public investment, based on principles of cost per capita road release, which meant that the cheaper roads along the fjords and sounds were completed in the 1960s, followed by the more expensive constructions to settlements on the outer coast and islands (Brox 1984: 158). The roads along fjords and sounds changed links, since earlier seaborne communities across fjords and sounds were superseded by road-based communities (Tjelmeland 1994: 353). Road release came with the expansion of the ‘welfare municipality’ (see below, Chapter 7) and a change in occupational structure from

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agriculture and fisheries to services (including public services, transport and tourism). Only construction maintained its earlier position among the ‘traditional’ coastal occupations. Altogether these processes produced a Northern Norway in the 1990s that was more like the rest of Norway. Also tourism from Northern Norway grew with automobility, and reached the same level as the rest of Norway in the 1980s (Tjelmeland 1994: 372–73). Since the 1970s Northern Norway has experienced growth in air transport and in IT-based communication; many visitors are astonished to find such a ‘highly modernised’ society at such ‘high northern’ latitudes. In the northernmost county of Finnmark, non-road land transport in fourwheel drives and snowmobiles further changed everyday ways of coping with distance among Sami, Norwegians and Kvens (Finns). People pursue strategies to create better connections. The island of Arnøya in Skjervøy municipality (in the northern part of Troms County) provides an example of intense engagement between different villages around the island and on the adjacent mainland. Key questions are where and how ferries (and quays), tunnels, ships along the coast and buses should be routed and scheduled to avoid isolation. These questions also include how to cope with the dangers of storms and avalanches that not only cut connections, but may also threaten the lives of passing schoolchildren and so on (Kennedy 2000). Lobby groups for such issues are important conduits of community building that may also produce new distinctions in relation to ‘others’. Readers’ letters in regional and local newspapers like Tromsø, as in many other places, address transport issues as a dominant theme. For example, on 27 February 2004 (p. 3), one reader, ‘B.A.’, continued earlier disputes on the state of snow clearance on county road 53, between Tromsø and the village of Oldervika (where the road ends), on 9 February. The snow began around noon, but snow clearance did not start until 5.30 p.m. In these five to six hours, 20 cm of snow fell in a strong wind. The regular bus to Oldervika got stuck three times and was delayed for half an hour on its way. ‘B.A.’, who claims to have driven the road every day for 33 years, thinks that the State Road Agency should have checked snow clearance, and issued a fine for the contractor’s negligence. The vehemence of such letters and of the efforts of inhabitants on Arnøya, mentioned above, to secure connections and avoid isolation shows the centrality of coping with distance in the everyday life and politics of people in Northern Norway. Ottar Brox described this development as a process of suburbanisation, which in the end rendered earlier disputes between localities irrelevant, as new, larger communities were materially constructed by roads and the general mobilisation of people (Brox 1984: 160–61). Increasingly, the larger community/society produced by transportation and communication in the second half of the twentieth century was Northern Norway as a region of Norway (see Chapter 3). A new regional identity was formed. People in Northern Norway used to identify

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themselves as from Nordland, Troms, Finnmark or more local areas of belonging. The concept of ‘Northern Norway’ was first invented by migrants from Nordland in America at the end of the nineteenth century, but it was not until developments after the Second World War that people in Northern Norway conceived of themselves as inhabitants of the region specifically (Tjelmeland 1994: 281). The concept of Northern Norway is double-sided. On the one hand, it points to the specific conditions of the long, narrow land of Northern Norway, now connected by one, but only one, main road connection. On the other hand, it also points to the fact that this is a region in the nation state of Norway. Northern Norway achieved regional status along many key dimensions. One of these dimensions is the national IT policy, whose aim is to overcome distance for ‘a safer, more just society’ with ‘a digital common (property) right’ with access for all to highspeed IT communication at the same cost, regardless of location (Berger and Tryselius 2000: 20–21, my translations from the Swedish). Although Norway may not be so centrally linked to the Internet, and the associated business developments are not as strong (Castells 2001) as in the case of Sweden or especially, Finland, the wording of objectives is typical of welfare-driven Norwegian regional policies. A paradigmatic case of the mobility of life in Northern Norway would be prosperous Storfjord municipality, with a stable population of 1,900. It has been studied by Marit Aure (2001), and was also the site of the UNESCO MOST CCPP user conference in 2001. It can hardly be said to be one locality, but rather a number of roads, including a piece of the North Norwegian main highway built in the 1970s, the E6, and a main road across the border to Finland, near Sweden, where these three countries’ borders meet. In addition there are blind roads into valleys and along fjord sides. There is no municipal centre. Settlement is scattered, although it includes three villages around the head of the beautiful Lyngen Fjord, with views of the Lyngen Alps. Driving time to Tromsø is a little more than an hour. People choose to live here – it is one of few municipalities that are not losing its population – due to its attractive environment, road connections, public services, and local jobs in these services. There are three kindergartens, three public schools and three homes for the elderly and disabled, spread among the three villages. In addition, the municipality has succeeded in attracting a number of service jobs (Storfjord is discussed further in Chapter 7). People, especially women, tend to share the relatively safe public- or voluntarysector service jobs, while many (men) work at a distance, combining IT connections with commuting, and perhaps also running a small-scale farm. Marit Aure reported household-level research, which showed that: Commuting has been a male strategy in a situation with few local work opportunities. The fact that commuting is seen as an actual way of living by so many, even among the youngsters, makes this way of thinking a collective phenomena, a part of people’s habitus. A critical factor for families practising

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commuting in everyday life seems to be the presence of relatives and short distances between home, day-care and work for the women. The job-sharing system, the decentralised workplaces that make it possible to settle at your home place, where relatives live, facilitate precisely these demands. But changes in any of the required elements may interrupt and make this adaptation difficult. As expressed by some women, commuting also leaves the responsibility for the household to the one staying at home, the woman, thereby reproducing the traditional gender norms. (Aure 2001: 109)

Coping practices involve mobility by some (men), thus also depending on and reinforcing immobility among others (women). The jobs of the welfare state are redistributed among territorially defined networks in the village or the municipality, which are connected by road, kinship and other relations. Periods of IT-mediated work at a distance can be part of a household’s coping with distance in certain jobs, while others, such as construction work, involve physical movement. There are other, ‘denser’ types of industrial locality based on fisheries in Northern Norway, as well as the processing work of immigrants (see Chapter 5), but the case of coping with distance, long or short, in time and space, in a locality like Storfjord is emblematic of how transportation and communication are shaping reflexive modernity in Northern Norway, as in many other areas.

Around the Circle of Iceland Road construction has also played a central part in the formation of society in Iceland. The mobility of ‘life on the road’ was a very central aspect in the formation of a working class in Iceland during the 1920s and the 1930s. Work in the fisheries has always had its ups and downs, but road construction offered more stable cash incomes. Construction work and cash income became even more secure in the areas where the occupying Allied forces had their camps and airfields during the Second World War (Magnússon 1990). Iceland, like Northern Norway, was reshaped by road construction (Map 4.2). Road construction was initially important in ensuring supplies of milk to dairies in agricultural areas, but with Iceland’s independence in 1944 it became a national priority, along with the construction of freezing plants for the fishing industry. Road construction in Iceland is a serious challenge, as it has to cross wet plateaux, areas covered by snow throughout the winter, and steep hillsides, with the risks of landslides and avalanches. Together with high precipitation and temperatures around freezing point, these factors make hard surfaces difficult to maintain. Gravel roads were thus the norm, but more and more roads are receiving hard surfaces. Still, many roads in the interior and other high areas and passes are closed during winter and spring.

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Map 4.2: Iceland.

Air transport has also been crucial in the development of both domestic and international connections. The Icelandic Parliament had air transport on its agenda before the Second World War, but military occupation by the United Kingdom and United States, as well as the independence Iceland enjoyed from Denmark during the war, created new airstrips, technologies and organisations in the airline business. Reykjavík and Keflavík airports were constructed, a control system was organised, international competition emerged, and foreign regulations required innovative practices among entrepreneurs in the Icelandic airline business. During the period from 1952 to 1977 Icelandic airlines went into international air transport, especially competition on transatlantic routes. Since 1997 there has been significant deregulation, and domestic routes, with few passengers, have become difficult to sustain. They are now a political issue, like the construction of roads in the periphery. Whatever the situation, there are good reasons to state that, ‘Fundamentally, air transport touches nearly every aspect of Icelandic lives, and its success will, to a great degree, shape Icelandic society and the Icelandic economy in the coming decades’ (Jonsson 2004, no pagination). Aviation has now, probably, become economically more important to the Icelandic economy than fisheries. Icelandic pilots are famous for their courage, and thus run supplies to remote stations in North East Greenland, used as they are to landing their Twin Otters without airstrips.

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However, in the socio-spatial production of Iceland, which is truly a product of nationalist strategies, the ‘closing’ of the circle of the national Circle Road in 1974 was a very important symbolic event. The closure took the form of a physical, social and symbolic bridging of (and in) the (now former) rural municipality of Öræfi with the west, via bridges over the many glacial rivers running through Skeidararsandur, just south of the Vatnajökull, ‘Europe’s largest glacier’. The bridges were constructed so that future floods from subglacial volcanic eruptions, which happen every decade or so, would open and disconnect them, but not totally destroy them (see Photograph 4.2). The South East Icelandic municipality of Hornafjördur (with over 2,300 inhabitants) covers a 200 km long, narrow strip of land on the south-east side of Vatnajökull. There used to be six municipalities: the town of Höfn (1,800 inhabitants) and five small rural (parish) municipalities, among them Öræfi as the westernmost. These municipalities merged during the 1990s. Local development in Öræfi illustrates the role of mobility along Iceland’s Circle Road (reported in Benediktsson and Skaptadóttir 2002; Jóhannesson et al. 2003). Agriculture has been through major restructurings in Iceland since 1979, and, as in many other areas, tourism has become a major alternative for making a living. The completion of the Circle Road turned Öræfi into a different place, much easier to reach by car for both Icelanders and

Photograph 4.2: Bridge over Skeidará (2005).

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international tourists. In Öræfi, Skaftafell National Park is the major tourist attraction, placed as it is just beneath Vatnajökull glacier. A number of local people and their families have become involved in the construction of rural hotels, the development of special ‘coast-to-mountains’ tours, and the introduction of a local waste incinerator. The incinerator burns the waste left by visiting tourists (as well as locals), and the energy is used to heat a swimming pool, which attracts tourists (as well as locals). There are a number of small-scale local businesses that cooperate through local territorial networking. The inclusion of Öræfi in the amalgamated municipal district of Hornafjördur has not been popular, as entrepreneurs think the distance from the municipal centre is too great, not only in kilometres but also culturally, between the (old) rural area and the (young) fishing town. Local tourism development depends totally on traffic on the Circle Road; mobilities beyond local control nourish the local economy in a contingent way. Special events, such as the 1996 subglacial volcano eruption and the subsequent flooding, brought extra visitors to watch the event. Mobile bridging is only an issue of participation in tourist marketing: the driving forces are the attraction of the landscape and the access made possible by the Circle Road. In this case, we are talking about roadside socio-spatial practices of territorial bonding (of locals) and mobile bridging (with passing tourists), drawing on the territorial bridging of infrastructure development. Far from the Circle Road, the old fishing town of Isafjördur in the Westfjords only managed to maintain a relatively stable population in the second half of the twentieth century. It is a rather large rural town, with more than 3,000 inhabitants. Since the early 1990s the fisheries have declined, but the 1996 amalgamation of the town with three smaller villages and two rural districts, the opening of a tunnel in 1997 connecting Isafjördur to these villages all year round and, not least, the immigration of many foreigners (Skaptadóttir 2004) have provided part of the momentum keeping this municipality going (Benediktsson and Skaptadóttir 2002). Still, focus-group interviews with leaders in Isafjördur stressed isolation and poor transport links as among the major barriers to living in the area. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see Internet (email, web service) firms emerging here (Skaptadóttir and Jóhannesson 2004). For many firms, Isafjördur’s location, far from the Circle Road, is a problem, not only because of road connections, but also because the electronic connections with the highest band width follow the Circle Road. The Icelandic government’s IT policy, as in most other countries, talks about using IT to make distance insignificant, but, typically for Iceland, their rationale for given a priority to IT in peripherally areas is to strengthen the country’s international position (Berger and Tryselius 2000: 27). It is part of the national tradition of coping with distance in Iceland to give priority to regional

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policy and the periphery only if it strengthens the national position (see above, Chapter 3).

The Faroes by Way of Tunnels Although domestic distances in the Faroes are much shorter than in Iceland or Northern Norway, not to mention Greenland, transport connections were a dominant theme in the formation of Faroese society in the twentieth century. Until a steamer route opened in 1896 connecting thirty-four Faroese localities (and Scotland and Iceland), transport depended solely on sailing in open boats, walking and horse riding. The opening up of steamer routes facilitated the collection of milk for the capital, Tórshavn, and provision of dried fish for export. Road construction reached around 200 km (in fourteen segments) in the 1920s and 1930s, forming supply routes to landing ports, but it was not until the 1960s that more coherent road networks were constructed. Road construction was followed by car ferry, bridge and dam connections between the main islands. Today, all the villages on the larger islands are connected by road (Map 4.3). Since the 1980s, there have been helicopter services to the smaller islands, in addition to boat connections (Guttesen 1996: 6). As in the case of Northern Norway, road projects were a central issue for local and national politicians lobbying for better connections to their localities. It is no coincidence that, for example, the first tunnels constructed in the 1960s on Suduroy (the Southern Island) and Nordoyar (the Northern Islands) were called Løgmansbergholini (Prime Minister’s Tunnels), since they were constructed at a time when the Prime Minister came from precisely these regions in the Faroes. The construction of roads, tunnels, dams and bridges was one of the central questions of power relations (Haldrup and Hoydal 1994: 149). Infrastructural development represents a strong continuity in the modernisation of the Faroes, as in many other areas. Although the Faroes experienced a severe economic crisis in 1992, investments were only postponed for a brief period. A new undersea tunnel between the islands of Vágar and Streymoy was opened in 2003, and another major undersea tunnel has been under construction between Nordoyar and Eysturoy and opened in 2006. Another persistent element is the imagination of the village world as the centre of Faroese culture and life, although this has clearly changed. The villages still have symbolic value and politically important meanings (see Chapter 3): fishermen and seamen come and go, while at home in the village it is the women who reproduce the established order. At least this used to be the picture, and it does persist, although in new forms in the mobile Faroese society of commuters. In particular the traditional idea of Bygdamenning (village development) and the territorially oriented policy it

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Map 4.3: The Faroes.

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launched are now over (Apostle et al. 2002: 160). National systems of the regulation, sales and marketing of fish products have been superseded by market systems, re-establishing the local–global nexus that has been characteristic of the Faroes for over a century. The Faroes have a strong commitment to local territorial bonding, combined with a strong tradition of mobile maritime bridging. Eysturoy and Streymoy are the two central islands in the Faroes, forming the centre of the Faroese ‘mainland’, now extended to Vágar, and to Nordoyar. Interestingly, it is the municipalities along the roads on Streymoy and Eysteroy that have witnessed high recent growth in population, based on the combination of attractive houses in villages and jobs in the larger centres. ‘In the Mainland the traditional culture, often referred to as “Faroese culture”, expressed by a highly nationalist discourse, is reduced to hobby and recreation’ (Kristiansen 2004: 8; see also Kristiansen 2005). Much socialising is facilitated by cars, through stops at petrol stations, kiosks and grillbars. Less than 25 per cent of the working population living in villages like Hosvík and Kvivík on Streymoy actually work in their village of residence, but commuters think this situation encourages them to be more active in social life in the evenings and at night and weekends, as a kind of compensatory strategy (Holm 2004). Villages become places providing attractive housing, and issues other than local jobs become central. Service provision becomes a central field for innovation, an example being the local mobilisation to introduce a regular three-kilometre bus route between Fuglafjørdur and Kambsdalur to make children’s everyday life travelling to and from school or sports safer (Mýri and Biskupstø 2004). Meanwhile it has become obvious that the islands that are unconnected to the ‘mainland’, both the smaller islands and the two larger islands to the south, Sandoy and Suduroy, are now losing population (Kristiansen 2005). The socio-spatial trends of Faroese society can also be highlighted by contrasting the villages of Norddepil and Hvannasund on Nordoyar (Photograph 4.3). They are located across from each other, on opposite sides of a sound. Two long, single-lane tunnels connected Norddepil to Klaksvík as early as 1967, and in 1972 a dam (using materials from the tunnels) stopped the stream through the sound and permitted the road to connect Norddepil to Hvannasund, as well as to Vidareidi, even further north. The two villages of Hvannasund and Norddepil look like one community at first glance, but the difference between the old and traditional village of Hvannasund, with four ‘king’s farmers’ (see Chapter 3), and the new village of Norddepil (founded in 1866) is maintained in the everyday orientation of their respective inhabitants. In addition to its long historical tradition, Hvannasund has stronger family networks and a more favourable (i.e. more sunny) location than Norddepil. Though a local fish-processing plant, owned by the joint municipality, provided jobs for women in both villages until the early 1990s, this municipality was one of the last in the

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Photograph 4.3: Norddepil (1989).

Faroes to open a kindergarten, around 2000. Especially in Hvannasund, women’s networks across generations made sure that children were looked after. If there were problems, the distance from home to the workplace was short, especially in Norddepil, where the plant was located. If they needed to, children could look for their mother or another family member in the fish-processing plant (Bærenholdt 1991, 1994, 1996a). Throughout the twentieth century, population growth had been more stable in Hvannasund, the population of Norddepil fluctuating with the fisheries. This pattern was continued with the closure of the fish-processing plant in the early 1990s, since the more traditional village of Hvannasund continued to be an attractive place for dwelling, including its heritage, although no new houses had been constructed since the expansive 1980s. Agricultural practices are now mostly leisure occupations, while much of everyday life involves using the tunnels for working, shopping or leisure activities in Klaksvík or elsewhere. This life would have been impossible without the tunnels. And place is given meaning through, not in contradiction to, mobility. This situation recalls the regional labour market of Troms county and the example of Storfjord in the Northern Norway section (above). However, the strong village orientation of everyday life is specific to the Faroes and is not a relic of the past, but rather a ‘product of the specific Faroese process of modernization and industrialization during the 20th century’ (Haldrup 1996: 26). Tunnels were built to connect villages, and a village-based municipal structure was created to support a decentralised

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pattern of export-oriented community fish plants, which closed after the crisis in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, imaginaries of village life still combine with business contacts at a distance, the various forms and scales of Faroese combinations of territorial bonding and mobile bridging thus being transported into the twenty-first century.

Greenlandic Insularity While roads were constructed to connect most localities in Northern Norway, Iceland and the Faroes in the second half of the twentieth century, the coastal steamer and local boat connections are still an issue in Greenland, where no road connections between towns or villages were built in that century (Map 4.4). Furthermore, ice conditions differ according to place and season, and many localities in Greenland can only receive ships during the summer and autumn; in some localities in the far north or the east, the period available for navigation is very short. One example in Northern Greenland, though not as far north as Thule, is Uummannaq, which is connected by coastal steamer only in summer and autumn, while the ocean normally used to freeze during winter and spring. Local traffic from the municipal centre of Uummannaq (around 1,500 inhabitants, living on an island) to the seven smaller villages in the large municipal district covering a whole fjord complex (a total of around 1,300 inhabitants in the villages) used to depend on relatively stable, government-owned, supplycompany shipping. This service has become increasingly irregular with the ‘rationalisation’ of this company in the late 1990s. In winter and spring, a helicopter service provides an expensive alternative. But, in general, those with access to a boat in summer and autumn or to a dog sledge and dogs, or a snowmobile, or even a car, in winter and spring are able to travel on the ice. However, in recent years warmer winters have meant less stable ice and therefore more isolation.1 It is also common in Greenland for people (especially men) to travel long distances in private speedboats. In winter, dog sledges or snowmobiles are also used for long trips between villages, with the advantage that these modes of transport work on both land and sea. Every winter, soccer players from the village of Ikerasak in Uummannaq district visit the village of Qeqertaq, more than sixty kilometres to the south in Ilulissat District (see Map 4.4), by dog sledge for an annual match. Videos were common for years, but, like other villages in Northern Greenland, Ikerasak did not get direct television until 1996. New connections had been constructed not long before my fieldwork in 1996, and this, combined with transmissions of the European Championships in football, did not always make my pursuit of interviews with locals in their leisure time easier. When insular

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Map 4.4: Greenland.

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social relations are released, much energy goes into the scapes that are opened up, and new anticipations, meanings and identities emerge. Connections are both socially and technologically mediated. As anthropologist Mark Nuttall experienced in the village of Kangersuatsiaq, Upernavik district, people often connect with the wider society via others with specialised knowledge, such as the catechist (combined teacher and local lay preacher), the midwife, another teacher, each of them being gatekeepers to the priest, the doctor, the school head, etc., in the municipal centre. In addition, the local fish-processing plant manager, in relation to the larger processing company, and the village council members in relation to the municipality, are also important (Nuttall 1992: 163). This pattern gives an idea of hierarchical colonial social space, where villages relate to the nodes of municipal centres, municipal centres to Greenland’s capital of Nuuk, and then again to Copenhagen. Apart from the international airport being in Kangerlussuaq, not in Nuuk, the transport routes fit this centre–periphery pattern well. There are severe material reasons for the exceptions to these fits: Kangerlussuaq was constructed as an American airbase during the Second World War, and the choice was made due to its stable weather conditions, which persist here. Likewise, there was discontent in Uummannaq when an airport for fixed-wing aeroplanes could not be constructed on the small island of Uummannaq, since its rocky surface would not support an airstrip long enough for the aeroplanes chosen by Air Greenland to take over from the helicopters that had been used since the 1960s. Uummannaq airport (Photograph 4.4) was later opened on the mainland, near the village of Qaarsut, in 1999, and passengers for Uummannaq have to travel the last twenty kilometres in a small helicopter, or by car when the sea ice is frozen. Travel costs, time and discomfort are still major barriers in such areas, not least in the development of tourism (see Chapter 6), especially when other destinations, such as Ilulissat, have had a fixed wing airport since 1984. Insularity and a hierarchical colonial order persist in the transports forming Greenland. The following brief account of air transport and Internet use, two contemporary infrastructures, demonstrates the production and persistence of this power geometry. Air transport in Greenland was initially a question of transit, as the shorter route between Northern Europe and North America cuts across Greenland. Thus, as in Iceland, airstrips were constructed by Allied forces during the Second World War to secure the transatlantic supply routes, including the transfer of combat planes. However, the pattern of domestic air services differs between Iceland and Greenland, as a wide network of airstrips for fixed-wing aeroplanes was constructed much later in Greenland (the 1990s) than in Iceland. The steep topography of the environment of many marine settlements in Greenland, as compared with flatter agricultural terrain in parts of Iceland, is one of many reasons for this difference, as reported by a Danish former pilot and historian (Ancker

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Photograph 4.4: Uummannaq airport, Qaarsut (2001).

1999: 15). The main international Greenland airport at Kangerlussuaq was constructed by the United States in 1941–42, and was originally intended only as an alternative to the airstrip constructed at Narsarsuaq in Southern Greenland. Together with Goose Bay in Labrador, simultaneously constructed by Canada, these airstrips provided the foundations for military air routes, with planes jumping via Goose Bay, Narsarsuaq or Kangerlussuaq, then Reykjavik or Keflavik, to reach Britain (Ancker 1999: 33). As a spinoff, a number of sites for seaplanes were also developed, for use in military patrolling. In this way, for the first time there were domestic air connections in Greenland. The seaplanes were taken over by the Danish colonial authorities after the Second World War. In 1954, Scandinavian Airlines System opened its polar route from Copenhagen to Los Angeles via Kangerlussuaq, thus revolutionising Greenland’s external connections. Flights to Kangerlussuaq and Narsarsuaq became increasingly important for bringing in craftsmen and officials, and, with them, construction projects and the rule of the Danish government. However, specific places became more connected than others, and the airports themselves became micro-societies consisting of essential staff and services, including the need for large-scale accommodation for passengers waiting for often delayed flights. In addition, airports became important places for meeting other people, whether planned or not. Flight connections shape a specific pattern of connection and disconnection, and there is no doubt that connections are one of the major political issues in Greenland.

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Airline networks depend on static facilities and are organised in forms of political and corporate regulation that make it clear that this is far from being a frictionless fluid of connection. Airline networks tend to copy and adjust the spatial orders of the traditional coastal steamer calling at municipal centres and less regular district services. Power is exercised by means of connection and disconnection, thus shaping the specific routings of social formations. Compared with this, many would expect the use of the Internet potentially to create another, faster or more egalitarian sociospatial order. However, the bandwidth and other features of IT networks also depend heavily on static networks in the form of radio and satellite installations in Greenland. Bottlenecks in such connections can often put them out of users’ reach, especially when located in the monopoly enjoyed by Tele Greenland’s international connection through Nuuk. Another barrier is the potential lack of material on the Internet in the Greenlandic language (Hansen 1999). However, there is no doubt that use of the Internet is contributing to the creation of forms of symbolic community as another way of coping with distance. A study of ordinary Internet sites in Inuit areas across Greenland, Canada and Alaska showed that the types of reference used on the Net are very physical and related to place. Online connections assert and embed offline identities and references (Christensen 2003). Some would argue that Inuit traditions of mobility might make Internet communication easier to access for the Inuit, especially in using it to exercise and produce a transnational Inuit identity. Interestingly, Inuit use the Internet to construct agendas with people far away by making references to their common peripheral positions, and thus they are also using the Internet creatively to construct new boundaries and distances (Christensen 2003: 16, 46–47, 67). Compared with Canada and Alaska, web pages in Greenland tend to be situated less in an Inuit or global world; rather, they produce a local place, with reference to Greenland as a nation in the world (Christensen 2003: 46, 68, 92). This is the socio-spatial ordering of Greenlandic society as a molecule with local ‘atoms’. Visual representation of society on the Internet provides maps and pictures of places. To the extent that people can cope with the possible bottlenecks in using the Internet in a remote village, the global distribution of the Internet facilitates other points of reference and easier routes of access. The cost of communications is still a major issue in Greenland, partly the cost of transmission devices, but also because of the monopoly. Internet users in Greenland depend on a very specific network of immobile facilities. Coping with distance is part of nearly every practice in Greenland. Eastern Greenland and Avernarssuaq (Qaanaaq and settlements) in the north are still remote regions that even have their minority language variants, which are not immediately understandable for a speaker of the majority West Greenlandic language. Villages do not have regular transport

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connections, and bandwidth and the cost of Internet connections are a crucial issue to cope with. Meanwhile, infrastructure projects have been the central issue for projects creating Greenlandic society. Some would even say that these ‘hard’ investments have had too high a priority as compared with ‘soft’ investments in education and health. With the Danish subsidy providing around half of public expenses, public investment and subsidies have made Greenland an extreme variant of the Scandinavian society, as compared with non-subsidised Iceland. Accessibility is a constant issue, and given the absence of a road network, collective transport is an issue of public interest, characteristic of other Scandinavian rural transport policies. Greenland has had a one-price system, meaning that public subsidies ensure that any benefit would cost the same, regardless of location. This was an extreme version of Scandinavian regional welfare policy, committed to securing access not only to public services under the same conditions everywhere, but also to supporting consumption. Recently, the Home Rule government has tried to abolish this system, being inspired by the specific form of national liberalism prevailing in Iceland; every locality has to work for the benefit of the nation and its independence. The challenges of transport in Greenland and the ways people cope with them clearly illustrate the role of transport in producing society. Transport relates to nation-building processes involved in printing, education and socio-economic development (see Chapter 8). In the Greenlandic example, it is clear that post-colonial coping with distances, physically, socially and culturally, is more or less bound to reproduce some insularity and internal hierarchy, simply because low density does not facilitate a diversity of routings in society. However, there are different ways of coping with distance, even in the Greenlandic case. As Ottar Brox (1984) argued with regard to Northern Norway, welfare policies tend to colonise, the only problem being whether or not alternatives meet imperatives of sustainability, justice and democracy better. In this regard, the development of a less monopolistic Internet system in Greenland (see Hansen 1999) could present better alternatives. This would depend on publics on the Net, including the non-privileged, who are otherwise marginalised from corporeal mobility in dispersed Greenland.

The Routes of Societies Transport practices in Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland illustrate the difficulties in providing the diversity of routes, meeting places and publics that are characteristic of our normal, more or less ‘urban’ understanding of society. The routings of the Nordic Atlantic societies studied here differ from the construction of urbanism in the degree of plurality of scapes and channels that they use. A central feature of the

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formative transports of Nordic Atlantic societies is their dependence on single routes. Outside the urban agglomerations in these societies, there are seldom alternative roads, flights, internet connections or shipping routes. Most often, the alternative is to switch to another device; these routes are fragile due to the influence of bad weather, technical problems and the like. Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland differ in respect of the forms of routes practised. On the one hand, we have seen a Greenland without roads, where distances are great and alternative forms of transport are minimal. There is no choice between the automobile and flights or ships. In certain areas and seasons the coastal steamer provides the traditional routing, whereas air transport and the Internet are the only forms that have almost universal coverage by area and season. Domestic connections almost everywhere in Northern Norway, Iceland and the Faroes differ from those in Greenland through the predominance of car transport on roads, over bridges and through tunnels. Indeed, Southern Greenland has the prospect of developing a regional single road structure like Iceland’s, and there are plans for a ‘local’ road from Sisimiut to Kangerlussuaq. But in Northern Norway, Iceland and the Faroes, the construction and later upgrading of roads, bridges and tunnels have also been means for constructing national cohesion. These routes are not empty; they are used by all those with access to cars. But the system still leaves people without access to cars in a non-privileged situation. However, especially in Norway and the Faroes, this is partly compensated for by bus transport. In central parts of Northern Norway (especially in the county of Troms and around larger towns like Hammerfest, Alta, Narvik and Bodø in the two other northern counties), most of the Faroe Islands (apart from Sandoy and, especially, Suduroy) and in large areas around Reykjavík, Akueyri and Egilstadir in Iceland, commuting now makes it possible to talk about regional labour markets, which also work as consumer markets. In these areas, road networks are not only a question of national connectivity and tourist access, but also of everyday life practices. The example of the roadside Storfjord locality in Northern Norway is one place, and the villages mentioned in the Faroes are others, where people make both a living and meaning, through the mobility they perform (Aure 2001; Kristiansen 2005). In between, there are large, peripheral areas of Iceland and Northern Norway where people may and do spend longer times in cars, buses, planes, steamers or hydrofoils in order to travel – routing society with a certain, though limited, plurality. Earlier I discussed the transnational and transatlantic transport connections between Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes, Greenland and other areas. Many of the domestic connections feed and are fed by these international connections. As for international shipping, a number of container shipping companies connect localities in the Nordic Atlantic with Southern centres on a relatively regular basis, and are increasingly being integrated

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into the international shipping business. In summer, the Faroese Smyril company runs a car and passenger ferry service between Denmark, Norway, the Faroes and Iceland, facilitating automobile tourism to and from Iceland, the Faroes, etc. In addition, it is important to stress the practices of professional transport workers. Navigation has been a normal career, especially for the Faroese, and many Faroese captains, stewards and crew are found on ships all over the world. There is also a growing cruise economy. For example, the former Greenlandic coastal steamer Disko is now run by a major Norwegian shipping company (also running Hurtigruten) along the shores of Greenland, using Russian officers and foreign crew, and servicing tourists with transport, sightseeing, food and accommodation, but having almost no connection with the economy or wider society of Greenland. Indeed, although societies depend on distant connections, how this is performed has not been properly studied in the social sciences (see Urry 2004: 36). As already noted, Manuel Castells’s work is one of the contributions that have set contemporary agendas for approaching society as networks. In his The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society (2001), Castells uses the concept of ‘society’ without responding to the critiques of the concept put forward by Urry (2000) and Bauman (2001). Castells prefers to explore the notion of network: A network is a set of interconnected nodes. Networks are very old forms of human practices, but they have taken on a new life in our time by becoming information networks, powered by the Internet. Networks have extraordinary advantages as organizing tools because of their inherent flexibility and adaptability, critical features in order to survive and prosper in a fast-changing environment. This is why networks are proliferating in all domains of the economy and society. (Castells 2001: 1)

Society is taken for granted, while networks are ‘tools’ for those who survive. Indeed, networking as a dimension of coping practices is fundamental, but how, then, do we understand the social formations that are somehow a fabric(ated) environment, but also a point of reference for regulation, responsibility, redistribution and the formation of regular connections, in addition to being an imaginary (Bauman 2001)? To understand material, social and cultural forms of society that may well be produced through networking, we need further concepts, notions and metaphors. ‘Network’ is not enough, because it tends only to accentuate the networks of friends and professionals using the Internet through email and thus producing only ‘networked individualism’ and ‘specialised communities’ (Castells 2001: 118, 122, 131–32). No doubt these are elements in building (Internet) society, but are there more? Societies also involve projects of generalised reciprocity, recognition and acknowledgement, like those normally associated with the concept of networks (see Chapters 1 and 2). Mimi Sheller creatively suggests a discussion

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of ‘mobile publics’ (2004b), thus taking the debate over distant and moving connections beyond networks of kin, friends, business or special interests. She argues that ‘increasingly integrated modes of transportation, personal communication and electronic work and entertainment have significant implications for the constitution of “mobile publics” that exceed current understandings of the public domain as a set of spaces or institutions that can easily be distinguished from the private sphere’ (Sheller 2004b: 40). First one could argue that this is nothing new for Nordic Atlantic societies: they have always been on the move, and private and public were and are constantly mixed in ways that can be both productive and disruptive. The problem is that many of the forms of networked mobility we can think of are exactly forms of ‘specialised communities’ (Castells 2001). It is necessary to go beyond these notions, which more or less deal with the production of what I have called ‘mobile bonds’ (Chapter 1). Sheller also suggests that we need to address unpredictable but likely meetings of people, which can be corporeal or virtual, territorial or mobile. We may define places by the coincidental and foreseeable meetings that are performed, and Bourdieu does this (see Bourdieu 1996). But places of this kind may be mobile and virtual, and the social formation is thus not only the meeting, the connection, but the route of regularised movement that facilitates coincidental and yet foreseeable, repetitive and reciprocal meetings. This definition is necessary, but not sufficient, since it does not explain commitments, the performance of generalised reciprocity or the role of power (see later chapters). But, compared with the technical associations of the term ‘network’, as well as the too coincidental connotations with metaphors like ‘gel’ (Sheller 2004b: 47) or ‘encounter’ (Callon and Law 2004: 7), the notion of society as routes that I suggest actually meets Mimi Sheller’s ideas about people’s ability to ‘switch’ between communicative contexts (Sheller 2004b: 48) and enable ‘momentary stabilisations of collective identities as publics’ (Sheller 2004b: 50) enacted through the use of mobile communication technology. The notion of society as routes also addresses people’s commitment to sharing their wealth, future ability and imaginations with many others. We need to replace ideas of publics or societies as merely territorially given (Amin 2004: 40). However, in the single-routed peripheries, transport and communication are still so fragile that isolation and territoriality remain issues. Formative transports expand the limits of who can participate, but their performances are not without limits. They should be practised according to principles of mobility, but also to the acknowledgement of other participants and contributors (see Chapter 2). Routing societies also involves obligations, metaphorically speaking, in order to keep the ship afloat, the car on the road, the plane in the air and the Internet working. Formative transports thus produce societal routes that are more than one-way and more than coincidental

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fluids and fires. Routes can be followed both ways, but they are also followed jointly, sharing risks and hopes. Thus every societal route is also a project that involves certain common anticipations and obligations. In this way, people can form societies by travelling routes of transport and communication. However, the Nordic Atlantic examples show how fragile societies formed in this way can be.

Note 1. I would like to thank my friend Lars Therkelsen for always keeping me up to date about life in Ikerasak (also during his annual stays in transit through Denmark, while travelling the world). I first met him when he hosted me during fieldwork with my family in the school building in Ikerasak, in 1996.

5 NETS

AND

FLOWS I: FISHERIES


Introduction ‘Fisheries are areas of the sea where fish are caught in large quantities for commercial purposes’ (Collins Cobuild English Dictionary 1999: 635). This entry reveals a great deal. First, fisheries have increasingly become associated with territorialised ‘areas of the sea’, an indication of the attempts to produce territorial resource management societies at sea. Secondly, fish are at centre stage, but as an object for a practice in the passive mode, from which fishing humans have been erased. Thirdly, catching fish is more than coincidental, instrumentally serving business interests. This chapter examines the complexities in the spatialities, objects/actors and economic connections of fisheries in the North Atlantic. Its focus is not only the fishers, but also fish on the move, the flows of capital in fisheries, routed societies of fishermen and fisherwomen, networks and flows of fish to consumers, native and emigrant workers in fish-processing plants and the like. Fisheries create practices that are most important in the formation of Nordic Atlantic societies. The region depends on fishing as an economic foundation, as the basis for various social organisations and as one of the most prominent sources of identification. The colonial exploration of the Nordic Atlantic areas and the society building that followed were oriented to the exploitation of marine resources; monopoly trade had fish as its staple (see Chapter 3). Some of the major international definitions of the area, and central political struggles, are about fish, from the cod wars of the early 1970s to the non-membership of the Nordic Atlantic in the European Union. People in the Nordic Atlantic have tried to define their societies as fishing societies, and their unity and relations in terms of territorial control over mobile fish. Iceland was a pioneer in defining and later extending Exclusive Economic Zones to 200 sea miles in 1976, a central practice in the contemporary territorial bridging

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of nation building. Meanwhile, there are more or less invisible mobile bonds (see Chapter 1) among fishers across the Atlantic, on their travelling vessels, sharing tacit knowledge across borders. As a former Faroese fisherman said to me in an interview in 1989: ‘Fishermen were caught behind the fences of Exclusive Economic Zones.’ They had been used to fishing in distant waters and to a life without regulations or resource management systems, but now had to concentrate on domestic waters. This particular fisherman faced the consequences squarely, and began raising salmon in closed aquaculture nets, a practice far more in keeping with agriculture than with fishing. There are clearly diverse forms of network and flow in fisheries, where people cope with unpredictable and invisible fish populations, more or less migrating, together with the global circulation of oceans, climate changes, topographies, pollutants and food chains, from plankton to mammals. It is no surprise that modelling fishery systems needs to address complexity and uncertainty as core issues (see Charles 2001). This chapter analyses the more or less unintended consequences of people’s coping with these complexities and uncertainties and the societies produced by these practices. Since these socio-material practices involve both humans and non-humans at significant levels, there is a continuing undercurrent of ontological debate. It is therefore not possible to limit oneself to discussing only strictly social ontology: fisheries cross major academic fields dealing with nature and society, while also transcending boundaries between various forms of knowledge – scientific, local, tacit, mobile and the like. This investigation starts with the rich traditions of social sciences in examining fisheries, and the ambivalences in the ontologies of these sciences, including community embeddedness approaches and Actor–Network Theory (ANT). The analysis continues with the historical, colonial tradition of approaching fisheries as non-social, purely economic practices, ones that destroy the indigenous. From here the empirical focus turns to studies of mobile fishing societies, the introduction of Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQs), contemporary socio-economic networks and flows of fishing in the Nordic Atlantic, the role of women in fisheries, fishing heritages and festivals, and the constitutive role of labour migrants in fish processing and their associated locations. This chapter takes into account a number of cases of social transformations in fishing societies, where isolated positions and requirements for distant transport and communication used to be the basis for trade monopolies and dominant merchants, brokering with the ‘outside’ (Löfgren 1982: 164; see also above, Chapter 3). Other ways of coping with distance emerged with the twentieth-century social institutionalisation of fishery regimes, introduction of nationalised Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), attempts at state resource management, deregulation and introduction of

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neoliberal principles (like ITQs) in order to cope with overcapacity without ‘troublesome’ state interventions. The result of this was to a great extent that mobilities of fish, capital and labour increased, propelled by an increasingly capitalist organisation of fisheries, together with other adaptations, such as household strategies, many of which are also mobile. One aspect of this chapter is its attempt to take the voluminous discourse on fishery ‘communities’ out of its often narrow localism, since fisheries are enmeshed in so many and varied networks and flows beyond the ‘local community’, thus destabilising localised life and restructuring societies spatially.

Social Science Networks in Fisheries Networks and flows, alongside more territorial notions of place and region, are among the central socio-spatial concepts or metaphors of the last decade or so (Mol and Law 1994; Castells 1996; Urry 2000). Society is no longer primarily territorial, but is also made up of networks, fluid objects and bits and pieces. It has been said, that the social-science concept of a network originates from research on ‘knitted’ relationships among people in a Norwegian fishing community studied by the British anthropologist, J.A. Barnes (1954). The concept occurred to him while looking at fishing nets hanging out to dry (Jentoft 1993: 39). For Barnes, networks were about the ‘social field’ of interactions between people with interwoven relationships of kinship, friendship and community life, with no external boundaries to the social fields of fluid fisheries and static administration and agriculture (Barnes 1954: 43). The concept of networks spread into management studies, economic sociology and the like as a way of addressing relatively permanent relationships that are horizontal rather than vertical. The concept of the network became one of ties between individuals who know each other, expressing trust and, perhaps most of all, reciprocity. Networks became a central idea in economic sociology for forms of organisation other than anonymous, amoral markets, or the hierarchies of corporations, state governments and the like (Grabher 1993). From its original focus on interaction among individuals, the concept was extended to inter-firm relations and governance networks. Whereas the socio-material character of interaction and exchange was implicit in the network analysis of interpersonal and inter-firm relations, the concept was increasingly being used for anything, anywhere, at any time. Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society (1996) opened the path to an increasing focus on distant connections propelled by the development of information and communication technologies. Meanwhile, in the literature about fishing communities, networks continue to be affiliated with notions of the local, the community, embedded-

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ness and, more or less explicitly, territoriality. The classical reference in anthropology became Anthony Cohen’s The Symbolic Construction of Community (1985), based on his studies of the Shetland Islands. In North Atlantic community studies, the anthropological approach was linked to economic sociology through the works of Granovetter (1985) and K. Polanyi (1957; also Hovgaard 2001). A whole transatlantic community of researchers contributed to this approach, a tradition ranging from classical works by, among others, Ottar Brox (see above, Chapter 2) to Apostle et al., Community, State, and Market on the North Atlantic Rim (1998) and a number of contributions to the UNESCO MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Project (Bærenholdt and Aarsæther 1998; Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001a, b). With reference to Anthony Cohen’s work, Apostle et al. defined their main concept as follows: ‘For us, community embeddedness refers to an emergent sense of identity and belonging that is a product of interactive density and role homogeneity in a social setting with definable boundaries. Identity springs from a depth of knowing – ‘memoryscape’, attachment to people and place, and a normative structure that gives the physical boundaries of place social closure’ (Apostle et al. 1998: 236). These studies focus on reciprocity in local networks, and how Gesellschaft is nested in Gemeinschaft in the embedded fishing community (Apostle et al. 1998: 260). These unities and boundaries are simultaneously under threat from the dis-embedding forces of capitalist markets, creating the challenge of re-embedding social relations in new forms of solidarity and sustainable development. Increasingly, this literature also raised awareness of the possible negative aspects of embeddedness, such as clientelism, free riders, patriarchy and xenophobia. This research discourse has pervasive messages for people in power about taking decisions. Especially in Norway, the community-oriented discourse in the areas of fisheries and regional policies has parallels in the societal institutionalisation, dominated by the rural left, of such policies. This process started in the 1930s and culminated in the 1970s, with some echoes in today’s neoliberal discourses. Jahn Petter Johnsen has shown how – though being in conflict with other, more market-oriented approaches – the community-oriented discourse came to influence fishery policies in Norway after the Second World War (Johnsen 2002). Meanwhile, Petter Holm demonstrated the invisible revolution that has taken place in Norway since the 1980s, introducing more and more market-based forms of regulation in the resource management system (Holm 2001). While still in many ways rooted in the community and embeddedness tradition, Holm’s and Johnsen’s dissertations opened new routes of research, based in Actor– Network Theory (ANT). In fishery sciences, one source of inspiration, and debate, has especially been Michel Callon’s now classic case study of the ‘translations’ of relations between researchers, fishermen, scallops and the scientific community. Callon argued that ‘understanding what sociologists

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generally call power relationships means describing the way in which actors are defined, associated and simultaneously obliged to remain faithful to their alliances’ (Callon 1986: 224). ANT does not provide a general theory of practice and change (see Chapter 2). Rather, it opens up a path for concrete, contextual studies that show how actors are associated with one another and, most provocatively, introduce a generalised symmetry between nature and society. If there is a theory, it is one in which only networks are actors. Networks are simultaneously material and social, but if the emphasis is placed on the material side, then one acquires an understanding of relationality that is rather different from the original network concept discussed above. This is because no social forms are taken as given, as society is the category to be explained, rather than being just taken for granted. Here, networks are not about reciprocity between humans, but about the associations made between the various types of actor involved. More specifically, Callon’s economic sociology, although influenced by Polanyi, breaks away from the embeddedness approach mentioned above. Callon (1999) does not accept Granovetter’s dichotomy between networks and markets, between the social and the economic, because this approach tends to accept markets as having been defined a priori. For Callon, in contrast, markets are also constructed networks. He does not accept market ontology, but this does not prevent him from acknowledging the existence of markets, once they are built up and stabilised. For Callon, markets are not only abstractions (Callon 1998): they work as they are performed, when property rights and other stabilising devices have been put into practice. As Holm remarks: It is these devices that allow framing and disentanglement, and they are built into organizations, routines and regulations, physical structures and machines. The more institutionalized, naturalized, technological, material and thing-like they become, the better they will work in dis-embedding agents and objects from their social, cultural and technological contexts, setting them free so as to realize – put into reality – the market model invented by the economist. (Holm 2002: 16)

An example of this is the implementation of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in fisheries in many countries around the world, with Iceland being at the forefront of this development in the Nordic Atlantic. ITQs introduce the concept of private property in natural resources. They have exerted tremendous transformative powers, changing fishermen into the owners of fish resources, with considerable consequences for the losers in this battle (see later section). Hence, markets do not exist a priori: they are produced through processes of networking. Their functioning is not due to any other reality behind the ‘ideology’ of the market. ANT approaches perform a materialist critique of the forms of constructivism that view the world in two layers: reality, and representations, abstractions or discourses. Meanings and

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abstractions are not external to the practices of reality – they are part of it. Thus, the central notion of networks in ANT is simultaneously material, social and cultural. In the ANT approach to research, networks are a set of tools that can be used to describe how certain socio-material networks stabilise and frame society, sociality or social relations. The interest of ANT in ethnographic, descriptive research may be seen as a plea for contextual socio-material analysis of the making of societies. Alongside this, there is an interesting tendency in the conclusions of actual studies. The process of disengagement, disentanglement or dis-embedding, if studied in the concrete, is seen as problematic. Holm (2001) and Johnsen (2002) end their dissertations with normative claims of how fishermen may be put back into power again. They obviously dislike their own analytical results, where fishermen and other actors have been turned into dis-embedded networks. Does their obsession with technological, material relations make ANT’s use of network concepts too abstract to be able to distinguish crucial differences between types of network? For example, how does using the idea of networks as a stabilising process differ from the way mainstream economics uses the concept of markets? How do we understand networks as more than their functions (Descola 1996: 99)? In other words, the interest in more genuine research on the material side of socio-material practices should not lead to an avoidance in research of conceptualisations of the various ways they work. This is also an argument for reassessing embeddedness approaches. Mingione (1991), drawing on Polanyi, stresses that the market differs from reciprocity and association as ways of connecting people. Reciprocity connects people through commitment over time in social relations among people (Bourdieu 1977; see also above, Chapter 2). The point here is that reciprocity extends relations over time; if you help me now, you can count on me helping you at another time, when you need it. The principle of association, developed from Polanyi’s concept of redistribution, generalises a form of solidarity in which people do not exchange with one another, but commit themselves to certain socio-material networks, thus construing patterns of redistribution among all members across time and space (Mingione 1991; Martin 2001). Where face-to-face interaction would be the metaphor for reciprocity, standing shoulder to shoulder would be the metaphor for association. However, both reciprocity and association can be performed at a distance, provided that physical non-presence is ‘compensated’ for by other forms of social, political or virtual proximity. Hence, there are in fact multiple forms of community or societies that people can embed themselves in, or commit themselves to, through their practices. The major problem with the embeddedness tradition is that it does not reflect critically on the spatial and temporal character of units and relations. In other words, embeddedness is

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seen as an external relationship between instrumental economies and social commitments, when it should rather be viewed as characteristic of the practices producing societies, in various ways combining territoriality and mobility, bridging and bonding (see Chapter 1). The inspiration that ANT, and also Tim Ingold’s work, adds to this is to stress the biological and physical, ‘embodied and embedded’ character of practices that produce certain types of society. One suggestion could be to extend the concepts of reciprocity and association into human–environment relations, as has been suggested at a theoretical level (Pálsson 1996: 67), but which is also implied in the cosmologies of Inuit fishermen (Roepstorff 2003). Hence, one should not idealise human–environment relations: reciprocity and association in human–environment relations do have human practices as their point of reference – the cosmology is anthropocentric. This can be illustrated more precisely by the way Greenlandic fishermen from Ilulissat perceive over fishing: they use the Greenlandic word aalisapilunneq, but this concept is semantically different from the scientific understanding of ‘over fishing’ as a technical matter of not harvesting fish stocks efficiently. The Greenlandic word is ‘an abstract noun related to aalisapilutoq, denoting … someone who fishes more than he needs. To be accused of aalisapilunneq is therefore to be accused of violating one of the most basic rules in the exchange with animals: namely to take more than one needs, and that is a serious insult’ (Roepstorff 2003: 134). Interestingly, the ethics regulating this form of reciprocity are social; it is a question of the distribution of catches among the members of a society, all of whose members depend on the same resources. Like the concept of ‘sustainable development’, it is a question of the distribution of harvesting possibilities among people over both space and time (generations). In this context, socially embedded practices perform human–environment relations guided by principles of reciprocity and association, in time and space, among humans. Coping with the environment produces sociality. As a consequence, networks should always be understood as networking human practices. Thus networking is an aspect of coping (see Chapter 1), and should not be confused with the flows, fluids and fixities that people constantly have to cope with. One can talk of telephone networks, satellite connections and the like, but their affordances are not really performed until they have been inserted into a network of communicating people. This does not mean that networking practices are only human; they are sociomaterial practices, involving wires, radio signals, talking bodies, senses and the like. ‘Since almost all social entities do involve networks of connections between humans and these other [non-human] components, so there are no uniquely human societies as such. Societies are necessarily hybrids’ (Urry 2000: 15).

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Coping with Flows in Fisheries: the Ambivalence of Danish Colonialism Flows or fluids have topologies other than networks (Mol and Law 1994; Urry 2000: 38–39). They are not reciprocal or associative relations organised by and between people, but they create movements and circulations that are non-regular, unintended, without final destinations, they change shape and speed and can follow but also replace set routes and form new scapes. They are not totally out of reach of human practices, but they can never be fully controlled. In fishery societies, a number of crucial fluids, both human and non-human, can be identified: ocean currents, streams, winds, fish migrations, drifting objects, but also the networked, more or less organised flows of secret but also coded knowledge – money, rumours, ‘news’ and so on. Thus, knowledge is not only derived from the life worlds of particular humans, it can also travel in the dis-embedded forms of information transmitted by printed books, attached files and films. This is something Latour adds to Ingold’s understanding (Roepstorff 2003: 139). Dis-embedded information is incorporated into vessels, computers and the like as expert systems, thus regulating the use we can make of them, while the effect that these flows and systems have on social organisation is a question of how people cope with them in their daily practices. However, disconnecting is hardly a realistic way to deal with flows and systems that people have come to depend on. Thus we need to look at both fishers’ coping practices and the flows and systems they cope with. Fishers’ practices rest on the logic of hunting, where the relations between humans and fish are less stable and only performed in specific moments, as opposed to the calculations and evaluations that peasants perform in the social organisation of farming. In an ideal-type fishery, as opposed to aquaculture (Callon 1986), work does not perform any longterm investment in the resource, as is the case with farmers’ use of land (Bærenholdt 1991: 54–63). Not even the privatisation of rights to fish in the form of ITQs will fundamentally transform these characteristics. There are specific material–bodily–social–imaginary characteristics bound to the performance of the working capacities (Arbeitsvermögen, Negt and Kluge 1981) of fisheries, and these are different from hunting: the hunter, like the fisher, is searching, but, apart from trapping, hunters do not act blindly. In spite of the skills and technical devices that fishers use to ‘see’ fish, the fisher–fish relationship is not a face to face one: it is mediated by fishing gear and various ICTs. This characteristic is associated with the fisher’s traditions consisting of myths and secret knowledge practised through imitation, but increasingly being performed via smart technologies, observing what other fishers do, and talking over inter-boat radios in the constant search for fruitful fishing grounds. Certain forms of sociality at a distance are performed, thus producing societies that are more open,

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porous and horizontal than those of property-owning farmers. Fisheries are always uncertain and unpredictable. Fishing is a hybrid performance; the sea is a ‘taskscape’ incorporating fishers’ bodies in coping by moving with the sea (Rossvær 1998: 79; Ingold 2000). Rather than the aggressive abilities of the hunter, who kills the mammal, fishers need to be patient, to adapt and respond to the sea, on which they dwell in their vessels. But in contrast to the farmer or the pastoralist, the fisher, like the hunter, has no land or herd and thus lives in moments and on the move. Coping with flows involves bodily, imaginary and technologically mediated movement, with variations over long distances and long periods, from ocean fishing to coastal and fjord fishing on a day-to-day basis. But there are always various kinds of information, skills, technologies and regulations floating around. These can be part of the distant socialities of fishers, the more or less strict enforcement of various systems of resource management, or the networks and markets used for selling fish, most often over long distances. The involvement of people in the Nordic Atlantic in systems of regulation and commodification at a distance has a long history, as, for example, in the cases of Danish colonialism and paternalism in Greenland and Iceland. The colonisation of Greenland and of the Greenlandic Inuit in the nineteenth century was subject to intense discussions among Danish politicians and administrators. Most significantly, the Dane H.J. Rink (see Chapter 3) travelled to Northern Greenland in 1848 to 1851, came to head the southern of the two Forstanderskaber (kind of local council; see Chapter 7) in Greenland, first introduced in 1856, and was later director of the Royal Greenland Trade monopoly until 1882 (Marquardt 1992). In many writings and through his own actions, Rink warned about the possible negative consequences of modernisation in Greenland, and the potential destruction of the Inuit. He became the main advocate of paternalist policies protecting the Inuit from the effects of going into commercial fisheries, thus being responsible for a shift in Denmark’s Greenland policy in the second part of the nineteenth century (Marquardt 1999). Rink stated that Greenlanders’ ability to think in terms of long-term investments had been destroyed by their interest in consuming imported goods (such as coffee and alcohol), and that their past norms and orders had been broken down without introducing new ones. Greenlanders were reported to be losing their ability to hunt mammals from kayaks and were on the road to ‘decadence’. Rink’s reports increasingly influenced debates in the Danish Parliament, which brought the issue of ‘the destiny of native/nature people encountering civilization’ to the top of the agenda (quoted in Marquardt 1999: 13). Following years of investigation and debate, the monopoly of the Danish State’s Royal Greenland Trade was not abolished, in contrast to Finnmark (Northern Norway), Iceland and the Faroes (see Chapter 3). Although the

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reason for this decision had much more to do with the potential incomes to the Danish state from the monopoly than with the protection of the Greenlanders (Marquardt 1999: 20), the paternalistic agenda of ‘protection’ illustrates the specific form of ‘orientalism’ exercised by Danish colonialism. Ironically, the Greenlanders were to be defended and protected, by the colonisers, against the influences of the culture and consumption of the colonisers (!). Greenlanders should remain a hunting, ‘nature’ people, as long as possible. While Indian policy in the USA in the same period was different, it rested on the same ‘orientalist’ dichotomy: the indigenous people should either remain hunters, or give up hunting and become civilised (Marquardt 1999: 22). A modern (Inuit or Indian) way of life based on hunting, fishing and the like was out of question, if contact with Western cash, consumer goods and markets were to lead to the Greenlandic population collapsing: they had to be educated properly first. Coping with the flows of cash, goods and markets was for the paternalist Royal Greenland Trade to organise. A colonial system was constructed based on this perspective, and it lasted long into the twentieth century. Indeed, the Trade Monopoly was not formally abolished until 1950, not without resistance from northern parts of Greenland, where people were afraid of the consequences of opening the country to the outside world (Lidegaard, 1991: 194). In reality, monopoly trade continued much longer; most significantly, the monopoly’s persistence was partly a result of how colonial paternalism was embedded in Greenlandic political culture (see Chapter 8). Fear of the flows of international capitalism may well lead to protectionist nationalism. Whether this is a consequence of colonialism or the logic of an indigenous culture’s way of coping with nature is open for discussion. In other words, was Rink reporting the ‘truth’, because his investigations and reports were, ANT-like, turned into reality, or because he, Ingold-like, reported the more or less authentic, vulnerable way of life among Greenlanders? Greenlandic fishers have experienced these ambivalences, primarily through class divisions among themselves. Are they supposed to be skipper capitalists, forming independent economies once released from colonial restrictions, as Icelanders did from around 1900? Or are they the sole true bearers of the Inuit hunting way of life? A similar ambivalence is found in historical writing about Iceland (see also Chapter 3). The leading Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup interpreted Icelandic culture as being rooted in a specific reading of Iceland’s historical geography: The social and conceptual significance of the bú [farm household] as a microcosm was related to its relatively isolated position in the landscape. Towns were entirely absent, and so were villages. This meant that each farm was the centre of its own world, and such ‘worlds’ were conceptually mapped as if they

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were serially placed, either along the coastline or in the narrow valleys. (Hastrup 1990a: 49)

This analysis leads to a fascinating interpretation of the dichotomies between ‘social’ agriculture and ‘non-social’ fisheries in Icelandic history, easily convincing a geographer like me that these mappings reveal the truth about Icelandic culture as such, with the sociality of farm households at the centre (see Bærenholdt 1991: 335–37). The problem, in the context of the 1990s post-colonial debate, is, who is doing the mapping? In other words, is the analysis a product of colonial conceptualising, or does it a reveal the ‘inherent’ truth about Icelandic culture, as performed in nationalist discourse? This is the same question posed with regard to Greenlandic fishers above. Unsurprisingly, this tension has also been subject to debate concerning colonial history in Iceland. For example, in his PhD thesis, The Hidden Class (1990), the Icelandic ethnologist Finnur Magnússon showed how a new class of workers and fishers defined another, new culture around 1900, opposed to that based in agriculture. Therefore, to speak about a single Icelandic culture is to perform a historicist interpretation encouraged by both Danish colonialism and Icelandic nationalism. Such interpretations tend to ignore crucial social transformations associated with the abolition of monopolies, the development of capitalism and class antagonisms. As explained by the leading Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson, ‘The decisive growth in fishing occurred despite attempts by the landowners to maintain a labour reserve in farming. As colonial relations with Denmark weakened, traditional household production gave way to different forms of production: those of the skipper-owner or the petty entrepreneur, and the capitalist company. These transitions involved fundamental changes in social relations and means of production’ (Pálsson 1991: 106, emphasis in the original). In his book The Textual Life of Savants, Pálsson addresses Kirsten Hastrup’s work directly. While appreciating her work on medieval Iceland, he points to the problems in her dualistic interpretations of inside and outside in contemporary, modern Iceland, characterising her approach as ‘neo-Orientalism par excellence’ (Pálsson 1995: 65), which he explains as the tendency ‘to essentialize his or her informants, disempowering and “canonizing” their voices, refusing them the right to speak’ (Pálsson 1995: 170). As we saw in Chapter 3, historical accounts are produced for various practices involved in the production of societies, and research is one of the agendas in which the battle is played out. From these examples, we can learn that the networking practices of people, here fishers, exist not only as connections associated with ‘pure’ human–environment relations (the fisher imitating other fishers on vessels at sea). With ANT, we can acknowledge how scientific knowledge is deeply inscribed in the practices and imaginations of the flows and networks that

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are performed. How fishers cope with the flows of the sea, fish, money and regulations is not only a question of revealing an inherent ‘truth’ by stripping layers of ascriptions away. Floating knowledge is itself inscribed in the very practices and social transformations it talks about. Thus, researchers’ forms of knowledge do not differ from fishers’ traditions, myths and secret knowledge, which are practised through imitation, and increasingly performed via smart technologies. Fisheries and societies formed around fisheries, like those of researchers, are created through the specific transitions and translations of their historical and material geographies. And significantly, fisheries and research are connected. Among the following cases, I shall begin with the process of introducing Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in Iceland, since this is an obvious case of how researchers’ ideas have been translated into the practices of Icelandic fisheries, implying deep transformations of social relations and regional development. It is a case of how economics is involved in producing society (Callon 1998; Holm 2001).

Enacting Individually Transferable Quotas in Iceland Resource management in fisheries is an increasingly international business, where ideas travel around, and the research practices of biologists and economists in particular are deeply involved in translations and transformations. Since the 1980s, the system of Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQs) has been globalised, at least as an alternative. Based on the economic theory of ‘the tragedy of the commons’, resource economists in the University of British Columbia (Canada) developed ITQs as a market system for capitalising fishing rights as a means of avoiding over-investment and generating higher resource rents. The system was then exported and implemented in certain fisheries in Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the early 1980s (Jentoft and McCay 2003), and in its first limited version in Iceland in 1984 (Pálsson and Helgason 1997). It has also been proposed for adoption in the Nordic Atlantic countries, being actually used in modified versions in Norway, the Faroes and Greenland. Also in systems where quotas are fixed to vessels and quotas are not formally tradable, quotas are de facto capitalised and traded together with vessels. Such practices come along with a neoliberal discourse, and the enactment of the system seems to have much to do with how it actually changes fishermen or skippers so that they willingly engage in implementing systems in practice that they initially were opposed to (Brox 1997; Holm and Nielsen 2004). Both economists and the fishing industry are heavily involved in the increasing implementation of the system, crediting the clear and simple logic of its way of reasoning – the ITQ model’s ‘simplified representation of reality’ (Eythórsson 1996a: 213) – as leading to the one and only solution

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for a more effective fish industry. Economists in favour of ITQs eagerly argue for the potentials of their model, while admitting the necessity of ‘distributional considerations’ when designing an ITQ system (Árnason 1995), and fishermen, once having received their ITQs, play the game. Even critics of the system acknowledge the merits of ITQ systems in rationalising fisheries and the problems involved in many alternative systems (Copes 1995). The ITQ system must be seen in terms of the spread of neoliberal thinking in response to the challenges of securing a more competitive fishing industry in increasingly open markets. Thus although ITQ systems are based on quotas as shares of national TACs (Total Allowable Catches), the enactment of the system is embedded in the context of increased international competition in fisheries, fish processing and sales. When ITQs were first introduced in Iceland in 1984, quotas were initially attributed to individuals ‘who happened to be boat owners when the system was introduced’, based on their last three years’ fishing record (Pálsson and Helgason 1997: 190). The 1984 system still had limitations on transferability, and in other countries too, like Norway, ITQs began as nontransferable Individual Quotas (IQs). But transferability was implemented in Iceland in 1990, and the system was applied to the management of more species and also smaller vessels, so that it became fully institutionalised in all demersal fisheries. Quotas as shares of TACs became fully alienable as separate commodities that could be sold without an accompanying vessel. The result has in fact been a kind of improved economic efficiency, mostly due to the many vessels that have been taken out of the fleet. This result has been achieved by way of a strong concentration of ownership of quotas, especially after 1990. Fewer and bigger ITQ holders became ‘quotas-kings’ and ‘lords of the sea’ (Pálsson 1995: 150–61; Pálsson and Helgason 1997; Eythórsson 2000). Economic concentration meant that fisheries became increasingly vertically integrated. The big owners of quotas also control a fleet of vessels and the fish-processing plants, which they have given a priority to running (Photograph 5.1). Local communities and municipal authorities have lost much of their influence and, apart from the cases where such more localised networks have been able to buy and secure quotas ‘for the community’, the dominant position in the fishing industry is occupied by those who control the quotas. And the industry is, of course, itself a central enactor of all this: Along with a general liberalisation of economic policy in Iceland, there is a trend towards an ideological shift within the industry, leaving behind the idea that fisheries and fish-processing should be locally embedded in fisheries communities. Many fisheries companies have joined the Icelandic stockmarket, and ownership is in many cases not linked to any particular community. Investors without a fisheries background are now well represented among the owners of quota-holding companies. (Eythórsson 2000: 488)

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Photograph 5.1: Fishing vessels in the port of Isafjördur (2005).

Fisheries have more or less been transformed into a ‘normal’ business, as was the economists’ intention. These dynamics and the flows of capital involved tend to disconnect fishing from smaller villages, especially those with fewer than 500 inhabitants. Boat owners who received ITQs have become rich, while their (often former) neighbouring fish workers and crew members lost their networks with the coming of fish quotas. In Iceland, the ITQ has clearly had the social and regional distributional ‘side effects’ that economists on both sides in the battle over ITQs warned about: ‘a semifeudal system has developed with a fundamental division between quota holders and quota renters – between “sea lords” and “tenants”, to borrow local jargon. A small class of boat owners, it is argued, has become the de facto owner of the fishing stocks in Icelandic waters’ (Pálsson 1999: 2). There have been court cases about the legality of making the national commons de facto private property, although it is still de jure public property. For economists like Árnason (1995), there was no doubt that the introduction of private property was actually the decisive, transformative move. The system has meant further growth in the fleet of factory trawlers, thus speeding up the mobility of the industry, now ‘liberated’ from the constraints and troubles of on-shore fish processing. These vessels, made possible economically by the accumulation of capital within the ITQ

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system, are extending their fisheries beyond the ITQs into fishing in areas outside the 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), while the possession of ITQs by the boat owners is stabilising this riskier business, since ITQs ensure a share of the resource rent in domestic waters. So, while fish companies are becoming the dominant networks, or mobile bonds, the strategies of territorial (e.g. municipal) communities do not work any more (Eythórsson 1996a). No doubt the introduction of ITQs in Iceland has facilitated the accumulation of capital and the transfer of domestic capital into international fishing businesses and other business too. While foreign ownership of Icelandic ITQs has been limited, Icelandic fish companies are active in other countries around the world. The ITQ system was introduced as an experiment, but it is apparently an irreversible one. Once allocated for free to boat owners, in what might be described as a kind of primitive accumulation, the state of Iceland is not able to take or even buy back quotas. ‘The quotas capital is already being invested, primarily in freezer trawlers and fisheries abroad. The political influence of the quota-owners in Icelandic society should not be underestimated’ (Eythórsson 1996b: 281). It is therefore no surprise that boat owners accepted the gift from the outset: it changed power relations overnight, and mobilised new flows of capitalised fishing rights. There has been much public criticism of the system, which many Icelanders would like to abolish or at least modify, though the need for some sort of transferability seems to have been generally accepted (Pálsson 1999, Eythórsson 2000). The implementation of the ITQ system involves the practices of multiple actors and networks (including those of economists and boat owners – Pálsson 1995: 155–56) that destabilise local communities and contribute to the building of new mobile networks in the business community. There are still other networks within the fishing industry, some of which are local, as we shall see in the next section. Meanwhile, resource management schemes based on ITQ shares of TACs combine management in the name of the nation with the neoliberal principles of private property, competition and the free flow of capital. By implication, in their networking practices, people have to cope with the challenges of capitalism in accessing natural resources too.

Flows of Networking in the Fishing Business Fishing is a business involving a whole set of flows in transport, processing and sales, in addition to the question of quotas or licences. It is a fluctuating business, and not only due to the fragility of natural resources. Networks performed in the fishing business are complex networks that often destabilise actors in business and political life.

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Photograph 5.2: Landing of Greenlandic halibut from dog sledge and snowmobile on sea ice, Uummannaq (March 2001).

A business story of fisheries in Uummannaq in Greenland (see Map 4.4 and Photograph 5.2) demonstrates this (Bærenholdt 2002b). The context is a Greenlandic fishing business-cum-political system with traces of the colonial monopoly trade, where the government-owned company, Royal Greenland, plays a central role in organising the majority of Greenland’s exports. The firm is vertically integrated and has facilities in many places in Greenland, but it also plays a role in the Danish and international fish industry. From the mid-1990s Royal Greenland dealt with German, Russian and Pacific US fish businesses, and also bought up prawn enterprises in Northern Norway in 2003–4. Royal Greenland went global, seeking to consolidate its role as the world’s largest producer of cold-water prawns. Royal Greenland’s dominant role in Greenlandic fisheries has been challenged. New firms have emerged, often with municipal authorities playing a key role. For example, Uummannaq Seafood A/S was established in 1998, following an initiative by the mayor of Uummannaq, conceived after a local industrial development seminar. The local industrial development officer formed a network with the local association of fishermen. Initially 166 fishermen signed up, and sixty-two fishermen in the district invested in the company. Local fishermen came to control one-third of the shares in the new company, with the other two-thirds being controlled by a Greenlandic family fish company in Maniitsoq (further south) and a Danish company associated with it. Local fishermen had for long been dissatisfied with prices and seasons in Royal Greenland’s purchase of their Greenlandic halibut. Since catches had increased during

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the 1990s and had financed a growing fleet of vessels (with the investment subsidies available from government), fisheries had become the backbone of the local economy. Fishermen from Uummannaq and the seven villages scattered around the district became the most important entrepreneurs. Uummannaq Seafood A/S bought and fitted out a factory ship to buy catches of Greenlandic halibut and process it on board as ‘Japan-cut’ for the Asian market. The firm in Maniitsoq and its Danish partner took care of marketing and sales. Some fishermen did not support the idea of a factory ship, as it is less appealing in the winter period, when fish are caught through ice holes. Meanwhile, Royal Greenland also introduced factory ships, both before and after the foundation of Uummannaq Seafood. One year, a Russian factory ship was deliberately stuck in the sea ice near the far northern village of Nuugaatsiaq in Uummannaq district and bought fish, thus attracting the activities of mobile fishermen on their dog sledges and snowmobiles. Fishermen were happy with these factory ships, especially when there were competing fish buyers, both onshore and offshore. Factory ships are usually more efficient than onshore processing, but it is only people without family obligations who normally stay on the ships. Working hours are also much longer than onshore, and there is a question how long people can cope with such conditions. Political regulation imposed obligations to develop onshore processing. In October 2001, the government awarded Royal Greenland a monopoly on buying Greenlandic halibut in Uummannaq in order to develop ‘commercial fisheries’ (Grønlands Radioavis, 9 October 2001). Protests, negotiations, restructurings and new coalitions followed, and politics played a role the whole time. In certain periods, the government allowed Uummannaq Seafood’s vessel to buy fish under certain conditions, if, for example, the vessel was fixed at a certain location (the village of Illorsuit). In other periods, share-holding fishers, with their vessels, followed the factory ship as a mother ship into other areas (Disko Bay), away from Uummannaq. Another continuing issue was the arrangements between Royal Greenland and the government for transporting fish catches to areas of Greenland where processing plants lacked raw materials. Protest at this practice was the main theme in the campaign for municipal council elections in Uummannaq in the spring of 2001. The Greenlandic managing director of Uummannaq Seafood in 2001 had been the Minister of Fisheries in 1995–99, and had contacts in the Maniitsoq fish company families who were behind the new vessel initiative. However, he became chairman of the board of Royal Greenland in September 2004, following a number of the usual internal conflicts and restructurings among the many Danish managers at various levels of the organisation. This story recalls many other cases of business and politics in the world, where connections are always crucial in the flows of the play of networking. Uummannaq Seafood started as an attempt to build a fishing

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industry that was more locally embedded than Royal Greenland, but the story is also about distant connections alongside friendships, kin, sales, capital and transport. Many locals were not happy about the factory ship because of both pollution and poor working conditions. The question of the sustainability of the fisheries in parts of the Uummannaq district was also an issue as the average size of fish being caught began to decrease. Other examples of the dynamics in fishing businesses, such as Arctic Fish in Ilulissat, Greenland (Bærenholdt 2002b), and the post-1992 reconstruction of fish processing in Klaksvík in the Faroes (Hovgaard in Apostle et al. 2002: 105–22), also point to the fragility of networking in fisheries. Political negotiations over licences to fish in nearby or distant seas is a public matter, decided by ‘connections’. Financial activities are also crucial, ranging from the role of local saving banks to international financing. And financing is also about networks, where trust and confidence are central issues. Municipal initiatives and agenda setting often stabilise the complex flows of business affairs, creating the orientation and momentum needed to bring specific, and often rather different, partners to work jointly on projects. In economic geography, such cases have often been described as examples of localised learning (see Chapter 2), but there is persuasive evidence from the cases described here that the key is a broader ‘community of practice’ characterised by diversity, rivalry and reflexivity (Wenger 1998; Grabher 2004). Here political negotiations and connections can be stabilisers, producing memory, commitment and engagement over longer periods in the Nordic Atlantic fishing villages, and often being played out with the territorial practices of municipal authorities (see Chapter 7). However, there is also a mobile and international ‘community of practice’ among fishermen, businessmen, organisations and politicians in the fishing industry, who are playing an increasingly dominant role, thanks to the capitalisation of fisheries.

The Networks of Sailing Fishers There are still other networks in fisheries than those governed by the circulation and accumulation of capital – indeed, fisheries would probably not work without the social networks implicit in fishing. But the communities and bonds of fishers, crews and their families are intertwined with, respond to and contribute to social transformations. Fishing communities are dynamic: their coping practices change and translate social relations over time and space. Orvar Löfgren argued ‘that much of what has been regarded as traditional elements in the rural fishing communities along the North Atlantic Fringe … are adaptations to recent changes in the macroeconomic system’ (Löfgren 1982: 172).

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The classic analyses of networks in the social organisation of fisheries concern relationships on board fishing vessels, especially studies of the roles of the skipper and the ‘net boss’ (Barth 1966; Löfgren 1977; Pálsson 1991: 112ff.). These studies show how people network in order to cope with flows, and they stress forms of bonding among people on board, according to kin relations, religious beliefs and associated fishing cooperatives. People organise networks in order to secure and make their lives more certain by coping with the dangers and uncertainties of the sea. Fishermen used to occupy key positions in these networks, but this was due to their simultaneous role of transmitters and communicators with the outside world, often representing the local externally, as fishers were always the more mobile (Johnsen 2002: 192). A widespread idea has been that that there is a land–sea gendered division of labour, where fishers were men, while women took care of community building ashore (see later). But this is not the whole story: fishing women are part of the tradition, both in factory trawlers and on board small coastal vessels. However, knowledge about this is situated, being part of the relations of dominance that feminist approaches have questioned, thus introducing new perspectives on the gendering of fishers’ networks. A major contribution to this has come from Eva Munk-Madsen (1990, 1993), whose case studies of fishing couples in small-scale coastal fishing I shall now discuss (Munk-Madsen, 2000). The fishing couple is a quintessential example of care-taking, affective and intimate reciprocity, stabilising human life: Mutual recognition requires acceptance of both separation and connection, of difference and sameness. Culturally, separation (the autonomous individual) is ranked higher than connection (interdependent individuals) and the split between these forms of relating is gendered. The ranking of separation over connection, matching an oppositional perception of masculinity and femininity, prepares ground for relationships based on dominance and submission rather than mutual recognition. (Munk-Madsen 2000: 336)

Munk-Madsen analyses the construction of gendered relations in two cases of fishing couples in Northern Norway, based on on-board fieldwork. For one couple (Britt and Bjørn) the division of labour on board is clear – he is the skipper and she is the deckhand, leaving authority about the machinery, vessel, gear and navigation to him – but roles are negotiated on board. Their reciprocity is based on closeness, where power and love, authority and submission are performed. For another couple (Tone and Johan) the situation is different: Tone’s role is to stabilise their way of life, so that their pub life will not destroy their livelihood. Both women support the masculinity of their male partners. In fact, they ‘support the masculine identity of their husbands by not threatening the symbolic values of authority and by helping their husbands to demonstrate decision-making power as skippers’, thus supporting the otherwise fragile (myth of)

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fishermen’s identity (Munk-Madsen 2000: 339). This is also how women confirm their own femininity, even while doing what used to be mostly men’s work. Gender relations are performed interdependently, taking the form of reciprocal, emotional, bonds beyond the realms of efficiency. However, such relations are not performed in a social vacuum, but are inscribed in wider networks of kin, the economy, and communities of friendship and business. Johnsen (2002) talks about ‘short and long networks’, given the wide variations, from the intimate bonding of a fishing couple to the detached connections spun around ocean-going fishing vessels. Meanwhile, bonding couples have their own mobilities, for example, taking part in the seasonal winter fisheries around the Lofoten Islands. The many historical rorbu cottages on the Lofotens are symbols of this way of life, now made into tourist accommodation, but they are also still used by seasonally migrating fishing couples. On the other hand, there are examples of fishermen involved in long bridging networks (such as Knut; Johnsen 2002: 232–36), whose path in fisheries is created by the skipper-owner’s strategy of acquiring larger and larger vessels to guard against changing environments and competition, as well as establishing new connections. Local networks do not play a role here: the essential stabiliser is the bond of a stable crew following their skipper-owner over time. Networks are performed in order to make vessels move, to exchange vessels for larger ones with greater facilities, to adapt to new seas – always in connection with a bank financing the business. It is ‘a continuing process of translation to enrol, mobilise, making interested and stabilise a never-ending pool of co-players’ (translated from Johnsen 2002: 235). The crew on board various vessels is the bond, the bank the main connection. Knut is an example of the capitalised Norwegian fishery, most prominently following the distant networks and connections. The sociomaterialities involved in the capitalisation of fisheries are apparent here. Meanwhile, there are still coastal fishermen taking day trips from their home port, such as Kurt (Johnsen 2002: 242–47), who has reflexively chosen not to engage in ‘longer’ networks but prefers to keep strong relations locally, stabilising his fisheries by networking family and other fishers locally. This also allows him to take part in bringing up his children. Another version is represented by another fishing couple (Linda and Pål; Johnsen 2002: 256–59), not unlike the two couples studied by MunkMadsen (see above). Although fishing couples are still not the rule, their very existence is interesting. They perform a mode of life reflexively, realising their ‘good life’ in a project bound to place. Linda normally takes part in the fisheries from ashore, where she is the ‘land man’, baiting lines, thus taking part in performing a rather emblematic kind of place. The baiting cottage (egnebua) is an iconic meeting place in fishing communities. It is either private or public; people come and go, young

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fishers are socialised and trained into the business, but it also an open place or agora, where many belong. A specific form of sociality is performed across distinctions of gender and generation (Solberg 1982, Rossvær 1998). Each vessel has its egnebua, while these meeting places are often located more or less in a row, materially framing a hybrid place of work, meeting and family life, including raising children and young people. The egnebua is an intermediate place between the vessel and the home; it is an indoor space, but in fact a place outside, a vibrant setting for contingencies and which is almost the most central. However, we need to remember that such a place is bound to specific forms of fishing, and to manual equipment that increasingly belongs to the past. All forms of analysed bonds and bridges change when coping practices adjust and new technological framings are enacted. We have seen how people cope with the uncertainties of a diversity of flows, including fish, technologies, knowledge and money, by netting their partners, crews and banks in various ways and securing meetings in local venues.

Women’s Networking of Society and Heritage Ashore Women tend to stabilise social relations ashore, as they perform childcare and family life, especially when fishermen are away. For example, in a 1989 interview, Lena gave an account of her attachment to the village of Hvannasund, in the Faroes, where she had lived most of her life. The attachment was not because of nature or the view, since it was also beautiful in the Faroese village where she grew up before marrying a man from Hvannasund. She explained the role of networks among humans by describing her relationship with her place of birth: Because when I was young, I knew all the people there – my friends and all the people there … strangers have now moved into [place of birth], and the old are dead, and the young moved away. I do not know … the people there. And [place of birth] has been developed so much that I do not know it as it was, when I was small, that is, at the time when I lived in [place of birth]. (Bærenholdt 1991: 125, translated from the Danish)

Place is both space and time; it is about networks among people that know each other. These networks are performed by local women, but this is easier for those who are married and have family locally than for single women coping with village life. Although these women all work in the local fishprocessing plant, their relations, the meaning of work for them and their positions in local networks can be quite different (Bærenholdt 1991: 119–42). The historical development of fish processing from the late 1800s onwards changed the orientations of women’s lives. For example, in the Icelandic villages of Eyrarbakki and Stokkseyri, these innovations brought

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‘contact with a far wider social field’ (Magnússon 1990: 118). Women engage in health associations, the local choir, the women’s association, the local rescue team, the handicraft centre and what is called ‘the Society House’ or ‘Community Hall’ (samfunnshus in Norwegian, félagsheimili in Icelandic). It is women who form collective networks in response to crises in the fisheries or the loss of fish quotas, while men cope more individually, typically doing the hard, voluntary work needed (see Rossvær 1998 on Sørvær in Northern Norway, Skaptadóttir 2000 on ‘Eyri’ in Iceland). It is normally said that women in fishing communities cope with the long periods of men’s absence by socialising in various associations. Households in such communities are traditionally thought of as women-centred. It was the wives’ association that organised the political response to the fisheries crisis of the early 1990s in Sørvær (Rosvær 1998), and it was women in ‘Eyri’ who developed the new handicraft centre to cope with unemployment in the fishing industry, following the loss of quotas in Iceland in the early 1990s (Skaptadóttir 1998). Women also play the main roles in other transformations of social life in fishing localities, for example, in setting up local festivals, as in Skarsvåg in North Cape municipality and many other localities in Northern Norway (Gerrard 2000). These festivals, like the one in Siglufjördur in Iceland, build on the symbols and celebrate the knowledge of fishermen, but increasingly women use such occasions to create their own agendas. One such agenda is the development of tourism (see Chapter 6), another is knitting connections with those who have moved away. Thus, the festivals stand out as identity markers for an extended local population and an extended local community. The local community’s boundaries no longer stop at the last house in the village. It includes men and women who have emigrated, wherever they live. In this way, the festivals exemplify the fact that former neighbourhood ties based upon face-to-face interaction are important in people’s lives ... Kinship and former neighbourhood relations are maintained, not necessarily on the day-to-day basis, but over years. (Gerrard 2000: 307)

Fishery networks expand to areas beyond fisheries. Affiliation with fisheries via kinship, friends, neighbourhoods and even tourist visits facilitate new mobilities bridging formerly separate spheres. Still, fishing is primarily the business of men and their mobile bridging practices: many women, conversely, engage in attempts to produce bonds with territorial places, staging events that will bring people together.

Migrant Labour Connections The transformation of localities considered to be ‘fishing communities’ coincides with changes in occupational patterns. The hard, wet, monotonous and cold work involved in fish processing is hardly attractive to youngsters in the Nordic Atlantic. This lack of a stable labour force in fish

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processing has led many labour migrants, from Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, Poland, Lithuania and Russia, to go to Northern Norway and Iceland, and there is also some demand for migrant labour in Greenland and the Faroes. Migrant labour produces a number of new socio-material relations, which have been studied by Marit Aure in the case of the transnational connections between two fishing localities on the Barents Sea: Båtsfjord, in Finnmark, Norway; and Teriberka, in Murmansk Region, Russia (Aure 2002, 2004a,b). Båtsfjord has been a mobile place, dominated by people coming and going in its entrepreneurial fishing industry for most of the twentieth century. Rural–urban migration shaped this place as a very specific fishing town, well known for its numerous fish-processing plants and vessels from many countries. Foreigners account for 16 per cent of the population; only Oslo has a higher proportion in Norway. Since the late 1980s, Tamil migrants from Sri Lanka have come to work in the fishing industry, but, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the gradual opening of the Norwegian–Russian border, more and more Russian workers arrived. Some ninety to 100 Russians lived in Båtsfjord (out of a total population of around 2,500) and took around 10 per cent of all the jobs in the four fish-processing plants (Aure 2002: 6). Migrant labourers generally followed flows of fish landed by Russian vessels during the 1990s, following the transformation of the Russian economy. Meanwhile, the fishing industry in the Murmansk Region (Kola Peninsula) suffered from these transformations: landings of fish declined, while vessels went to foreign ports to earn foreign currency (money that did not always flow back to Russia). Among the few coastal villages developed in the Soviet period, fish kolkhozes in Teriberka, east of Murmansk, were among the more conservative, in trying to keep some of their income for local investment (Bærenholdt 1995). Cooperative relations developed between fishing industries in Teriberka and Båtsfjord, with the prospect of Båtsfjord firms investing in the industry in Teriberka. However, the Båtsfjord firms suggested training in Norway first, thus stimulating a widespread practice of people from Teriberka working temporarily in Båtsfjord as a reserve labour force. In the meantime, Teriberka fishing industries found other international partners.1 Russian migrants in Båtsfjord maintain connections with their families in Teriberka; some leave their children and partners there. This pattern of working through long-term commuting continues practices that are well known in shipping and fisheries, though they are also widespread among rural residents in Northern Norway (as in the case of Storfjord; see Chapter 4). Thus, transnational migration and commuting should be understood in connection with other forms of mobility and migration (Olwig and Sørensen 2002). However, in the case of temporary Russian migration into Norway, legal regulations limiting the length of work permits and the like

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also contribute to the commuting practices of people living in multiple places (Aure 2002: 20). However, this form of transnational migration contributes to a number of forms of mobility, other than just cross-border migration of people. It means regular phone calls to children and families, visits by families, the transport of goods, the transfer of money, fishing industry networks among politicians and entrepreneurs in Teriberka and Båtsfjord, cross-border marriages, ‘bi-national’ children, flows of information and knowledge, and various forms of new colonialism (Aure 2004b: 16). These connections also function as complex forms of ‘recruitment networks’ supporting further migration on the basis of relations of kin, place of origin, language and gender (Leitner 2003), as has also been shown in the case of Polish labour migrants in Iceland (Wojtynska 2004: 9–10). Migration routes become new associative societies of people living in multiple places and maintaining connections between them in search of better livelihoods, potentially being celebrated for aiding repopulation and multiculturalism in receiving areas (Skaptadóttir 2004). However, national stereotypes are also manifested, as when the purity of Scandinavian national cultures are challenged by foreign women ‘potentially represented as prostitutes’, and foreigners perceived as being too unhealthy or dirty to be allowed access to local swimming facilities (Aure 2004a). Contemporary approaches in migration research are critical of the equation ‘one nation = one culture’ and suggest that ‘migrants become parts of transnational sociocultural systems that transcend the political border between the receiving and sending countries’ (Olwig and Sørensen 2002: 9). These approaches highlight the problems involved in many, more or less hegemonic, Nordic essentialisms about nationhood, especially in the western part of the Nordic countries, the Nordic Atlantic and Danish areas (see Chapter 8). Mobile livelihoods are nothing new. Thus, new Russian–Norwegian routes of migration cannot be isolated from the nineteenth-century Pomor trade and migration across various types of border between Russian, Finnish, Norwegian and Sami areas (see Chapter 3), contemporary rural– urban migration patterns inside, for example, Norway, or the various forms of forced migration in the Soviet Union, which were largely responsible for the population of the Kola Peninsula and other northern parts of Russia. People have had to cope with physical, social and cultural distances and differences for centuries. Most Russians, but also many Ukrainians and Jews in the Russian north, have contacts with places of ‘origin’ in the south. The Sami recall times when some of their pastoralist practices were easier to perform, before many of them were more or less forced to settle as ‘coastal Sami’ fishers and farmers. Coping with the distance embedded in livelihood practices implies the practising of various social routes combining mobility and territoriality, bonding and bridging, to such an extent that it becomes networked mobility that makes bonds and territorial networking that bridges, rather

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than the opposite. Most often, the sociality and bonds performed between people only become stronger the more they are performed at a distance.

Fishery Societies? It is now clear that fisheries are more than just ‘areas of the sea where fish are caught in large quantities’ (Collins Cobuild English Dictionary 1999: 635). Humans network in coping with various flows of fish, money, regulation systems and knowledge to make fisheries a livelihood and a business. This coping involves human relations producing societies in response to uncertainties of the environment, but these relations are sociomaterial, involving the framing of bodies and communication by vessels, technologies, licences to fish, festivals, baiting cottages and other material meeting places. People cope with distance by living as couples and in crews associated with various sorts of fishing vessels used for fishing, storage, transport and accommodation, as well as the communication of sociomaterial status and ability. Fish business actors cooperate in episodic initiatives, governed by the various forms of ‘connections’ that produce the ‘political capital’ required to access public resources. Political capital is a form of social capital that Bourdieu found especially in Soviet and Social Democratic societies (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), but which may be just as relevant to the translation of Iceland fishing rights into private property (ITQs), a translation from political commons to economic private property. Municipal authorities persist in playing key roles as intermediaries for business entrepreneurship, bringing fishermen and other actors into the same rooms, seminars and networks. In other cases, we have noted the specific activities of women in organising festivals, associations and voluntary work. Societies are performed in routes, attracted by the jobs available in processing fish or by shared memories of fisheries of the past. Emigrants come back for visits and immigrants come and go, also performing family life at a distance here and there. Places are constructed through the mobile practices that cross through them, but many bonds become stronger the more they are performed at a distance. Consequently, approaches invoking community embeddedness find they have analytic problems in equating community with a territorial locality, since reciprocities and associations are performed just as much at a distance and by way of short meetings. Networks are performed among humans, and the very crucial moment of networking is, as always, reciprocity. Flows are non-stable, nonreciprocal, uncertain fluids of objects, knowledge, regulations and money. And networks and flows produce societies in various ways. There are variations in the social formations in each of the territorial countries in the

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Nordic Atlantic, as I shall show in later chapters. Across these variations in territorial regimes, fishery societies are mobile, patient ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998). Though the nationalisation of Exclusive Economic Zones meant that marine resources were territorialised, fishers are still on the move. But it is not least the international flows of capital that further mobilise businesses, and, if they only produce non-committed, mobile, bridging connections, it is questionable whether these will qualify as societies. However, fishers’ ‘communities of practice’ can also be mobile bonds of partners, crews and ties on board vessels that are networked with other vessels, thus making societies also at sea. Coastal and distant fisheries differ greatly in this respect because of differences in their temporal and spatial modes of organisation. Meanwhile, it is often women ashore who maintain social life in villages, making territorial bonds of commitment to and support for fishing activities, including through networks of attachment to people in other places. Labour migration has meant the arrival of new groups, and, in cases where ‘integration’ is succeeding in the making of local communities, these represent new forms of territorial bridging. It is not the fisheries or business practices that make the bridging or the exclusive bonding, but other forms of social and political practices associated with territorialising policies, such as those of municipalities. Thus there are fishery societies, built especially around networks and flows at sea, while the making of societies more comprehensively involves other social, economic, political and cultural practices, such as those associated with tourism, municipalities and welfare systems, to be discussed in the following chapters.

Note 1. As reported by the mayor of Teriberka at the MOST CCPP user conference, Storfjord, June 2001. Larissa Riabova has investigated the transformation of Teriberka, also comparing it with Icelandic and Faroese localities, in Skaptadóttir et al. (2001).

6 NETS

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FLOWS II: TOURISM


Introduction Tourism takes place when people – hosts and guests – perform tourist places, but this only happens if various forms of networked mobility secure routes and connections about, to, through, around and away from tourist places. Tourism means flows of images, objects and people transported via a diversity of routes governed through networking (Bærenholdt et al. 2004). Thus tourism is more than a question of uncommitted flows causing moments of contact in place. There are crucial networks governing travels and meetings, and the networks connecting across distances are stabilised by narratives about relations between hosts and guests. Colonial definitions of otherness are parts of these narratives. Therefore tourism is seldom exogenous to societal relations; rather, it constitutes networks and narratives of connectivity, in part making societies. Tourism research has tended to focus either on the impact of tourism on the economy, culture and the environment – impact then being an effect produced by a tourist coming from the outside – or else on the internal dynamics of tourism as a sector. This chapter seeks to develop understandings of how tourism produces societies. Tourist mobility has been constitutive of societal formations; tourism networks and flows among places, hosts, guests, objects and the like form social relations, although they seem ‘strange’ to our conventional concepts of territorial, nation-state societies. In peripheries like the Nordic Atlantic, many local people experience tourism as an outside phenomenon. Tourists are seen as strangers from foreign, faraway countries, while many ‘local’ people and administrators tend to forget that they are also performing tourism themselves, domestically or internationally or both. Tourism is measured in balances of trade, or in balances of environmental damage versus environmental gains,

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of economic loss versus economic benefit, of cultural ‘erosion’ versus the new inspiration coming with tourism, of balances among a variety of social, environmental, cultural and economic ‘factors’. These evaluations of costs and benefits enact absolutely legitimate, functional and necessary expert systems, while they also have the unintended consequence of sustaining conceptual distinctions between ‘us’, the locals, and these ‘strange’ tourists. Moreover, hosts and guests both tend to perform certain stereotypes, following the ways in which authenticity haunts tourism, and tourism research (MacCannell 1976), in various ways. Tourists expect locals in peripheral areas to be living in pre-industrial ways, and tourism is celebrated as means of preserving and protecting indigenous cultures (Nuttall 1998: 133, 147). In this way, popular images of wilderness habitat and indigenous habitus are reproduced. MacCannell claims that tourism is driven by a ‘limitless appetite for mere otherness, but it is an otherness that is under control, a comforting otherness, an otherness that has been domesticated’ (MacCannell 2001: 386), and much historical evidence supports this point. It is, however, worth considering whether there are not other examples where brokers creatively build networks betweens hosts and guests (Smith 2001). These networks do not need to be merely a question of separation and distance between host and stranger (see Nash 1989: 45), and there does not need to be any contradiction between the culturalbridging role of tourism and the observation that tourism is a ‘repetitive, monotonous business’ (Smith 1989: 9). Repetitive transactions with strangers also qualify as social relations and networks. Societies are not only constituted by warm, intensive, highly affective relations: ‘secondary’ networks at a certain distance may also play a significant role. Both hosts and guests often prefer less distant and stereotyped connections. For tourists, experiencing a surprising modernity in the North does not need to be a negative surprise. For many locals, finding real friends among tourists is attractive, with bitterness at the failures of tourists to make enduring friendships being the opposite side of the coin. Hence, there are more social relations, networks and flows than either economically instrumental or culturally sceptical approaches normally acknowledge. Tourism is more than marginal, and it provides more than minor economic benefits or cultural preservation. Tourism is also constitutive of the social relations and formations I shall investigate in this chapter, following a brief overview of tourism development in the area. Tourism in the Nordic Atlantic area is not a single phenomenon, but is embedded in various histories and geographies of Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway. Tourism in Northern Norway dates back to nineteenth-century travellers and to the Hurtigruten coastal steamer of the beginning of the twentieth century (see Chapter 4). European automobile tourists have increasingly taken the North Cape tour since the Second World War, while the Lofoten islands are still the major North Norwegian

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destination. In Iceland too, nineteenth-century travellers from England, Germany and other countries pioneered tourism, for example, by establishing Thingvellir and Geysir as attractions. However, in Iceland, the expansion of tourism came much later, being greatly dependent on the growth of transatlantic air traffic since the Second World War (see Chapter 4). Apart from exploration and scientific expeditions (see the next section), tourism in Greenland started slowly, in the 1970s. It was not until the establishment of Greenland Tourism (the Tourist Board of Greenland) in 1992 that tourism became a priority development strategy. Organised tourism in the Faroes still plays a modest role, although travelling and visiting have been going on for centuries. There are a number of commonalities. The seasons and attractions in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and Northern Norway are similar. The leading attraction is wilderness, though with some cultural interest, where ‘the North’ is not only a territorial category but a cool and remote atmosphere (Birkeland 2002b). Summer is the high season in all four areas, but the more northerly parts of Greenland also have a spring season for dog sledging and the like. Northern Norway and to some extent Iceland have winter visitors for the Northern Lights, and winter or spring visitors for fish tourism. In addition, there has been a recent expansion of less seasonal ‘nightlife’ tourism in Reykjavík. The types of tourists are more or less the same, whether from Southern Scandinavia, the main European continent, the United States or Japan, all seeking ‘the North’. Many of these tourists, having visited one of the countries, later take a trip to another. For example, many visitors to Greenland have been to Iceland earlier. Some tourists, though not many, make combined visits, following the ferry and air transport routes (see Chapter 4), and thus combining the Faroes and Iceland (and Western Norway) by ferry or Iceland and Greenland by air. For many years air excursions to Eastern Greenland have been arranged from Reykjavik, and from time to time there are also tourist connections between Iceland and Southern Greenland around Narsarsuaq airport. There is also regional cooperation among tourist industries, such as the West Nordic Travel mart (for Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes) and projects supported by the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation – NORA (see Chapter 9). The analysis in this chapter takes as its main empirical example the development of tourism in Greenland, since this is the most extreme case, though exhibiting a number of principal features clearly. But it also takes into account research on tourism in Northern Norway, which is, so to speak, the opposite case, that is, of integrated European tourism with a long tradition. I argue that there are important connections between the history of exploration and the history of tourism and, furthermore, that networks in tourism are influenced by, and also reproduce, orientalist imaginations. Tourism is deeply involved with colonial patterns of exploration. Therefore I shall first discuss networks and flows in historical cases of Danish

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exploration of Greenlanders and of Greenland. Secondly, tourism is well known for having chronic problems with cooperation in ‘the industry’; these difficulties are intensified when foreigners control parts of it. This will be illustrated by studies of coping and networking in Ilulissat in Greenland, based on interviews of my own in 2001. Thirdly, tourism in the Nordic Atlantic implies various types of networks between hosts and guests, forming various types of transnational social relations. This pattern is illustrated by cases from Lofoten in Northern Norway. The chapter aims to demonstrate how tourism practices – material, social and symbolic – challenge and produce societies.

Exploring the People and Lands of Greenland Tourism cannot be understood in isolation, but is deeply involved in and circumscribed by other mobilities (Sheller 2004a), such as the transport of objects and people for display, scientific explorations and many aspects of colonialism. Tourists also follow the routes of past mobilities, be they Vikings or migrants, and imagine ‘second worlds’ associated with these mobilities (on Viking worlds, see Bærenholdt 2002c; Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004). Flows are performed while imagining the flows of earlier travellers. Travelling in Greenland involves a number of emblematic, historical cases. In this section, these cases will be used to give an idea of how the networks and flows associated with tourism emerged. Greenland, as the largest island in the world, looks even larger in the most common projections used in world maps. It is a legendary travel destination. The insularity of Greenland may produce certain forms of attraction, not unlike many other island destinations (Sharpley 2004), but in the case of Greenland this is not because people ever really experience the limits of the island themselves. Fascination is rather produced by cartographic images and by the Inuit Greenlandic ‘others’. Of the Nordic Atlantic countries, Greenland is clearly the extreme with respect to accessibility, size, colonial history, wilderness and indigenous inhabitants. Danish colonialism and geographical exploration in Greenland reveal interesting patterns of travelling – specifically, how scientists constructed indigenous knowledge and performed Danish nationalism politically and scientifically. Compared with the emphasis placed on natural history and geopolitics in Sweden’s scientific practices in the North, Denmark’s colonialism in Greenland has been very much oriented towards people in Greenland. The major characteristics are the role of the Pietist mission and the tradition of giving space to (and also forming) indigenous voices. Whereas Sweden gave priority to scientific exploration and tax revenues in the North, to an imperial search for natural resources, Denmark’s colonialism was always concerned with civilising the indigenous Inuit (Bravo and

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Sörlin 2002; see also above, Chapters 3 and 5 on Rink). However, there were also Danish geopolitical interests that propelled cartographic explorations, but these would not have worked in practice without the human connections involved. Here we should especially not forget: the Eskimo travelers who made the trip [of polar expeditions] possible! A host of servants, helpers, companions, guides, and bearers have been excluded from the role of proper travelers because of their race and class and because theirs seemed to be a dependent status in relation to the supposed independence of the individualist, bourgeois voyager. The independence was, in varying degrees, a myth. (Clifford 1997: 33)

Who is dependent on whom and who discovered whom (Bærenholdt 2002c) are key questions of colonial positions in meetings and networks. For the great hero of Danish Arctic expeditions, Knud Rasmussen (1879– 1933), the point was his hybridity. He has been praised because of his mastery of native techniques of travel and survival, because he involved Inuit in his work, because of his partly Inuit blood, and because of his mastery of Greenlandic language (he grew up in Ilulissat, Greenland). Rasmussen can be seen as part of the continuity in Danish imperial selfunderstanding (Harbsmeier 2002). Michael Harbsmeier has investigated the practice in Danish colonial administration of kidnapping savages. While Columbus had earlier put Indians caught in the new lands on display, Danish expeditions to Greenland in the early seventeenth century captured Greenlanders in order to bring them back to Denmark to display them to King Christian IV and the general public. The aim of these expeditions was to find the descendants of medieval Norse settlers, since there had been no contacts by ship with the territory for a long time (see above, Chapter 3), and in order to signify continuity in Danish sovereignty over Greenland. No descendants were found, and no gold or the like. Instead, native Greenlanders were captured and brought to Denmark for display. Many of these died on the way or from diseases in Denmark, if they did not commit suicide before that. Danish colonialism in Greenland varied slightly from the narratives of Anglo-American polar researchers, such as the narrative about Robert Peary addressed by Clifford above. Danish narratives did not exactly forget the native Inuit, but rather focused on their characteristics as others. In Knud Rasmussen’s many writings, ‘Eskimos represented an unspoiled world’ (Ries 2002: 212). The role of Inuit (‘Eskimo’) helpers on expeditions was recorded, and indeed much discussed, as, for example, in the case of the Greenlander Jørgen Brønlund, who perished on the Ludvig MyliusErichsen ‘Denmark’ expedition to North East Greenland in 1906. Before that, Mylius-Erichsen, Jørgen Brønlund and Knud Rasmussen had been among the participants in the 1902 ‘literary Greenland expedition’, which was specifically interested in human ways of life.

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Many explorers travelled to and lived in the Thule area, among them Robert Peary. He also introduced rifles and steel tools to the locals, creating demands for such goods after he left. Visitors brought new technologies, while also studying the traditional technologies and material cultures of the Inuit as traces of their past migration, as was the case for one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Danish geography, Hans Peder Steensby (see Bravo 2002). The geologist Lauge Koch played a crucial role in mapping North East Greenland and introduced the new technologies and equipment of the field sciences in the 1920s and 1930s. These modern forms of exploration were not exactly popular in the established academic community. Koch’s efforts can be interpreted as a modernising strategy that ‘also paved the way for a vision of arctic Greenland as an integrated part of modern Danish reality. Airplanes, wireless radios, canned food, research stations, and fully equipped field laboratories extended recognizable elements of modern Danish society to what had traditionally been conceived as a place of otherness and life-threatening adventure’ (Ries 2002: 226–27). The introduction of technologies to cope with distance developed further with the US presence in Greenland during the Second World War and beyond (see Chapter 3 and 4), leading to the post-colonial changes of the second half of the twentieth century. Explorations had immense consequences for ways of life and social formations in the North. Explorers, like other travellers or tourists, were not merely external visitors with limited impact. The consequences of their travelling presence were more than can be understood by the term of ‘impact’. Exploration was socially transformative, as it led to new connections, not only in Greenland but also in a Denmark that was pursuing symbolic and human bonds with Greenland, having lost almost all of its past imperial status (Hvalsum 1999). Koch did perform the ‘scientific occupation’ in Northern Greenland for the Danish government, in order to establish Denmark’s geopolitical interests in a dispute with Norway in the International Court case in The Hague in 1933 (see Chapter 3). Amounts of presence and cartographic work were arguments put forward in this dispute. But the actual work and the techniques used later contributed to the creation of routes, during the Second World War, for what in 1953 became the Sirius patrol, whose predecessor was originally set up to prevent Germany from establishing a meteorology station that might have been crucial in submarine warfare in the North Atlantic. Under different names, the patrol was continued after the Second World War as a means of defending Danish sovereignty over the vast uninhabited area of North East Greenland. In 2000, a very symbolic Sirius expedition travelled the whole way, 2,800 km, from Thule (Qaanaq) to Daneborg (see Map 4.4). The symbolic elements involved here were many. First, the routes travelled were those used by explorers like Knud Rasmussen. Secondly, while modern airborne provisions were used, the patrol used dog sledges as their means of

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transport. Although a slightly different and modernised version of the Inuit sledge, this performance celebrated indigenous technologies. Thirdly, one of the six members of the Sirius 2000 expedition was HRH Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, who was thus territorially circumscribing the realm he is supposed to reign one day. The event was reported heavily, day to day en route, in the mass media and, later, books. Fourthly, this expedition started further to the west, in inhabited Thule (Qaanaq), than normal Sirius patrols did. Many of the mass-media reports of the event addressed the Crown Prince’s friendships with the locals in Qaanaq and the hunters from there who accompanied the first days of the expedition. The mass media have also reported on the Crown Prince later revisiting his friends in Qaanaq. Finally, in connection with the event, the Greenlandic Home Rule Government renamed an area of North East Greenland ‘Crown Prince Frederik’s Land’. The Sirius 2000 expedition is not only a story about the networks and flows of travelling themselves, but most importantly about the narratives. Among the narratives are selected diaries of the expedition. On 12 February Crown Prince Frederik writes about his stay in Siorapaluk, Greenland’s northernmost village (north of Qaanaq), where he stayed with one of the local inhabitants, a Japanese man who had married a Greenlandic woman and been living there for twenty-seven years. Another Japanese person also visited frequently, as well as French citizens. Crown Prince Frederik writes: ‘I visited a French woman, who is also attracted by the loneliness. She speaks the dialect, but does not really seem to have her roots among the inhabitants – another French person, driven up here by romanticism – odd’ (Expedition Sirius 2000: 20, my translation from the Danish). Travellers, visitors, tourists, Danish administrators, scientists and craftsmen come and go, but the presence of people from Japan and France living permanently in the northernmost village of Greenland does not really fit Danish imaginations of Greenland. Such geographical narratives of land and people are more central to tourism practices than many would expect. Another example would be the novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow by the Danish author Peter Høeg, an international best-seller that became a Hollywood movie. When I was myself on an ‘expedition’, travelling with my family on the local boat from Uummannaq to the village of Ikerasak in 1996 for fieldwork, a European tourist couple also came on board for the trip. Since I was investigating discourses about Greenland, I asked them which guidebooks they were using, and their answer was: Smilla’s Sense of Snow! Narratives of Greenlanders and their ambivalence to science performances (as in this novel) are widely read and frame tourist mobility into ‘literary places’ (Wollan 2001). There are specific traditions associated with ‘staging’ the Greenlander, often ‘hybrids’ like Knud Rasmussen, Smilla or the like, as examples of Danish–Greenlandic human relations. Knud Rasmussen, Peter Høeg’s Smilla

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and Crown Prince Frederik each in their various ways established a pattern in which ‘the 17th century’s violent kidnapping of Inuit individuals on behalf of the Danish Crown laid the foundations for a particularly Danish tradition: the staging of individual “Skrælinger”, “Eskimos”, “Greenlanders”, “natives”, and “Inuit” as icons, signs, and voices of what was at first Royal and imperial and later also entertaining and scientific, Danish and European superiority, sovereignty, and authority’ (Harbsmeier 2002: 36). The entertaining character of these imaginations came along with the networks formed among and around the explorers, but they also inspire, continue in and are reconsidered in contemporary tourist networks and flows through Greenland. Kirsten Thisted has shown how Peter Høeg’s novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, although written as a post-colonial piece, is caught up in the discourse of ‘Arctic orientalism’ (Thisted 2002: 319). The processes of colonial othering in this discourse leave ‘no middle ground’ between tradition and its erosion. Rink suggested this absolute contradiction (see above, Chapter 5), Knud Rasmussen propelled it further in his obsession with the Thule Eskimos (because of their isolation), and the next prince of the Arctic, HRH Crown Prince Frederik, networked with inhabitants in Qaanaq (Thule), thus performing the same tradition, thus resembling the ambivalence of Peter Høeg’s Smilla, the daughter of a female Thule Inuit and a male Danish scientist. While Danish Arctic orientalism is obsessed with genes (Hvalsum 1999), contemporary Greenlandic literature plays more freely with the construction of identities (Thisted 2002: 334–25). This is also the case in Greenlandic educational materials, tourist promotions and international politics. In 2000 there was another event, the Leif 2000 project. A replica Viking ship was sailed from Iceland via Southern Greenland to America to celebrate the thousand years of Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland, as well as the introduction of Christianity to the North American continent (Greenland!). As I have shown elsewhere (Bærenholdt 2002c: 47), the discourse of the managers of the Greenlandic project can be interpreted as a reflexive use and construction of hybrid identities to create a geographical imaginary of Greenland as simultaneously Nordic, Inuit, Christian and North American. Re-enacted Viking–Inuit encounters played creatively with the haunting colonialism of Greenland between Danish/Nordic and Inuit identifications. Meanwhile the combination of the latter two – Christian and North America – is the real innovation, an attempt to market Greenland as a tourist destination in a North America for Americans. The problem with such a play on identity is not the business, cultural or political creativity involved, but the negative political correctness that it meets among researchers and other performers of colonial heritage. Narratives tend to regulate who can say and do what; as we shall see, this is also the case in the development of tourism in Greenland. There are

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networks and flows of explorers, travellers, tourists, tourist entrepreneurs and the like, but the networking of flows is not a functional machine. People network together with certain streams of meanings, memories and anticipations. It may be that it takes much more effort to cope with the distances embedded in the flows of words and imaginations of a colonial present than merely coping with ‘simple’ physical distance.

Tourism Networking in Greenland In tourism research, there has been a trend towards anticipating that local networks around destinations performed with a common vision are crucial to tourism development and innovation. Hence, it has been supposed that there should be tight bonds between hotels and other types of accommodation, restaurants, transportation, tour operators and attractions, so that tourists will experience a ‘more coherent product’. Of course, bitter competition and rivalry among actors doing tourism in a particular place are not productive, but there are in fact systematic reasons for the widespread talk about the ‘lack of cooperation’ and lack of ‘localised learning’. Tourism is not one, single industry, nor does it fulfil the characteristics of certain industries where ‘localised learning’ has been found (this argument is developed in more detail in Bærenholdt et al. 2004: Ch. 2). Tourist practices and networking involve ambivalent social translations and transformations (Jóhannesson 2005a). On the one hand, tourism propels narratives of place, nation and (post-)colonial order that envision various forms of imagination of ‘holistic destinations’. On the other hand, in practice tourism transgresses territorial containers and produces social relations performed at a distance. Tourism is therefore a trace of work undertaken by various actors to translate places and relations into networks performing ‘practical othering’. Ilulissat is one of the primary tourist destinations in Greenland, which I investigated in fieldwork in 2001 (Bærenholdt 2002b). Its status as such is due to a number of technological advances, as well as environmental and cultural attractions. Ilulissat acquired an airport for fixed-wing planes in 1984, thus making it a hub in the northern part of West Greenland. Adjacent to Ilulissat is the largest ice fjord in the northern hemisphere, an attraction that was included on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004 (Photograph 6.1). Finally, the environment of Ilulissat was the Greenlandic location for the filming of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, which produced a number of concrete effects, as we shall see below. Tourism as a regular commercial practice slowly began to develop in Ilulissat in the 1970s. The Hvide Falk (White Falcon) Hotel opened in 1972, and some dog-sledge tours were organised. But in general most people thought of tourism as something bad, possibly distracting fishermen

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Photograph 6.1: Icebergs from the Ice Fjord, Ilulissat (2001).

and workers away from the necessary work in fish and fish processing. Apart from the Hvide Falk Hotel, there were only a few other actors in the tourism business. It was not until the opening of the airport in 1984 and the subsequent construction of the larger Hotel Arctic that numbers rose. Hotel Arctic was originally constructed as a transit hotel for Air Greenland. Transit hotels are crucial because overnight stays may be needed between infrequent flights, especially since weather and other conditions in the Arctic often cause delays and cancellations. Hotel Arctic is located on the road between the town and the airport, with a view of the town and, importantly, the enormous icebergs produced by the ice fjord. It also hosts courses and conferences, accounting for 45 per cent of bed nights (with ‘tourists’ being 32 per cent and transit travellers 23 per cent) (Photographs 6.2 and 6.3). Throughout the 1980s, tourists came from Germany, France and Italy in the spring (for dog sledging) and from Denmark in the summer (for hiking). But, as elsewhere in Greenland, the crucial event was the establishment of Greenland Tourism (the Tourist Board of Greenland) in 1992, indicating government support for increasing tourism in Greenland. The municipality opened a local tourist information office in 1991 but, following constant local conflicts over payments of public subsidies to it, in 1998 it was changed into the Ilulissat Tourist Service Company, owned by sixty-two shareholders, including the municipality, hotels, etc. Since then the conflicts have continued, since the Ilulissat Tourist Service won the status of the

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Photograph 6.2: Hotel Arctic, Ilulissat (2001).

Photograph 6.3: Reception, Hotel Arctic, Ilulissat (2001).

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Photograph 6.4: Greenland Tours, travel agent and tour operator, Ilulissat (2001).

official Greenland Visitor Information (GVI) office, authorised by Greenland Tourism. GVI status gives direct access to national marketing channels; Ilulissat Tourist Service also sells tours and souvenirs. Two other local tourist offices (Greenland Tours and Tourist Nature) also sell tours and souvenirs, but, unlike the Ilulissat Tourist Service, they are travel agents who own excursion boats and facilities for accommodation (of a lower standard than the two four-star hotels already mentioned). Greenland Tours (Photograph 6.4) has operated since 1977, although it did not have its own office until 1996–97. It is owned by a German couple. Tourist Nature has operated since 1993, with its own office since 1995, and is run by an Italian. These foreign entrepreneurs, German and Italian, have been in Ilulissat for many years; they speak Danish and a little Greenlandic. Their particular national backgrounds and language abilities ease their networking in Germany, Italy and France. Competition in the tourist business is continuing, and is even becoming more energetic, with the increasing use of the Internet and email in marketing and sales. In 2001, conflicts over GVI status and other issues tended to facilitate the formation of two groups of business partners. Conflicts might arise over issues such as the size of commissions given to offices booking tours (sailing or dog sledging), a type of conflict well known in tourism development in general. The various groupings of tourist businesses do more than just create local rivalries: they involve networked partners and associates in other

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places, such as Greenland Tourism and the government, as opposed to private entrepreneurs elsewhere, as well as certain foreign tour operators who are opposed to others and the like. Rivalries have also been linked to disputes over the role of Greenland Tourism, which itself acted as a business entrepreneur until 1998, when it was changed into a ‘normal’ coordinating tourist board with responsibilities for international marketing and support of product development (Skydsbjerg 1999: 156–61). ‘Local’ networking is therefore not local, but based on the translation of specific connections, friendships, interests and forms of trust into stable groupings that include some and exclude others. But conflicts also vary, and as far as I know tourism in Ilulissat is no longer so conflict-ridden. My fieldwork was undertaken in spring 2001. Constellations, firms and friendships change, while some tensions remain. Competition can be seen as productive for tourism practices, although bitterness often tends to overshadow relations. Moreover, the advantage (political capital; see Chapter 5) of having access to public resources is an asset not shared with everyone. In addition, forms of nationalist exclusion of foreigners are practised. Tourist entrepreneurs, whatever their specific form of insider–outsider hybrid, are often not popular among local inhabitants, who are sceptical that tourism is ‘proper work’. Meanwhile, inhabitants themselves travel and are more than locals: they have family relations long distances away in Greenland (and often Denmark). Thus, Ilulissat is not the island like the village that anthropologists have traditionally studied, but is rather the type of ‘village as airline transit lounge’ (Clifford 1997: 1), one that often surprises the researcher. However, there are distinctions between the ‘Inuit-Greenlandic’ and the ‘DanishGreenlandic’ communities (Bærenholdt 2000), and the political articulation of ‘Inuit-Greenlandic’ interest in particular stresses the need to embed tourism among real Greenlanders. One attempt to develop a more ‘embedded’ form of tourism in Greenland has been the so-called ‘outfitter system’, the ‘outfitter’ word being used locally in Greenland for a system of local guides and tour operators. Initiated through Greenland Tourism, the idea was to build on the qualifications and aspirations of local hunters, fishermen and (in Southern Greenland) farmers. An earlier investigation found that few Greenlandic actors earn their main income from tourism, due to the fact that foreign tour operators control tour planning, as well as the major economic circuits involved in running tourist businesses (Rasmussen 1998). I interviewed four authorised ‘outfitters’ in Ilulissat in 2001, two of them also private travel agents. Greenland Tours, which as already noted is owned by a German couple, owns the tourist boat Smilla, bought with West Norden Fund loans. The boat is used for excursions and for transport to their hostel and restaurant in the village of Oqaatsut (Rhodebay), north of Ilulissat. Local Greenlanders resent the presence of a hostel and restaurant owned by

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Germans, who even employ German friends to run the hostel and restaurant. Tourist Nature, owned by an Italian, runs the Smilla Holiday Centre in the old settlement of Ata. The camp consists of three cabins originally put up for use during the recording of Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Tourist Nature received special Greenland tourist entrepreneurship (TRT) loans to buy the cabins. Both enterprises offer package tours, including accommodation in their facilities at Oqaatsut/Ata, as well as in the town of Ilulissat. A third ‘outfitter’, Disko Wildlife, offers snowmobile tours and hunting. Disko Wildlife owns a hut at a lake in the hinterland of Ilulissat. The enterprise is run from a private home by a Danish–Greenlandic couple, both of whom have other, central, main occupations in local infrastructural businesses. The male, Danish partner has the authorisation, and is also a member of the national council of ‘outfitters’. Their speciality is to assist camera crews, a business that started with the filming of Smilla’s Sense of Snow and continued with the Greenlandic movie The Heart of the Light. They have access to equipment to take thirty people out in the snow. While it would be possible to make a living from such work, the couple prefers to keep this business part-time. The fourth ‘outfitter’ is a Greenlander well known for his winter expeditions by dog sledge across the Arctic, visiting and connecting Inuit across localities and states. He has assisted camera crews, including one involved in filming Smilla’s Sense of Snow, in which he appears in the opening sequence. Relatively few Greenlanders play any significant role in local tourist development. Greenlanders say that they are ready to ‘get more involved in tourism if it becomes necessary’, and they acknowledge the need for language training. The only part-time ‘outfitter’ in Uummannaq, who works for the single local hotel, expressed the language problem clearly as follows: ‘Taking a tourist on a five-hour dog-sledge tour across sea ice in minus 20 degrees C can be difficult, if you cannot talk with the tourist about even simple, practical issues.’ For most Greenlanders, other businesses and jobs, primarily in fisheries, though also in transport and public services, continue to be more lucrative and stable. Meanwhile, the foreigners running tourist businesses have few alternative job possibilities in town; tourism is the reason most of them came here in the first place and stayed. Clearly, Ilulissat is not one community. Yet the foreigners involved in tourism are not that foreign. They have been living in Ilulissat for decades, and they make use of their specific networking with tourists abroad. Although it is hard to generalise findings with just a few cases, the position of outsider, stranger or foreigner is initially produced by locals, politicians and competing (Danish–Greenlandic) business. Welcoming labour migrants from poor countries taking unattractive jobs in fish processing (as in Northern Norway and Iceland especially; see Chapter 5) is different from welcoming tourist entrepreneurs in the still-existing colonial social relations

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that surround Greenland. Tourism in Greenland cannot help but be associated with the heritage of colonial exploration; resistance to tourism is therefore also nationalist resistance to the role of the Inuit savage as a tourist attraction. Ironically, resistance to tourism is also a kind of defence of the Danish administration, the two sides of orientalism going hand in hand. This is especially the case when certain forms of essentialist nationalism take over from the colonial power (see Chapter 8). Orientalist othering and counter-othering is therefore practised in the networks and flows of tourists and tourist business. It is a play, its characters and their interrelations being inscribed in the obsession with the real Inuit tradition. But it is more than a play or a discourse. Tourism networking in Greenland, as demonstrated by our examples in Ilulissat, is central to the struggle to produce a Greenlandic society. The Arctic orientalist image of the Inuit has been used in continuity from King Christian IV to Crown Prince Frederik, from Knud Rasmussen to Home Rule Government policies, in defining a Greenlandic national society. This is the first stream of tourism’s production of society. Alongside it is also a second stream producing transnational societies. This second stream is performed in the networking of transnational regional cooperation of West Norden, Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (see Chapter 9) and the increasing international presence of Greenland. In a much celebrated promotion of the Ilulissat ice fjord to the UNESCO World Heritage List, the ice fjord was accepted at the 2004 meeting of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in Suzhou in China. Such an event promotes a number of interests: Ilulissat’s position as a tourist destination, Greenland’s participation in international relations and Denmark’s ‘gentle’ administration of Greenland. The networks behind the promotion involved the Danish Environmental Agency, the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Greenland and Denmark Geological Survey (GEUS), the Greenland Home Rule Government and Ilulissat municipality (press release on www.ilulissat.gl). The celebration of an ice fjord can promote many interests and give pride to people doing very diverse projects; it produces transnational social relations and identifications without questions about Inuit identity being raised. However, tourism networking in Greenland also produces social formations in a number of more discrete forms than those reported above. A third stream is the scheduling of society as a route through modes of transport, technology, science ‘in the field’, meetings among travellers, and especially the networked travelling of people engaged in special interests. Coordination takes place at a distance, thus regulating flows of people, goods and information into routes, referred to and embedded in universal systems of time and space (Meethan 2001: 8). This stream is bound together with a fourth stream propelling capitalist consumption and the commodification of signs and places, one that affects not only tourism, but

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societies in general (MacCannell 1976; Lash and Urry 1994; Urry 1995). The presence of tourists in Ilulissat and the tourism performed by people living there imply engagements with global consumer markets. Indeed, tourism ‘may eventually be seen as the millennial stage of colonialism and Empire’ (MacCannell 2001: 385), while it also produces creative platforms to situate marketing, cultural economies and international relations for municipal authorities (Meethan 2001: 53). However, all these streams of society production – nationalist, inter/transnational, routing and consumption/commodification – are selective. In their different ways, they include some and exclude others. We have not only a simple contradiction between nationalism/colonialism on the one hand and globalisation/ modernity on the other: they all go hand in hand with tourism.

Hosts and Guests in Northern Norway Tourism development started much earlier in Northern Norway than in Greenland. To begin with it was dependent upon the coastal steamer Hurtigruten, but after the Second World War automobile tourism became more common. However, many principal findings from the Ilulissat case can also be applied to Northern Norway. Although colonial history is less important in Norway, certain hostilities towards foreigners, especially German tourists, have been observed. The German occupation of Norway during the Second World War in general, and especially the destruction of housing and infrastructure in Finnmark and Northern Troms, were not easily forgotten in Northern Norway. Tourist visits by former German soldiers did not make things easier. Touring Northern Norway in the early 1970s, I still remember a ferry crew finding reasons why there was no place for a German car, but certainly space for a Danish car behind it in the queue. One of the areas where tourism has expanded, especially since the 1970s, is the Lofoten islands, which are well known for their beautiful steep mountains, sounds and bridges and tunnels connecting the different islands. Lofoten used to be, and still is, a very dynamic fishing area that hosts many visiting fishers in the traditional winter fisheries (Photograph 6.5). These fishers used to stay in the rorbu chalets around the harbour, but during the 1970s rorbu tourism became another form of accommodation. During these transformations, there was some hostility towards outside entrepreneurs (Midtgard 2002: 9) and conflicts over the harbour areas, which served both fishers and tourists (Fossum 2000: 134). In addition to the steep mountains, the environment around the fishing harbours became the main attractions. Tourist expansion also meant constant questions as to whether or not there would still be enough space (material, social and

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Photograph 6.5: Fishing heritage as tourist attraction, Å in Lofoten (1989).

cultural) for local fishers. This is especially crucial because the active fishery is one of the tourist attractions. Therefore, many local debates address ‘mass tourism’ and keeping ‘local control’, which tourism seemed to be invading, along with globalisation (Jentoft 1993: 98). However, increasingly local people address these issues reflexively, as the problem of cooperation in tourism worries people (Fossum 2000: 150; Midtgard 2002: 11–12). Today, Lofoten is a rather ‘ideal’ tourist destination, with all the attributes needed according to textbooks in tourism: attractions in both natural and cultural landscapes, activity-based experiences, restaurants and accommodation – all with a specific ‘local’ flavour and within relatively short distances. While tourism development in the area may have started with networks of visiting artists, the real take-off had to wait until political initiatives in the 1960s set the agenda for, among other things, rorbu tourism, especially since visiting fishers could increasingly accommodate themselves in their larger vessels. Many of the local networks that were active in the transition to tourism have been engaged in the preservation of heritage, but also in opening new opportunities for young people when the fisheries declined (Viken 2001). Interestingly, tourist visits increase, regardless of whether or not tourist enterprises can cooperate in joint marketing. The forces that draw tourists to Lofoten are to a large extent outside local control. First, there is external marketing. This is exemplified by the architecture award given to the restored rorbu environment in Nusfjord in 1975, the construction of a Lego replica of the Reine locality in Legoland in Denmark in 1979, and the

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mediatised tourist visits by international personalities, such as Helmut Schmidt, all of which were events outside local control (Fossum 2000: 148). Secondly, tourism has expanded by car, with mobile homes and ‘freezer box’ tourists eager to take their own, more or less legal, catches of fish back home (Fossum 2000: 139, 144). But locals have realised that even tourists in mobile homes consume in local markets, and they also understood the need to introduce regulations on fish tourism. One of the advantages of the ‘careful strategies’ pursued in North Norwegian tourism development is that it facilitates social relations between hosts and guests. This has resulted in renewed visits, where hosts in small hotels, guest houses, ‘bed and breakfasts’ and small camping sites develop personal relations with some of their guests. While individualist entrepreneurs in small-scale tourist enterprises – who tend to maintain a distance from each other while accepting the ‘freedom’ of others to do as they like – can be troublesome for local cooperation in tourism, they do in fact facilitate the kind of diversity, if not fragmentation, that facilitates complex networks between themselves as hosts and their guests. Another very interesting case is the regular linking of dry-cod consumption in various parts of Italy with producers in Lofoten, which encourages Italians to visit the place of origin of their regional type of dry cod, as well as people from Lofoten going off to take part in festivals in Italy. For example, the outermost island of Røst has strong connections with its twin town of Sandrigo, north of Venice (Røiseland and Granås 2004: 110–13). Dry-cod producers on Røst have had a long tradition, going back several centuries, of export to Southern Italy, but from 1983 people from Røst participated in the festival in Sandrigo every second year, and five men from Røst are now honoured as members of the dry-cod association in Sandrigo, ‘The Brotherhood’. This association is about socialising, but it also complements the dry-cod producers’ strategy of giving priority to the more lucrative market for quality products that exists in Northern Italy as opposed to Southern Italy. This is now followed by tourist marketing in Italy, where the new hotel on Røst attracts tourists with special interests not only in dry cod, but also in birdwatching. In another Lofoten municipality, Vestvågøy, the Viking museum in Borg has been constructed with connections to other Viking museums in Roskilde, Denmark, and York, England. The networks responsible for this development emerged among local politicians and citizens engaged in managing the protection of a remarkable archaeological site. The traditional museum solution did not seem an obvious one, since few of the objects found on site could actually be displayed. Through a long process, involving the scientific community at the University of Tromsø, visits to Viking attractions overseas and a seminar summoning archaeologists from all the Nordic countries to discuss what the excavated ‘chieftain’s farm’ might have looked like, people succeeded in creating a reconstruction.

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Neither regional nor national heritage authorities were keen to support the process, but networks among the municipal authorities, local citizens and politicians from the local to the national level were more energetic, and raised the public funds needed (Viken 2001: 101; Røiseland and Granås 2004: 101–4). Of course, politico-cultural engagement with the Viking heritage exists as part of broader flows of heritage interest that also engages visitors (Sletvold 2001a; Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004). However, the networks directly involved in such innovations follow certain routes – they do not spread in all directions and are not as fluid or as unidirectional as flows can be. ‘This is not to say that networks will develop in a deterministic way, but networks of business relationships will be, to some extent, both prisoners of the past and tools for the future’ (Røiseland and Granås 2004: 116). Hosts and guests are connected by networks that perform certain forms of path dependency, but the routing of both guests and hosts has depended on infrastructural connections with cars, following shipping and air connections becoming more central. In addition to infrastructural routing, many of the networks governing tourist flows derive their energies from the special interests, hobbies and consumption patterns performed by people here and there, hosts and guests, who are obsessed with fishing, dry cod, birdwatching, walking, Vikings or the like.

How Cultural Economies Challenge Societies Tourism in Northern Norway, as in other places, tends to be a not very stable agenda that some people are not keen to address. Tourism might be seen as disruptive to societies; it is approached as non-social. In this sense the kind of cultural boundaries historically produced around fisheries (as in Greenland and Iceland; see Chapter 5) can also be observed around tourism. Ironically, some of the actors and networks that set boundaries to tourism are based precisely in fisheries. At least, there are examples of this in the development of fish tourism in Northern Norway, where fishers and authorities are worried about the amounts of fish being caught by tourists. These worries have contributed to public awareness and research concentrated on the negative impacts of fish tourism. In Northern Norway, fisheries have succeeded in being acknowledged as the backbone of both the economy and the heritage of the region. Therefore fish tourism can easily be perceived as a threat, especially since tourist industries and tourism research do not have the same strong positions in society as fisheries and fishery research. Such controversies could then be seen as part of the struggle in fisheries in periods of the privatisation of restricted fish quotas (Borch 2004). With its weak ties and weak institutions, tourism represents

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something strange, on the edge of societies. This form of scepticism also includes much research on tourism itself, especially in the never-ending debates about authenticity and mass tourism. Playful tourist practices surrounding ‘artificial’ attractions, such as theme parks, can be defined as non-social, although many of the activities that are played out here are very social and also produce economic revenues. There is often a struggle with paternalist tendencies, in which those who know better want to protect the locals from the threats of tourism, and in this way the colonial history of protecting the indigenous from fisheries may repeat itself. Secondly, these challenges to ‘society’ are tied together with questions of taste and distinction. For example, mass tourism can be seen as a threat to the sublime experience of the North Cape in Northern Norway. However, it is also possible to let the vivid ambivalences towards tourism embrace how local people can make new identities meaningful, because their definitions are acknowledged and appreciated by visiting tourists (Granås 1997: 110). In this way, the flows of individual tourists can be used to redefine local communities as new types of societies. Furthermore, different social distinctions among tourists need to be acknowledged, for example, in the diversity of opinions over the ‘post-auratic’ visitor centre that has been constructed inside the North Cape cliff (Heimtun and Abelsen 2001). However, whatever people’s expectations of their visit to the North Cape, it is more the flow of tourists to the place that creates a society as a route, where visitors are able to practice very different tastes individually, though alongside and together with others in the stream. Tourists sense place while on the move, feel at home in themselves and do ‘dwelling-as-path’ (Birkeland 2002a), but they do these things alongside others, thus contributing to the formation of social routes, though without this being their intention. Thirdly, much tourist experience is about specific traditions of human practice. This is, for example, the case with the Hurtigruten. The heritage of the coastal steamer is associated with the rhythm of the daily calls at each port, and this is also something that tourists experience alongside locals, whether on board or ashore (Granås 1997: 60; Sletvold 2001b: 172). Especially when the coastal steamer reveals glimpses of its ‘traditional’ role, tourists experience ‘a working ship’ with transport work done, together with their bodily sensing of sailing, winds, sea, and so on. Societies are made by doing traditions in lived space, and this is valid even when some associate negative memories with traditions. Finally, tourism is a remarkable cultural economy, where business and research often work as a joint venture (Sletvold 2001a: 145). Business and research actors are becoming conscious performers of economies of signs, making the museums, nature paths, events and theme parks work with both pleasure and enlightenment. Tourism crosses boundaries of economic sectors, social fields and political networks. Networks in tourism are

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apparently less stable over time. Tourism networks are rather ‘light institutions’, which build on the temporal relations of ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998; Grabher 2001, 2004). It may be exactly the temporal and fragile character of such relations that may make people sceptical of what cultural economies do to societies. On the other hand, we know from Fredrik Barth (1969) that boundaries are made not by the closure they could produce, but rather by the transactions and transgressions they facilitate. This is also how tourism works. Through crossing the definitions of societies, these definitions are either sustained or changed.

Tourist Societies across the Nordic Atlantic In this chapter, we have seen how tourist practices, by both hosts and guests, can form various societal formations. Coping with social, cultural and physical distances, people form social relations with more or less regular ‘societal routes’ that both connect and disconnect. First, there are societies performed and defined by certain markers (Urry 2003), among which the symbols of nationality are crucial. Tourist practices and imaginations in Greenland are in many ways locked into the path dependency established by Danish orientalism, which was produced through the exploration of people and land in Greenland. The ‘real Inuit’ is thus used, commercially, politically and culturally, as a national tourist product. Nationalist icons are used, not only in taking tourists out on dog sledges, but also in the conflicts of tourism businesses, many under ‘foreign’ entrepreneurs. This is understandable, since resistance to colonialism is not only about the past, but also about present social relations. Therefore tourism is experienced as a new form of colonial domination. Meanwhile, it is also used to express national symbols, partly through the visits of international guests to obligatory national places, such as Thingvellir in Iceland (Sigurdsson 1996). Secondly, there are innovative attempts to construct new hybrid identities that connect people otherwise separated. This is especially the case with cultural tourism, which draws on historical, religious and geographical metaphors of mobility (Bærenholdt 2002c, Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004). Some of these attempts are performed in transnational forums by drawing on the vitality of projects across borders and seas. Among these forums are the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation and various West Nordic organisations (without Norway), which also support transnational EU projects marked by symbols such as the Vikings. On the other hand, the fact that many visitors from outside consider these northern areas as one destination hardly encourages the production of specific Nordic Atlantic tourist societies.

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Thirdly, there are connections based on special interests. For example, there are hiking clubs, where people meet to celebrate the wilderness, but where friendships are perhaps the more important rationale (Ólafsdóttir 2002). National tourist associations often celebrate national landscapes in highly class-specific and also gendered ways. But new forms of distant connections are also produced, for example, with interests in fishing and in a specific kind of dry cod. These are more than just marginal activities: they require much time and space from many professionals and pensioners doing business along networks at a distance. Certain forms of reciprocity and associational practices take place along the routes of special interests. Finally, tourism is a leader in the cultural economies of peripheral areas. The question to be raised is whether tourism should also generate new forms of citizenship and mobility rights, as well as obligations and tax payments, for visiting tourists (Amin 2004), such as seasonal inhabitants in second homes, but perhaps also other repeat visitors. Another characteristic feature of tourism development in local agendas is the problems in cooperating. There are examples of tourism development in peripheral areas of Iceland that perform strong local networks of consensus (Jóhannesson et al. 2003), but such successes must be interpreted in the context of small-scale tourism in isolated places, or in places people only visit in passing. In more competitive tourist milieux, complaints over a lack of local cooperation are normal. Elsewhere, I have argued that to base local cooperation on territorial criteria is not a logical strategy; hence ‘learning destinations’ and the like represent a systematic misunderstanding (Bærenholdt et al. 2004). In the case of Ilulissat, we saw how other interests related to nationality and colonialism were expressed in the complaints about the lack of cooperation, though these also related to the practical problems of managing transport capacities more rationally. It seems that national and colonial translations of these problems are a product of the widespread territorial understanding of society, where social groups across distances have no space. But many ‘birds’ live along the routes of their migration. Likewise, tourist societies are organised as routes connecting hosts and guests, facilitating common interests and so forth. These flows are not completely disorganised, but they are organised in other ways by means of networking. People may complain about how tourism is organised because it does not fit a widespread understanding of how communities and societies should be produced territorially.

7 INHABITING WELFARE MUNICIPALITIES


Introduction People cope with distances by means of mobility. The chapters on transport, fisheries and tourism have shown how various Nordic Atlantic societies, conceived as routes, are produced through mobile practices, challenging our more or less ‘normal’ conception of societies as territorial units. But I have now reached a turning point in this book. I am not only interested in the mobile bonds of associations, but also in the question of how the territorial bridging of political entities is enacted (see Chapter 1). Therefore I also need to investigate ‘the process of the territorialization of space, the construction and signification of demarcations and boundaries’ (Paasi 1996: 7–8). These processes are often re-territorialising ones, responding to challenges following from the mobility of people, capital, goods and information. Among the territorial institutions produced, it is argued that municipalities in the Nordic Atlantic welfare systems are of major importance in several respects. A recent Nordic Council of Ministers report on Democracy in Norden stressed that municipalities are the basis of Nordic democracies, since municipalities have self-government and their own tax base, while they also represent the welfare state locally and the primary level of democratic participation (Demokrati i Norden 2005: 10). With this understanding in mind, this chapter investigates municipalities as organisations, territories and places. First, municipalities are political organisations, enacted through rules and resources. The local authority of the Nordic Atlantic municipalities is a form of actor network that is more than the sum of individual interactions. While people’s coping with distance helps produce municipalities, municipal authorities are also complex organisations coping with a number of challenges, partly on behalf of their citizens. Understood in this way, municipalities are associations of local citizens, and it is important to

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understand this form of citizenship alongside those associated with the nation state and the various transnational associations and communities. Of course, certain capacities of municipalities are due to their connections with nation states, or their more or less global, glocal or transnational associations. A number of translations, actions on behalf of others, are played out. Secondly, municipalities act not only through organised means but also through resources that are mobilised with reference to a specific territory. The capabilities of local inhabitants, industries, infrastructures, environments and cultural signs depend partly on the municipal territorial control of assets. Most importantly, Nordic municipalities have responsibilities for their inhabitants’ welfare, for infrastructure and environments, responsibilities that are territorially defined. Municipalities have these responsibilities to different degrees, but a significant number of their central functions concern the provision of public services that have been mandated by national welfare-state regimes. ‘Although its average size and the type of mandate it is granted by national government and legislation may vary, the Nordic type of municipality is an institution that assumes a broad responsibility for the well-being of the people in its area’ (Aarsæther and Suopajärvi 2004: 10). In spite of the differences in capacities of municipalities, they all have a number of distinct social and material responsibilities that make them more central actors in the Nordic countries than in many others. This is because of the broad territorial responsibility they have for their citizens. Thirdly, it is worth stressing that municipalities, in the Nordic Atlantic as in other places, imply questions of how people construct the places they inhabit. There are politically elected municipal councils that are considerably closer to local inhabitants than their national parliaments. People tend to engage in local affairs, as the municipality is partly associated with the places people build as dwellings. Places territorially include people who belong through their active engagement in the environment as a ‘taskscape’ (Ingold 2000; Urry 2000: 131–7). Agnew (1987) defined place in terms of three dimensions: physical ‘location’ (or locality), social ‘locale’ and ‘sense of place’. Urry (2000: 133), accordingly, refers to three different senses of community: topographical through propinquity (locality), the local social system and the communion of people who belong, but then he adds that the role of bodies, objects and powerful discourses, together with mobility, must be taken more seriously. Municipalities are, to a great extent, used as place-bound translators of politically and economically crucial distance relations by means of the three territorial ‘mechanisms’ of locality, local ‘community’ and communal sense of place. Municipalities link physical, social and cultural space by way of letting objects, information and people pass through their porous boundaries. To sum up, municipalities are organisations, territories and places. They are organised actors, enacting territorial responsibilities for inhabitants’

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welfare, engaged with the meanings of place creation and the translations embedded in passing through their boundaries. Responsibilities include infrastructure and other conditions for economic, social and cultural life. But communities referred to by municipalities are not homogeneous units. It is most realistic to conceive the associations and entities as being translated into a municipality’s communal reference as segmented: various groups, positions or classes are always in conflict over certain issues, but importantly these conflicts are institutionalised on the municipal stage (Aarsæther and Vabo 2002: 53–54). In Bourdieu’s sense, municipalities are social fields in which various actors are in conflict over certain services, resources and identifications, entities they agree about valuing, although differently; while this common spatial and temporal association of local citizens and delegations from the state also makes the municipality a stable actor. People experience municipalities through the services they use, the meetings they attend, the events they participate in, the positions they fight for and the political representatives they more or less support. In addition, municipalities, with their many public service obligations, also employ a number of both local and non-local people. In many relatively isolated places, the municipality is the major employer, especially for women. The municipal ‘taskscape’ is therefore also about kindergartens, schools, social services, care for the elderly, road and sewage maintenance and the like. Therefore one icon of a municipality could be the municipal service worker taking care of citizens on behalf of their political representatives, and thus acting on behalf of the citizens and the state. For example, in Norwegian legislation, the municipality is clearly a modern project designed rationally to connect professional work on the one hand and the ‘good local community’ on the other (Aarsæther and Vabo 2002: 34). People inhabit municipalities that are relationally constructed, and relations are played out among humans here and there, and between humans, environments and symbols along various routes. Narratives accompany practices, through stories of local histories and geographies, bridging people territorially, but in the end the crucial practices are those combining professionals who take care of citizens with local political democracy. This chapter starts by developing further the conceptual framing of territorial bridging, first presented in Chapter 1. Then the historical formation of Nordic Atlantic municipalities is outlined, as a transformation from parishes to welfare municipalities.1 Finally, in order to comprehend the variety of forms of municipality in the Nordic Atlantic, I have chosen to present two case studies from Klaksvík in the Faroes and Storfjord municipality in Northern Norway, which exemplify two different ways in which municipalities may be involved in the production and transformation of societies.

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Municipalities and Coping: Bridging Distances in Space and Time Municipalities bridge their inhabitants or citizens by means of territoriality. Theoretically, the production of the municipal society can be approached as a process of translation, creating a Hobbesian social contract. In the words of Callon and Latour (1981: 279): By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force. ‘Our interests are the same’, ‘do what I want’, ‘you cannot succeed without going through me’. Whenever an actor speaks of ‘us’, s/he is translating other actors into a single will, of which s/he becomes spirit and spokesman.

Although there is a basic conceptual difference between Giddens’s (1990) approach to the re-embedding and institutionalisation of social relations and Callon and Latour’s translations, it is worth pointing out their joint interest in studying how the re-embedding and translation of social relations is practised as a process. Specific re-embeddings, institutions, translations, ‘bonds’ and ‘bridges’ are not taken-for-granted entities, while it is also crucial that, when they are produced, these relational entities last considerably longer than their process of creation. There are various ways of re-embedding or translating actors and networks into social entities. First, there is the rather traditional ‘territorial bonding’ of Gemeinschaft, if it ever existed with the amount of sameness, strength and durability that this concept seems to imply. It is an abstract ‘type’ that in practice only coexists with other forms. The second, opposite extreme is the mobile bridging of weak, ephemeral ties that may be associated with cosmopolitan or ‘cosmo-mobile’ utopias, or simply with the transactions of non-institutionalised market relations. Again, this is an abstract category, implying a more or less totally individualised and divided Gesellschaft. The more interesting forms are the more paradoxical, whether with strong and ephemeral or weak and lasting temporality, and whether with territorial bridging or mobile bonding spatiality. In Figure 7.1 I have created a matrix to add temporal dimensions to the two paradoxical sociospatial forms of coping – territorial bridging and mobile bonding. Again, the two extremes are of less interest for our analysis of social production through coping. The intense encounters of people meeting in ephemeral, strong and territorial bridging relations of the cultural event, the love affair or the like, may cause further reciprocities, or contribute and give an impetus to redistributing associations. However, it is only through such translations that they produce social entities. In contrast, the loose but lasting contact among people associated with a common cause, a special interest or the same profession may contribute to the regulation and stabilising of reciprocities or the redistribution of associations. Again, it is

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Socio-spatiality Socio-temporality

Territorial Bridging:

Mobile Bonding:

Ephemeral Strong:

Encounter

Reciprocity

Lasting Weak:

Redistributing Association

Contact

Figure 7.1: Time and space of paradoxical coping.

only through such translations that they really make a difference. Neither encounters nor contacts produce stable actors. How encounters and contacts translate into reciprocity over distances has been studied in the ‘mobile’ chapters: 4, 5 and 6. People perform networking as a route, where flows are governed by networks of reciprocity. The reciprocity of these organised contacts and repeated encounters may imply redistribution over distances, as when money is sent to disaster victims through NGOs, or when migrants send money home (see Chapter 5), but their limit is their exclusiveness. They cannot take responsibility for every citizen, inhabitant, traveller or migrant in a certain social entity, apart from the bonding association or the receiving ‘community’ or household. The shifting of mobile bonding between present encounter and distant contact produces bonding social relations of reciprocity, friendship, concern, engagement, solidarity, support and help, but only for those who are included. Redistributing association is the form of social unit embracing municipalities and states. It is often one of the more durable social units, and it should be its ultimate quality to bridge and include every inhabitant of a territory, thus translating them into citizens. Political entities bridge physical, social and cultural distances through the inclusion of actors who are acknowledged as belonging within their boundaries. This inclusion is performed above all by way of physical boundaries, but as we have seen in the cases of migrants (Chapter 5) and tourists (Chapter 6), it is not every human who is present who is recognised as a citizen. Time matters, as do the social and cultural demarcations of strangers. For those who are included, redistributions of welfare goods are valid, thus expressing a certain form of generalised reciprocity or solidarity. The municipality also depends on a translation from above – from the welfare state – of resources and rules, following more or less universal procedures. There are important questions that must be posed about municipalities and territorial states. Are they ‘based on the categorical fallacy of taking

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administrative regions for political communities’ (Zierhofer 2004: 114)? This means that there can be other ways of constructing political entities than through territorial demarcation. Wolfgang Zierhofer defines politics as ‘the communication of aims to reach understanding over forms of coexistence’ (Zierhofer 2004: 115), but in the end he does not (yet) envision the emergence of non-territorial forms of political entity, that are able to mediate understanding and, I would add, redistribution, irrespective of the status of the actor. The normal way of reaching a committed understanding across social and cultural distances is to draw boundaries and enclose those with whom one has an understanding. These translations are only performed thanks to technologies enacting stable material limits over time and space. Baboons and other monkeys also perform territoriality, but only humans make more lasting associations by material means (Callon and Latour 1981). Social inclusion and exclusion are not only a matter of sociality among humans: non-humans are actively used. Callon and Latour stress that this is the limit of ethno-methodology. Power is performed by material means and, among humans as opposed to baboons, for example, it is more than corporeal – its exercise also depends on disembodied material means. The ethno-methodologists forget to include in their analyses the fact that ambiguity of context in human societies is partially removed by a whole gamut of tools, regulations, walls and objects of which they analyse only a part. We must now gather up what their analysis leaves out and examine with the same method the strategies which enlist bodies, materials, discourses, techniques, feelings, laws, organizations. (Callon and Latour 1981: 284)

Bridging or bonding, territorial or mobile, weak or strong, lasting or ephemeral relations and, more likely, complex hybridities of these are made by way of socio-material practices and discourses. As Benedict Anderson (1991) stressed in his famous work on the nation, Imagined Communities, national projects come into being through media, books, newspapers and curricula spreading out over distances, with socio-material references translating people into performing communities. Texts, maps, regulations, statistics, plans, roads, paths, guards, projects and, not least, buildings also make municipalities into realities. Translating by boundary crossings, municipalities refer to territorial state systems that are trans-municipal. Municipalities and states become ‘lasting asymmetries’ and ‘black boxes’ that constitute ‘obligatory passing points’ (Callon and Latour 1981: 286, 287). Callon and Latour’s work is useful in understanding how municipalities are materially constructed in the Nordic Atlantic. They point to the need to ignore various sizes and scales among actors. To the coping approach, this means acknowledging the plurality of types of actors that can cope. These may be individual humans, households, groups, firms, organisations, municipalities or states. Consequently, coping by municipalities and their inhabitants is a complex and hybrid process, where municipal authorities

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and agencies, households, firms, voluntary organisations, business organisations, cultural performers and state agencies are combined. This emphasis on not prioritising specific actors is in line with approaches to governance rather than government, and to coping strategies rather than just local development (Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001b: 24). The approach implies that innovations, politics and civil action are not performed in separate fields, but work across traditional notions of public, business and civil spheres. The municipal creation of opportunities in the context of contemporary, post-industrial challenges is thus a matter of networking, where the municipal actor is neither a unitary nor the dominant actor (Aarsæther and Suopajärvi 2004). In fact, the ‘governance trend’ may well mean the retreat of municipalities from a direct role in economic development. One implication of these considerations is that we should understand innovation as broader than just business development and politics (see Chapter 1 on coping as innovation, networking and identity formation). Coping includes a ‘sub-politics’ that has not normally been associated with the political sphere. It addresses the many significant decisions and actions that are performed outside the traditional political sphere. Inspired by Latour’s scheme (1993), Zierhofer suggests calling sub-politics ‘technological developments, business decisions, cumulative outcomes of market operations, institutional transformations and so on. It is thus beyond the modern concept of the political recognition of “My/our political interest” in relation to the “Political interest of the other/s” ’ (Zierhofer 2004: 113). I suggest that coping is this unrecognised, hybrid third. It is not only the articulation and action of one homogeneous municipal actor versus another. Coping should go beyond the binary us–other dichotomy. It neither demarcates the other, nor belongs to the other. It is neither mastery nor adaptation (see Chapter 1). The present chapter argues that the coping approach is a fruitful way of understanding people’s engagements with municipalities and the welfare state in the Nordic Atlantic. It also suggests that existing research on innovations, networking and local politics in Nordic Atlantic municipalities provides very instructive examples of how coping practices produce societies.

Nordic Atlantic Municipalities Municipalities in the four Nordic Atlantic countries – Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland – have mixed and varying histories. In brief, there are two histories. First, there is the complex history of the emergence of municipalities through colonial administration, ecclesiastical administration and post-colonial nation building. Secondly, there is the history of the municipal contribution from below, up to the creation of the welfare state.

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I shall start with a brief introduction to the first history in the different countries as background to further discussions in the next section. Greenland’s first quasi-municipal councils, the so-called forstanderskaber, were founded in 1857. On them sat Danish local officials together with selected hunters from various parts of the colonial district covered by the council (Janussen 2003: 43). These were superseded by the first elected municipal councils (kommuneråd) in 1911 (Dahl 1986: 44). After the Second World War, municipalities were reorganised along Danish lines, and they later became central pillars in the Home Rule system from 1979 onwards, with responsibilities for social services, culture and education, public housing, planning, the fire service, water and electricity. The territorial structure of Greenlandic municipalities is a mirror of the colonial structure, where each municipality has its district, and ‘towns’ are simply defined as the municipal centres, irrespective of size of population. The Lutheran church and its clerical administration were crucial in the development of Greenlandic municipalities, especially in education. Churches and schools belonged to the same system in the first half of the twentieth century, and the boundaries of parishes and municipalities still mirror one other. In small villages, church and school used the same building, while the catechist was both the lay priest and the teacher. The catechists, taught by Danish clerics and missionaries, were central actors in building the Greenlandic nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thuesen 1988, 1995). Municipal units and their subunits at the village level were instruments of colonial and ecclesiastical rule. As shown in Chapters 5 and 6, Danish colonialism in Greenland was accompanied by a certain respect for the indigenous population, who were expected to ‘stay primitive’. It was thus no coincidence that selected hunters, representing the preferred indigenous occupation, were first included in forstanderskaber, or that nineteenth-century missionary activity led to the institutionalisation of a Greenlandic education of Greenlandic catechists. This system endured until the ‘Danish modernisation period’ from 1953, when Greenland became a county of Denmark, with a large influx of Danish administrators and teachers into Greenlandic municipalities. Greenland still retains its eighteen municipalities from this period, but there are ongoing debates on the formation of as few as between four and six new large municipalities or regions (Demokrati i Norden 2005: 42). Iceland’s small hrepp municipalities have historical roots going back to the eleventh century, the municipal system itself being founded in the nineteenth century. Following the more direct imposition of Danish sovereignty over Iceland from 1662, municipal structures lost power, and a Danish law abolished the old hrepps in 1809. Municipal structures were reestablished in 1872 as a response to increasing Icelandic pressure for independence (Hovgaard et al. 2004: 20). Denmark was forced to reorganise local administration, in response to the Althing’s promotion of autonomous

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primary communes (Aronsson 1997: 178). The territorial system was more or less stable from the eleventh century until the gradual process of amalgamations in the 1990s. Until the 1990s, the main adjustments were the creation of a number of towns as municipalities, alongside their rural counterparts. But then the number of Icelandic municipalities was reduced from 204 in 1990 to 104 in 2005 (Hovgaard et al. 2004: 21), and there is now a proposal from the government to reduce the number further to just thirty-nine (Demokrati i Norden 2005: 43). As in other Nordic cases, there was a certain overlap between municipal and ecclesiastical administration, since the rural municipalities, the hrepps, and the parishes were more or less the same units territorially. Interestingly, it was the hrepps, not the churches, that had social responsibilities for the poor (Ohlsson and Röger 1987: 42). Until the early 1990s, Icelandic municipalities still had an obligation to secure jobs for all their inhabitants, an obligation that often led municipalities to be economically involved in local businesses, typically fish processing. However, this type of involvement has been prohibited under recent municipal reforms, parallel to similar developments in the Faroes. Faroese municipalities came into being through Danish laws enacted in 1872 and 1908, with municipal units initially being based on the existing eight parishes. In turn, this traditional territorial division followed the boundaries of common grazing lands in the villages (bygd), the latter being indigenous constructions rooted in sheep farming. It was not until the industrial development of the fisheries in the twentieth century that these traditional municipalities were divided into a maximum of fifty-two municipalities, a number reached in the late 1960s. This was also a period in which Faroese municipalities acquired new roles and taxes. ‘People from one village were reluctant to pay taxes to a municipality that also, or primarily, made investments in other villages’ (Hovgaard et al. 2004: 15). There have been a number of examples of very strong local patriotism, some of the most striking examples of how people inhabiting municipalities exhibited senses of place. Every village wanted its own school, an old people’s home, a fish-processing plant and a harbour, thus extrapolating the agricultural community into welfare industrialism (Bærenholdt 1993: 142). Following the Faroese economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s, this system was put under severe pressure. There is an ongoing process of municipal amalgamation (from fifty-two units in 1970 and fifty units in 1990 to thirty-five in 2005), and new orientations to municipal welfare provision, planning and the general business environment (Hovgaard et al. 2004: 16–17). As in Iceland and many other countries, Norwegian municipalities emerged along with parishes. Already during Danish rule in the eighteenth century, poverty relief became a parish obligation (Nagel 1991). Under Danish rule until 1814, local territorial administration was run by Danish

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officials. Under legislation passed in 1837, formannskapslovene, local councils were elected. State-imposed welfare obligations for municipalities to administer increased in the twentieth century, especially in the 1960s and 1970s (Grønlie 1991; Seip 1991). Norwegian municipalities were amalgamated around 1970 in processes similar to those taking place in Denmark and Sweden. They no longer correspond to traditional communities, and new professional administrations have been developed. Municipalities became enactors of the welfare state, seen by Ottar Brox as the ‘new colonizer’; he points out the paradox that municipalities have the power administer universal welfare services on behalf of the state that are regulated by the state, but do not have to power to intervene in business, where municipalities really differ (Brox 1984). However, during the 1980s, Norwegian municipalities formed business foundations and implemented local economic development policies (Larsen and Aarsæther 1985), as well as providing welfare in accordance with both state-imposed obligations and their own initiatives. New official reports on the municipal structure in Norway are on the way, while until recently wider debates have been especially harsh about the regional county administration in relation to both task and size (Demokrati i Norden 2005: 43–44).

Municipalities, Colonialism and Welfare In a classic article, the British anthropologist J.A. Barnes studied networks, class and committees in the island parish of Bremnes in Western Norway (Barnes 1954; see also above, Chapter 5). Barnes interestingly linked national independence with rural local government. ‘Yet the problem of the rural effect of political independence does not always receive the attention it merits’ (Barnes 1954: 56). For Barnes, it was an open question whether or not the end of colonial rule implies changes in political rule in rural areas, given that they always change the centres. During the union with Sweden in the nineteenth century, ‘it was clearly a demand for national sovereignty that underpinned the [Norwegian] demand for autonomy and regional districts – and it was for the same reason that the Swedish government did not approve’ (Aronsson 1997: 178). But due to the diverse histories of Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, there is no single interpretation of the relationship between colonial rule and local authorities. This is also the case for welfare institutions. There is a sense of continuity between the rather centralist state of Danish (and Swedish) absolutism to the implementation of the Scandinavian welfare state after the Second World War. However, the Scandinavian welfare state is not a single model introduced in the same way everywhere and at the same time in the Nordic Atlantic, since Greenland and especially Iceland and the Faroes have their own specific histories.

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In Greenland, municipalities represent continuity with colonial rule, but their functions grew with developments in the Danish welfare state from the 1950s to the 1970s, still occupying many Danish employees. There is a colonial legacy surrounding Greenlandic municipalities, and it is often said that arrangements have actually changed less outside Nuuk, the political centre of the Home Rule Government. Sheer physical distances play a significant role in the reproduction of this post-colonial heritage. However, Greenlandic municipalities, and the association of municipalities, acquired significant welfare-building capacities under the Home Rule Government. In the cases of Iceland and the Faroes, the numerous small municipalities played rather tacit roles in social construction, though in different ways. While Icelandic municipalities clearly became elements in the nationbuilding process of the twentieth century, the Faroese case is more ambivalent, as the question of independence from Denmark divided the Faroese people throughout the twentieth century. It has been suggested that many Faroese belonged more to their village than to the nation (see Chapter 3). However, few Faroese municipalities managed fully to perform the role of welfare municipalities, because welfare services were provided from the political centre of Tórshavn. The small size of municipalities and their staff, administration and capacities meant that Tórshavn remained central in providing social services. In Iceland, the persistence of very small municipalities was connected with the lower level of social expenditure and of welfare services in general in comparison with the other Nordic countries (Hansen 2003: 77). Icelandic municipalities were not responsible for the majority of public expenditure, in contrast with the decentralisation of public services to the larger municipalities in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway (Eythórsson 1995, 1998: 35). It is fair to say that Iceland and the Faroes did not see the emergence of the Scandinavian welfare-state system (EspingAndersen 1990) until the 1990s. The enactment of welfare municipalities is a highly gendered question. In all Nordic countries, the development of welfare services paralleled women’s growing employment outside the household, followed by their increased political influence. But this trend emerged later in the Faroes. For example, kindergartens were not introduced in some Faroese municipalities until the 1990s. Although there are significant local differences associated with political and religious distinctions, there is an interesting correlation between the increasing representation of women on Faroese municipal councils during the 1990s and the development of welfare services (Jacobsen and í Jákupstovu 2005). Until the 1990s the Faroese welfare system was closer to family-oriented continental European systems (EspingAndersen 1990). Faroese politics was constructed around images of the male entrepreneur and his wife at home (Jacobsen and í Jákupstovu 2005).

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The history of Nordic Atlantic municipalities is complex, but demonstrates a number of characteristic continuities that can be traced back to the colonialist performance of the rather centralist Danish state (see Chapter 8). These were territorialising practices based on the unity of church and state. This process also facilitated empowerment from below, since people were given a role in the system. Stein Rokkan and Derek Unwin suggested that ‘the Reformation raised a wall against cultural “exits” into other territories. This barrier was not only an important strategy in legitimizing the territorial state; in the long run it was also a crucial step forward in preparing people for the use of “voice” within the system’ (Rokkan and Unwin 1983: 26). They saw this, together with mass education, as a part of the process of producing the ‘victorious peripheries’ (Rokkan and Unwin 1983: 79, 126) of Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. Local voices were also part of the production of welfare municipalities, among others the voice of the peasant freeholder (Aronsson 1997; Trädgårdh 1997; Witoszek 1997), and in Greenland the hunter sitting on the forstanderskaber. From the nineteenth century, parish councils became the agenda for the peasant or hunter representing the stereotype of the rural elite, which itself formed the political basis for the construction of a national political culture. The twentieth century increasingly saw the promotion of the Social Democratic welfare project, and by the 1920s a number of welfare systems had been introduced in municipalities dominated by Social Democrats. This ‘commune socialistic’ shaping of welfare municipalities ‘from below’ took place in a number of Norwegian municipalities (Grønlie 1991: 43–46). Such municipalities were front-runners in the implementation of Social Democratic policies, increasingly taking over as welfare-state policies, especially after the Second World War. But these municipalities were not so common in the rural Nordic Atlantic. One North Norwegian example would be Mo in Nordland (Grønlie 1991), while smaller, rural municipalities in Northern Norway also took part in the performance of ‘electric power communalism’, which paved the way for the production and distribution of electricity locally before the Second World War (Nilsen 2002: 10). After the war, a number of examples of ‘municipal socialism’ were performed through municipal and trade-union participation in industrial activities (e.g. Neskaupstadur in Iceland; Tværøyri in the Faroes). In Norway municipal innovation in welfare provision increasingly became part of the nation-state agenda, whereas in many ways the Greenlandic case still had other, more colonial, present histories. We have seen various ways in which municipalities were involved in the enactment of the welfare state, and there were also examples of the role of municipalities in local economic development, and even municipal participation in industrial production. Bob Jessop has identified an overall shift from the Keynesian national welfare state to the Schumpeterian postnational workfare state (Jessop 2000), but the Nordic Atlantic has had its

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peculiar developments. Icelandic and Faroese municipalities used to intervene much more in business affairs, but now they are creating welfare municipalities as part of national systems. One example is the history of Klaksvík in the Faroes, a case of the restructuring of the territorially embedded industrial town. In contrast, North Norwegian municipalities have been engaged in running the welfare state for a long time. Inhabiting a municipality is only partly a question of (public service) work: it is also a question of obtaining services, infrastructure and an attractive environment. Life in the dispersed Storfjord municipality in Northern Norway is an illustrative example of such postindustrial trends. The next two sections discuss some coping processes in these two localities.2

Restructuring Territorial Bonding in Klaksvík Klaksvík is the central settlement in the northern part of the Faroes (Photographs 7.1 and 7.2). With a population of 5,000, it is the second largest town in the Faroes. Having developed historically from a number of smaller villages, Klaksvík is today a fairly concentrated settlement. It has a natural harbour in a fjord on the northern island of Bordoy, and it is a fishing town. Klaksvík is well known for its strong sense of identity, indeed for an almost armed confrontation with the capital Tórshavn and the Danish state in the 1950s. There is a strong religious influence from the Plymouth Brethren community (locally called Baptists), which is related to the dominance of certain families and the People’s Party, a conservative political party. Coping processes in Klaksvík are typical of a strongly embedded local economy with links to international fish markets, while the weakness of state regulation and the absence of connections with national strategies is another specific characteristic (Hovgaard 2001). Klaksvík developed into one of the major localities for the development of a fishing industry in the Faroes from the beginning of the twentieth century (Haldrup and Hoydal 1994). In this respect, its history is linked, both literally and symbolically, with a specific entrepreneur and his family. The municipality itself, local trade unions and especially the local savings bank played major roles in the development strategies that were pursued in Klaksvík throughout the twentieth century. The many fishing vessels and fishing companies have had a major fish-processing plant, ‘Kosin’, as the cornerstone of local development, although it has been closed down and reconstructed several times. In fact, people in Klaksvík have coped with several economic crises through local innovations in the social organisation of the economy, almost turning the lack of national links into a comparative advantage for the area.

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Photograph 7.1: Klaksvík (2004).

There are strong connections between networking and the formation of identity in the way dominant forms of coping work in Klaksvík. The municipality always acts as a background local regulator, but the central actors are to be found in the networks of local entrepreneurs and their supporters. The networks include cultural activities as well as religious communities and families. The most crucial factor is probably the tradition of raising local capital when it is needed. This is done through the local savings bank, as well as by informal means. The other important factor is the idea of keeping businesses in local hands. Klaksvík has not experienced much technological (i.e. product and process) innovation in the industries. The innovative work is more social in character, and this is strongly linked with the related reproduction of local identity: ‘in Klaksvík the strong adherence to “the local” is a powerful source for managing crisis and transition’ (Hovgaard 2001: 231). The ‘sheer defiance’ of the locality is supported by the historical evidence of the twentieth-century modernisation of the locality with the late nineteenth-century foundation of the hospital, the formation of the municipality in 1908, the founding of the local savings bank in 1919, the construction of the power station in 1931, of the harbour in 1937, and so on (Apostle et al. 2002: 118). It is therefore clear that there is a broader background to Klaksvík’s advantage as the strongest fishing town in Faroese society. But one might ask whether the localist Klaksvík strategy will remain viable in the long run,

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Photograph 7.2: ‘Kosin’, the major fish-processing plant in Klaksvík (2004).

especially with respect to the potential of national Faroese economic development. One answer is that the restructuration of the Faroese economy following the early 1990s crisis meant a dismantling of national regulations for fish sales, thus paving the way for a more persistent local–global structuration of the Faroese economy. This implies that local industries with viable links to international markets have better possibilities and are vital to economic development, thus giving localist Klaksvík strategies new prospects (Apostle et al. 2002). Analysing how businesses and people in Klaksvík coped with the crisis of the 1990s raises questions like, ‘How one can survive on “sheer defiance”, while everything else seems to have changed?’ (Apostle et al. 2002: 116). Restructuring the economy in fact meant the abolition of vertical structures and increasing entrepreneurship among a number of smaller firms. ‘Paradoxically it seems fair to say that nothing seems to be “as it was”, but still it is. The case of Klaksvík actually shows the enormous strength of locally grounded and traditionally bound institutions which manage to keep their fundamental orientation, while still maintaining the capacity to adapt to new circumstances’ (Apostle et al. 2002: 116). Gestur Hovgaard points to the ‘stability in change’ performed through coping that is characterised by the territorial bonding of local inhabitants, while responding to the challenges of what is perceived as an external world of fish stocks, markets and regulations, handled through mobile bridging relations. There is a living narrative about a tradition of autonomous entrepreneurship, and the municipal authorities facilitate its continuation,

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ever prepared to pave the way for collective action when this is needed. For example, running port facilities is a major service for businesses that the municipality takes responsibility for. The curious success of Gemeinschaft-like territorial bonding can be more uncertain than it seems. Individual mobility is increasing (Apostle et al. 2002: 121), not least because of one of the municipality’s most recent victories: the construction of an undersea tunnel connecting Klaksvík with the Faroese ‘mainland’ (Eysturoy, Streymoy and Vagur; see Map 4.3). Klaksvík is increasingly becoming part of an integrated labour market, and many people already commute to Tórshavn by car and ferry. Meanwhile, municipalities on the southern island, Suduroy, still tend to engage more or less directly in raising capital, buildings and infrastructure for local businesses (Apostle et al. 2002: 60–64), and a number of municipalities on the ‘mainland’ are increasingly becoming first and foremost the ‘welfare municipalities’ of commuting inhabitants. There is now an increasing awareness of municipalities as the providers of welfare services as well as attractive environments for living (see Chapter 4). At the same time, fishprocessing firms such as ‘Kósin’ in Klaksvík are becoming involved in ever more distant commercial networks, which also involve new alliances and mobile bonds with foreign firms. The Klaksvík narratives have also meant that new diversities are being accepted, and former rebels who have moved away are coming back and becoming important ‘glocals’ who ‘build bridges between the locals and the mobiles in social action’ (Hovgaard 2001: 242). Therefore, in conjunction with the impressive continuity of leadership in Klaksvík, transformations are continuing in everyday life, where the locality is increasingly formed by territorial bridging rather than territorial bonding. Former rules of conduct may dissolve. Comparing the evidence from Klaksvík with the three dimensions of municipalities presented in the introduction to this chapter, it is obvious that, although the municipality of Klaksvík first performs as a political entity and secondly ensures responsibilities defined by territorial borders, thirdly Klaksvík is performed above all by the way local people inhabit place. This involves Klaksvík’s rather distinct material location in the eide, a valley between two fjords and high mountains. Family and other networks persist as overlapping communities, but they all act with reference to the same narrative about sense of place and local tradition. Traditions and attachment to place are transformed and translated, fisheries are internationalised, people relate to many places and traditions become reflexive, but people, firms, associations and the municipality continue to perform the organisation, territory and place of Klaksvík. Municipal policies are becoming more diverse and direct intervention in business life is diminishing, while new focuses are provided by infrastructures for innovation, welfare, cultural events and the experience of the environment. This trend is also present in Iceland (Skaptadóttir and Jóhannesson 2004:

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63, 85), and the following case, rather different from Klaksvík, is an example of this.

Territorial Bridging: Storfjord on the Move Storfjord in Northern Norway can hardly be regarded as a localised entity (Photograph 7.3). It is a municipality consisting of scattered settlements, with three partly contrasting villages located around the head of the beautiful Lyngen Fjord (see Chapter 4). The population is stable, at around 1900 inhabitants, and the case has a specific interest, inasmuch as half of the women are newcomers. The locality has attracted more women from other places than have other localities (Aure 2001). Furthermore, the locality has at least three distinct ethnic groups: the Norwegians, the Sami and the Kven (Finns). It is also a border locality, close to both Sweden and Finland. The case of Storfjord is quite opposite to the strong informal social embeddedness in Klaksvík. In respect of innovation, we find no development of big business, cornerstones or the like. The major ‘cornerstone’ is the public sector, where negotiations in the 1970s at the local, regional and national levels resulted in a major regional public laundry being sited in the municipality. This decision was made in compensation for the implementation of a hydroelectric project, but it was only obtained through the initiative of local political representatives (Aarsæther et al. 2004: 145). A rehabilitation centre for heart and lung disease was also

Photograph 7.3: Skibotn, Storfjord (2001).

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located here because of the climate, and is supported by a nationwide voluntary association. There is also a missionary school, a branch of an American organisation. The hydroelectric company also pays a tax to provide capital for two funding schemes for small-scale businesses and for fishing and farming. Historically, small-scale agriculture was the major economic sector. Although it still exists, agriculture is no longer a leading sector; many households combine activities and incomes from several different sources, including agriculture on the farms where they live. These combinations may include jobs in international firms, to which people either commute on a weekly basis along the major North Norwegian highway which runs through the municipality, or are connected through IT networks. The highway running through the fjord and the ‘Alpine’ Lyngen Mountains also facilitates tourist businesses in the form of hotels, camping sites and the like. Municipal public services are of high quality, and public-sector jobs are shared by many people as part-time jobs (Aure 2001). Meanwhile, Storfjord is also the southernmost municipality in a part of Northern Norway that has state-regulated tax allowances and other advantages, which attract young people. Thus coping processes in Storfjord have a great deal to do with both local networking and institutionalised welfare arrangements, these two practices working very much in concert. Government policies can indeed facilitate civil society in the form of local networks, provided the actors in these networks know how to utilise the possibilities of funding and regulation by government bodies. Interestingly, one finds no strong identification with Storfjord as such. Local identities are connected to the homes and small villages where some of the inhabitants grew up (Aure 2001). Other identities are religious, but there are conflicts between the different religious communities. Villages also quarrel over the allocation of public services, and the result has been a decentralised service system that also provides local service jobs in each of the villages. Many strategies and identities are formed at the household level. Aure showed how a number of households deliberately chose to locate in Storfjord because of the environment (climate and scenery) and the possibility of a public-sector service jobs for the female partner. There are quite a number of people who have moved in from larger places and from abroad. The combination of an attractive environment, the public service sector and road connections localise people, but it is also clear that the female partners sometimes get stuck in the division of labour and mobility, with the husband doing the commuting (Aure 2001). Place evaluations are clearly shown in a number of school essays produced for the MOST CCPP school essay project. One female teenager from the village of Skibotn in Storfjord wrote: Skibotn is located in Troms county Norway. It is a rather fine place to live. We have a nice climate, and therefore the University of Tromsø has located its

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Northern Light Observatory here. We have a rehabilitation centre for those with heart or lung disease. We have nice weather in the summer, fine nature and lots of snow in winter. In terms of leisure activities, we have lots to do. There is the youth club every Tuesday, and every second Friday and Saturday … We also have aerobics every Tuesday and Thursday, but that’s really boring, because we train with oldies (adults). We have two shops, two kiosks and many camp sites. That’s fine because we meet and get to know a lot of people from other places.3

A male teenager wrote, less enthusiastically: Skibotn is located in Storfjord municipality in Troms county. It is a little boring here, because there are few leisure activities. The old people are very well, because it is so calm here. The positive things here are many friends, home, soccer fields, the community house, shops, the club. And travel to other places, for example to Tromsø, Kilpis in Finland, and Hatteng, is easy. There is much good weather here. There is too little to do, because events happen only from time to time.4

Together, these two teenagers are producing a narrative of an attractive but calm rural life, chosen by their parents. Activities organised by voluntary organisations in combination with municipal authorities, such as a music school and the like, form the stage of local life, together with the environment. The revival of the Skibotn marketplace is an example of local activity (Nyseth and Aarsæther 2004: 228–29). Until the 1950s, Skibotn, located in the Sami area and near to Sweden and Finland, hosted seasonal international markets and religious gatherings. In the 1980s, new initiatives began. A border garrison of the Norwegian army was about to be closed, and local people negotiated compensation for the loss of the military presence. The locals succeeded in making the military and other sponsors co-fund the construction of a community sports hall in Skibotn. Skibotn Hall was then used for the 1990s Skibotn development association’s revival of the annual market. Using a variety of contacts, Skibotn succeeded in making the market event ‘an important North Calotte transnational arena’, including participants from Russia, with as many as 5,000 paying visitors and 500 local volunteers (Nyseth and Aarsæther 2004: 228–29). This innovation was not an achievement of the municipality itself; rather, it was performed by one of the municipality’s three villages, and by particular politicians from one of the municipal parties. To some extent, the project was performed in competition with the other villages, and it was never clearly supported by municipal authorities: conflicts arose between villages and religious congregations. In spite of these complications, however, this is an example of how inhabitants produce new forms of sociality and society from below, thus becoming part of the play on the municipality arena. There are other such events, for example the RidduRiddu indigenous people’s festival in neighbouring Kåfjord municipality, which also attract people from the global indigenous arena (Nyseth and Aarsæther 2004: 233–36, Nyseth and Pedersen 2005). These crucial events

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are less productive in the sense of job creation, but they lead to new social encounters and contacts, as well as to reciprocity and association, thus combining mobile bonding and territorial bridging (see Figure 7.1). Festivals and other local events are crucial ways in which people can translate, rethink and perform the localities they inhabit on a potentially global stage (Aarsæther 2004: 252; see also above, Chapter 5, on fish festivals). Meanwhile, the municipality and parish council work to a common agenda, where issues are fought out and solutions found. It may be precisely ‘the ability to live with conflicts’ (Aure 2001) that explains the potential of Storfjord. This ability also seems to be conditional on the acceptance of a common political identity and agenda in the municipality. This is no coincidence, since, as we have seen, municipalities are a central element in Nordic welfare states, especially in public service provision, as a conduit for funding derived from national initiatives, for which many local applicants compete. It is this mediation of local networking and state regulation at the municipal level that makes locality a political unit in the still relatively strong welfare state of Norway. And it is through this mediation that the reflexive play of different strategies can take place. It is particularly through the absence of strong bonding ties at the local level that Storfjord illustrates the diversity of the late modern ‘reflexive North’ (Aarsæther and Bærenholdt 2001a).

Territorial Translation: Inhabiting Municipal Societies To conclude, municipal authorities play roles that are simultaneously very distinctive and rather silent. On the one hand, municipal authorities, which depend on rules and access to resources, can perform the roles of partner, supporter, gate opener, legitimate networker, integrator, committer, or producer of orientation in respect of ‘local development’ (Aarsæther et al. 2004: 152). On the other hand, municipalities are often only the backstage organisational framework and territory for the performances of either businesses, as in Klaksvík, or voluntary organisations, as in the villages of Storfjord. However, there are differences in how societies are produced: given the strong local presence of the Norwegian welfare state, a municipality like Storfjord performs a much more direct role as an actor in itself, and also as the territorialised arena in which responsibilities for local citizens are performed. The role of the political entity is therefore more encompassing when municipalities like Storfjord territorially bridge inhabitants and transform them into municipal citizens. Social construction in Storfjord is a question of an explicit political process of acknowledgement of citizens who are members of a redistributive association. Most of its inhabitants would not live in Storfjord if these transformations were not

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enacted. People inhabit, identify, glorify, celebrate and find their recreative ways through scenic environment, but most of them would never settle there without welfare-state entitlements as citizens. It is the performance of the municipal authorities on behalf of the welfare state that territorialises the responsibilities that are crucial in making living in Storfjord a sensible option. In contrast, the narrative of Klaksvík’s stubborn entrepreneurship and patriotism was prior to the establishment of a Faroese system of welfare municipalities, and thus also prior to the firm institutional and territorial formation of Klaksvík as an actor. Indeed, Klaksvík’s history is also partly about the local construction of a welfare municipality taking care of local inhabitants, but this has been part of the production of Faroese society only to some degree. Ironically, inhabiting places like Klaksvík will now increasingly depend on how well the boundaries of the traditional ‘community’ are transformed, translated and transcended. One of Bauman’s central claims is worth repeating in this context: ‘the ostensibly shared “communal” identities are after-effects or by-products of forever unfinished (and all the more feverish and ferocious for that reason) boundary drawing’ (Bauman 2001: 17). Coping with distance in the Nordic Atlantic opens new roads and tunnels of connectivity bypassing previous boundaries. It also facilitates new encounters and reciprocities that are increasingly performed at a distance. Meanwhile, people still inhabit places: they choose, reconstruct, re-imagine, reshape and remember environments, houses, roads and so on. An immense arsenal of innovative sub-politics is practised by means of networking and the constant reformulation of identifications or meanings. Welfare states may be under pressure, but in Iceland and especially in the Faroes, welfare systems are still being created in the context of the amalgamation of municipalities. Direct municipal intervention in industrial activities is more or less a past practice. Municipal actors now concentrate on shaping infrastructures, services and environments for private business and voluntary associations to exploit at their own initiative. With increased mobilities, the role of municipal responsibilities for local citizens and the places in which they live is becoming more crucial. Municipalities set agendas, translate non-local relations into local, negotiated economies, and facilitate cultural performances for the sake of both local people and new cultural economies. But their most prominent role is that of bridging people who are otherwise unconnected through reference to territory and common places, while territories are also negotiated with the restructuring of municipalities. To what extent municipal actors can overcome social inequality and cultural distance by means of redistribution and negotiation depends to a large degree on the rules and resources available. The enforcement of such rules and resource use is a matter of translation from the territorial (nation) state. Therefore, it is the crossing of the boundaries

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of the municipality as an organisation, a territory or a place that releases much of the energy that municipalities depend upon. And there are permanent power struggles between municipalities and national governments, for example, over the regulation of the provision of and payment for kindergartens (Aarsæther and Vabo 2002: 184–90). Does it make sense, then, to think of municipal societies? There is no simple answer to this question. It is rather a concrete question of whether or not people, municipal actors, voluntary organisations, firms and the like cope with reference to and on behalf of local inhabitants. And it is a question of whether such practices manage to bridge social and cultural distances among inhabitants territorially. This chapter has shown that municipal authorities only perform decisive ‘sub-politics’ when in cooperation with other actors. When the various ‘sub-politics’ combine practical solutions to local problems with sociality and democratic processes (Aarsæther and Vabo 2002: 190–91), municipalities become societies alongside nation states and mobile routes. The viability of a territorial municipal society is thus a matter of practices. If there is a crucial municipal action, arena or reference in the innovations, networking and meanings of people’s coping to make viable livelihoods, municipal societies are produced. In other words, it makes sense to inhabit a municipal society if it means participation in common solutions. Like nation states and provinces or regional authorities, municipalities can then be approached as social institutions. However, ‘a “common” language is crucial for the operation of all institutions. Governmental agents use rhetoric persuasion, and appeal to popular ideas and identities to gain support, while people may routinely express their cultural identity and distinctiveness in territorial terms, even though at times the territorial dimension may be rather vague’ (Häkli and Paasi 2003: 148). Municipal action and demarcation are a question of combining governmentality with the practices and meanings of people’s inhabiting. Welfare municipalities are one example of this, traditional rural parishes are another. Also, Nordic Atlantic municipalities engage in cross-sector innovations in response to the challenges of living in a world of globalisation and a still more or less colonial present. Territory for municipal societies is a means of translation. Flows and mobile networks of transportation, fisheries, agriculture, food consumption, tourism, energy and the like are made into distinct outside forces from which people construct common, territorial agendas. Distances, whether physical, social or cultural, are thus translated into a common language of challenges that a local ‘we’ must cope with. Municipal societies are produced through such territorial translations. But they are not alone. The following two chapters deal with nationalism, nation states, transnationalism and trans-regions.

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Notes 1. While the ‘welfare municipality’ is an established expression, especially in Norway (Velferdskommunen; Grønlie 1991; Nagel 1991; Seip 1991), to Anglo-American readers it may have unfortunate connotations of municipalities that live on welfare, as opposed to the Nordic understanding of municipal responsibility for the welfare of local citizens and public service provision by welfare-state systems. Moreover, in contrast to a federal state system, the importance of municipalities in the Nordic countries should be seen in the light of their unitary state system, where the municipality is the main effective sub-national form of government. I thank Richard Apostle for these important observations. 2. For an earlier and shorter version of the comparison between Klaksvík and Storfjord, see Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2003: 55–58. 3. Statistics and Samples of Essays, MOST CCPP Management of Social Transformations, a Circumpolar Coping Processes Project, School Essay meeting, Roskilde, 23–24 September 1999, p. 48. My translation is from the Norwegian. 4. As note 3.

8 THE AMBIVALENCES

OF

NORDICITY


Introduction ‘The Nordic Model’ or ‘the Scandinavian welfare state’ are famous icons, which are often used to portray the success of labour and social democratic movements in the north, drawing on the wreckage of the nineteenthcentury Nordic nationalist project. The narratives about the Nordic Model cross-cut political, socio-economic and cultural fields to such an extent that it almost became an unquestionable myth. However, processes of globalisation, European Union integration and difficulties in having strangers involved in recreating Nordic nationalism present challenges to any myth in this context. The ambivalences of Nordic nation building on the basis of territorial bonding are intensifying. The present chapter discusses central figurations of Nordic political culture, their origins and consequences. The Nordic Atlantic regions have their specific paths, in respect of which Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland (the West Nordic countries) have often been ignored. In some respects, they may be exceptions to Scandinavian paths, but any variations first and foremost divided west from east, in the traces of the former Danish and Swedish realms respectively. Therefore, Nordic Atlantic peripheries that are or were subject to Danish colonialism experience their own specific ambivalences of Nordicity. The central organising idea of the Nordic Model has been the idea of ‘the people’, bonding and bonded by the common production of wealth and welfare. Welfare nationalism has been a way of coping with social and physical distances, producing societies of redistribution among those included in these nations. This was clearly evident after the Second World War, as many Social Democratic programmes anticipated people coming together in hopeful national communities. There were striking similarities among the programmes of the British and Norwegian Labour Parties, as

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well as the Danish and Swedish Social Democrats, because they inspired each other (Olesen 1998). These were national projects with broad appeals. Greenland was to become one of the very few countries in the world to experience a clear-cut implementation of a Social Democratic programme by its colonial power (Adolphsen and Greiffenberg 1999). The post-war histories of Iceland and the Faroes followed somewhat different tracks, as they were rather more concerned with national independence from Denmark. People in Iceland and the Faroes performed their own specific variants of welfare nationalism, but this was less an implementation of a Social Democratic programme. The commonality of the various paths suggests that welfare projects have historical roots prior to twentiethcentury Social Democratic policies. They also draw support from more discrete and contingent relations, which pre-existed the formation of the political programmes of the welfare state (Knudsen 2000a). Among other aspects, Nordicity can be traced back to the specific forms that the Protestant Reformation, absolutism and Pietism took on in the relationship between church and state in the Danish kingdom. Along with apparent continuities based on the idea of a common ancestry in the transnational Nordic world, there are crucial ambivalences in the production of nations and welfare regimes in the Nordic Atlantic. The ambivalences are associated with the specific form of Nordic nationalism that is embodied in national definitions of each people as a bonding community (Gemeinschaft; Østergaard 1991). With increasing flows of people and capital across borders, the implicit use of territoriality to bond is challenged. This raises an explicit set of questions about who is included in the ‘we’ and who is excluded from it. Who identifies with whom, and who will contribute to the general good? Solidarity is partially about socio-economic redistribution, in what can be called an ‘associational economy’ characterised by profound societal (gesellschaftliche) innovations. Alongside these political economies of redistribution, there is the question of recognition of those who are entitled to benefit. Here, social distinctions are made according to bonding communities (Gemeinschaften) of Nordic nations or people, as defined by means of cultural similarities. This chapter uses a number of historical and contemporary examples to understand how this ambivalence between recognition and redistribution has worked and may work in the future. While one would ideally expect direct connections between the cultural recognition of nationhood and socio-economic redistribution by territorial states, this is not the case. First, the ambivalence comes to the surface in the relationship between nationality and Nordicity. The nineteenth-century Nordic nationalist project failed, since the project of building one Nordic nation state (in parallel with the Italian and German projects) did not succeed (see later). This made any Nordic project a matter of ‘low politics’ or cultural cooperation. This became a form of transnationalism, supported

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by rather weak institutionalised organisations alongside the Nordic Council (formed 1952) and the Nordic Council of Ministers (established 1971), but first by NGOs, especially the Nordic Associations (Foreningen Norden) since 1919. This means the performance of a type of mutual recognition and networking among sister peoples, though these types of recognition are not, in fact, supported by any Nordic political economy of redistribution. Nordicity remains a question of identity, and of networks of the selected. Secondly, the ambivalence is located in the connections between the Nordic and the European Union projects. With Denmark being a member of the EU and its predecessors since 1973, and Sweden and Finland since 1996, along with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Nordic project became more backstage. In finding a role in relation to the European Union (and to Russia), the Nordic project also changed its orientation and placed considerable energy into cooperation around the Baltic Sea, and especially with the three new independent Baltic states. This meant a sharper distinction between a dominant European Union-oriented Norden, the three Baltic states being associated with this idea, and the other four Nordic Atlantic countries defending their maritime resources by staying out of the EU. The community of the Nordic people is therefore being challenged by the much stronger, territorial, almost statist forms of redistribution performed by the European Union, which are driven by innovation and regulation, rather than by identity formation and reciprocity. Finally, ambivalence is also apparent between nation-statehood and the home-ruled nations of the Faroes and Greenland, where Nordic cooperation has given the Faroes and Greenland (along with the Åland islands) certain roles to play. The Faroes and Greenland remain parts of the Danish realm, and it is with Denmark that redistribution takes place. Politics of recognition and redistribution complement one another in ambivalent ways, and it is the aim of this chapter to show how this works. The relationships between recognition and redistribution (see Chapter 2) address central issues in the production of Nordic Atlantic societies. This is less about physical and more about social and cultural distances. The ambivalence is between coping with social distance (overcoming inequality by means of redistribution) and coping with cultural distance (identifying us and the other by means of recognition). The sections of the chapter fall into two groups. The first four sections analyse dimensions of nationalism, namely the construction of boundaries in everyday nationalism, the principle of ‘sameness’, Protestantism and socio-economic development. The other sections analyse the various nationalisms performed in the Nordic Atlantic area. Historical examples are drawn from Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic (in this order) history to analyse how discrepancies between recognition and redistribution work. Finally I address Nordism as a form of post-colonial ideological practice.

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Nationalism and Boundary Construction: Cultural Practices and Social Interaction To frame this section, let us once again consider Bauman’s interpretation of Fredrik Barth’s (1969) social anthropology of boundaries: ‘the ostensibly shared “communal” identities are after-effects or by-products of forever unfinished (and all the more feverish and ferocious for that reason) boundary drawing’ (Bauman 2001: 17). It is of particular importance for this study of ‘Nordic after-effects’ to address the theoretical and methodological implications of Bauman’s claim. I start, however, with a consideration of the relevance of Barth’s original work. Barth always highlighted the social interactions that produce boundaries and cultures (see above, Chapter 2). He pointed out the problems involved in thinking of boundaries as hermetic. They ‘persist despite a flow a personnel across them’, and ‘ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of social interaction and acceptance, but are quite to the contrary often the very foundations on which embracing social systems are built’ (Barth 1969: 9–10). Barth’s remarkable critique of cultural essentialism (long before this term was used) was rooted in detailed ethnographic studies, especially of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Barth saw how sharing culture was taken for granted, but he suggested that this be viewed ‘as an implication or result, rather than a primary and definitional characteristic of ethnic group organization’ (Barth 1969: 11). This perspective makes the very concrete process of making bonds and boundaries in practice central to the analysis. Contemporary constructivist approaches to Norwegian nationalism have shown how nationalism drew on cultural imaginations of an authentic village culture that was no longer being practised. The nationalist idea was produced by Norwegian intellectuals in the colonial capital of Copenhagen. The Danish historian Uffe Østergaard argues that ‘cultural nationalism does not captivate people [fænger] until the cultural basis it appeals to is no longer taken for granted’ (Østergaard 1994: 20, my translation from the Danish). The making of boundaries, in binding the memory of a village culture, is unfinished and therefore intensified. But does this mean, following Bauman and Barth, that it is only the organisation of social practices, innovations and networks (see above, Chapter 1) that matters in coping with distances? Do the practices of identity formation not matter to ‘how people’s mundane practices of coping with distances constitute various kinds of societies’ (see above, Chapter 1)? Bauman’s strong claims may in practice be too functionalist, as in the following statement: ‘the sameness evaporates once the communication between its insiders and the world outside becomes more intense and carries more weight than the mutual exchanges of the insiders’ (Bauman 2001: 13; see also above, Chapter 1). This sentence is so functionalist that it contra-

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dicts Barth’s points, quoted above (Barth 1969). Interaction does not necessarily make pre-interaction sameness disappear. However, the fundamental problem is that sameness is not a ‘clean’ theoretical concept; it is implicit in some everyday life practices, as shown for Norway in a number of studies by Marianne Gullestad (1992, 2001, 2002). The problem to be addressed could also be phrased in relation to the ‘boundary quote’ from Bauman, above: How are after-effects enacted? Gullestad responds directly to Barth: Theoretically, I think, in spite of Fredrik Barth’s claim to the contrary [in Barth 1969], it is not possible to understand ethnic boundaries without also taking into consideration cultural categories and practices. There is a more complex relationship between the ethnic boundary and ‘the cultural stuff that it encloses’ [Barth 1969: 15]. In addition to Barth’s emphasis on the individual’s understanding of his or her own identity, it is also important to focus on the power in being able to categorise and ‘name’ others. (Gullestad 2002: 80–81, my translation from the Norwegian)

Likewise, Tom Nauerby has claimed that Barth goes to the opposite extreme of the position he criticises, and raises the question: ‘How can such boundaries be drawn if not by way of the cultural stuff?’ (Nauerby 1995: 22). Gullestad has provided many interesting studies of everyday national identity, to be discussed in the next section. For the moment I shall pay attention to her more or less Foucauldian point about the power of categorising others, which is not exactly the same as ‘cultural stuff’. Her argument is a necessary addition to Barth and Bauman, as she stresses the power of making sense of mundane life practices. Therefore, a communitarian obsession with a community ‘we’ is more a problem than a solution for a non-xenophobic analysis. However, it is not the territorial localisation of ‘we’ in itself that is problematic: the difficulty, rather, is to remember to exchange the essentialist understanding of how identities ‘are’ with an analysis of how they are ‘made’. Otherwise, I would not investigate the active human practice of transforming people associated with a project. Not all collective projects are doomed to become exclusive. It is not territoriality per se but the essentialist use of territories that is problematic. Regarded in this way, boundaries have other, more discursive dimensions. However, in one sense, Barth’s approach can be translated into a Foucauldian perspective by studying the enactment of states ‘from below’. The social process of making people’s ‘we’ references and belongings into boundary objects for discrimination is central to the ‘“governmentalization” of societies, or the specific way human practices became objects of knowledge, regulation, and discipline’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 4). This process is performed; power does not exist independently of the practices exercising it (see above, Chapter 2). Therefore we need to study how people make boundaries into power, or better, how they use

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boundaries to exercise power, to categorise and transform forms of ‘we’ and ‘they’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Egalitarian Individualism: the Freedom of Sameness Are there central figurations of meanings used in Nordic nationalism to categorise ‘we’ or ‘us’? Gullestad has presented interesting anthropological work on the meanings of equality and freedom in Scandinavia or Northern Europe, based on fieldwork in contemporary Norway. She has suggested the term ‘egalitarian individualism’ (Gullestad 1992) to frame the understanding of equality and freedom. Gullestad’s provocative point is that equality in the Nordic sense is not the Anglo-American liberal conception of ‘equal opportunities’, but goes further. The Norwegian word likhet (Danish lighed), ‘equality’, means rather ‘alikeness’ or ‘sameness’, while difference (that is, a consequence of equal opportunity) is easily perceived as hierarchy and injustice. There is a linguistic complexity surrounding this point, since the Swedish word for ‘equality’ (jämn) is different, while the negative counterpart in Norwegian, ulik, does not necessarily translate the Swedish ujämn [‘inequality’], but olik, meaning ‘different’ (Skandinavisk Ordbog 1994). Therefore Gullestad’s argument may only be valid for Norwegian (and maybe Danish); categories are contextual. There is also the ‘historical explanation’ that Nordic peripheral areas (apart from most of Denmark and parts of Sweden) did not have feudal master–servant relations. Rural social structures in the Nordic peripheries were formed by means of scattered farms or village communities, which provided little basis for strong hierarchical social relations. Distinctions were rather a matter of physical distance. This contrast can explain why Norwegian words for ‘closeness’ (or ‘proximity’) and ‘community’ are deeply connected with ideas of equality as sameness (Gullestad 1992: 194). If these findings are true, they help us understand why some Norwegians seek to avoid direct encounters with immigrants. ‘From the point of view of the new immigrants, the Norwegian practice of avoiding situations where equality as sameness cannot easily be established is an obstacle for social contact and integration’ (Gullestad 1992: 195). In other words, immigrants experience Norwegians keeping themselves at a distance because sameness and proximity go hand in hand in Norwegian cultural practices. Gullestad’s analysis is provocative, but to the extent it is valid, it can explain how sameness is used to draw boundaries, a continuation of Barth’s approach in the last section. But this does not happen in a functionalist way, due to the content of the cultural practice. It is because Norwegian cultural practices connect sameness, proximity and community in such a way that they may constitute translations of each other: boundaries become the

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consequence. However, it is not an unintended consequence. Symbolic fence building is used as a strategy. People cope with cultural distance by means of distancing, but it is a strategy that produces new problems. ‘The symbolic fences imparted via distancing are solutions which form new dilemmas in a continuous process’ (Gullestad 1992: 196). Nevertheless, sameness remains the meaning that cultural practices ascribe to being egalitarian and to having a national identity. The other side of Gullestad’s analysis is to point to individualism, based on an understanding of freedom as independence. Again ‘roots’ in the experiences of living in remote farms can be imagined, but these past practices only form the present to the extent that people refer to them as giving meaning to their practices. But it is a very central part of Nordic cultural practices to want to ‘get one’s own place’ to live, as is often materialised in the one-family house. The Swedish historian Lars Trädgårdh, in his study, ‘Statist Individualism: On the Culturality of the Nordic Welfare State’ (1997), points out that the Nordic idea of Gemeinschaft is based on a notion of a ‘Gesellschaft of individuals’, which is a generalisation of the local peasant assemblies in Sweden and Finland. Therefore, Trädgårdh argues that the isolation (and loneliness) of individuals, which is often associated with Swedishness, is not a consequence of the welfare state, but rather a kind of pre-welfare-state national identity. He suggests that ‘behind the Gemeinschaft of the so-called “homes of the people”, one finds a Gesellschaft of atomized, autonomous individuals’ (1997: 253). Sweden may represent a certain form of Enlightenment of a Swedish democratic patriotism in contrast to the dark sides of German romanticism, though it is still a national cultural project of the Swedish people (Witoszek and Trädgårdh 2002: 8) that has its exclusive features. It can be argued that this ‘Gesellschaft-from-below’ argument is more valid in Sweden (and Finland) than in the western parts of Norden (the Danish colonial realm), but there may be an element of the argument that applies across the Nordic area. Some of Gullestad’s later works concentrate on the ‘sameness’ dimension, particularly in Norway, suggesting that an ‘imagined sameness’ is used to provide distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘As a concept and a set of practices, imagined sameness is not merely associated with the word likhet, but also with a large number of other linguistic expressions. Some examples of such expressions are “to fit with each other”, “to suit each other”, “to get on well together and to hold common opinions”’ (Gullestad 2001: 38, my italics). Gullestad has also used her analysis in critically addressing Norwegian forms of coping with immigrants (2002). She studied the transformations of the phrases ‘an immigrant’ and ‘a Norwegian’ in a sequence of diverse case studies. In one of these, she analyses a telephone conversation between an immigrant born in India and a professor in linguistics, based on the professor’s narrative (Gullestad 2002: 88–93). The

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immigrant wanted to know how long she would be considered an immigrant, given that she had obtained Norwegian citizenship, but, as an expert in linguistics, the professor could only reply that she would remain an immigrant for the rest of her ‘whole life’. Even consulting a number of dictionaries, the professor had no alternative. Gullestad shows how the word ‘immigrant’ only acquires its specific connotations in opposition to ‘Norwegian’, thus locking immigrants like the Indian woman – who was deeply dissatisfied with the answer she received – into an ‘eternal present’, where she can never leave her past as an immigrant (Gullestad 2002: 91). The key to understanding the situation of the minorities is thus to analyse the construction of ‘the majority’ by Norwegians, since it is through the performance of the governing practices of the majority that minorities are defined. Thus we see, drawing inspiration from both Barth and Foucault, how societies are made through governmentalising practices that draw lines between here and there, and connect them with boundaries between past and present. Interestingly, Gullestad began with the concept of ‘egalitarian individualism’ to explain Nordic cultural practices, and discovered a concept of equality as sameness. Ten years later, confronted with the debate about migration, she developed the same analysis into the concept of ‘imagined sameness’, with less stress on the ‘liberty’ of individualism. The freedom of sameness is ironic, it seems. Clearly it is involved in processes of governmentalisation. The freedom of sameness has become a form of governmentality, in which people rule and accept being ruled. ‘Sameness’ and ‘egalitarian individualism’ have become a powerful set of terms. The next section explores their historical origins.

Localising Protestantism The Nordic countries have a common religious history, one that separates them from most other European countries. With Finland as a partial exception, they are all countries where Lutheran Protestantism played a crucial role in state and societal formation. Lutheran Protestantism was introduced from above, when religion was nationalised through state-led reformations in the sixteenth century. These top-down reformations in turn provoked Pietism and a number of religious revival movements from below (Stråth and Sørensen 1997: 10). Many of these reactions were reintegrated into the state-led churches in interesting ways, thus transcending the distinction between ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ (Stenius 1997: 163). The statist introduction of Protestantism was especially pronounced in the kingdom of Denmark, including Norway, the Faroes and Iceland. To take one specific example, in Iceland the Reformation came from above and from outside, only gradually taking root in a society where Christianity was

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loosely integrated with other beliefs; Icelanders have been consistently ambivalent towards religion (Hastrup 1990a: 26, 130–31). Reformation meant the gradual installation of certain forms of governmentality, as in marriage systems and the like. Certain standards were set by the Danish king as to what should be accepted as part of society, thus defining the abnormal, such as witches, as non-social (Hastrup 1990a: 226). As already pointed out in Chapter 7, the Reformation meant the unification of the administration of the state and the church into one territorial system. Reaction to the ‘from above’ Lutheran state-church came from two directions. First, Pietism, initially introduced to the Danish court in the early eighteenth century, gradually became part of various popular revivalist congregations, not least in the peripheries of the kingdom, following, for example, the activities of Hans Egede or the Hernnhut mission in Greenland. Pietism sought an ‘authentic’ Christianity for selected people – Christianity was not for everyone. The revivalism caused conflicts with a state apparatus that was increasingly influenced by the Enlightenment, but the state administration generally did not favour much intervention in religious matters, since the Enlightenment was also a move in opposition to strong state–church relations (Ingesman 2000: 83–84). Ironically, this in its turn meant that Pietism and certain revivalist movements came to influence the governmentalities of many people in the Nordic Atlantic, under the umbrella of an enlightened state. However, the less religious Icelanders represent an interesting exemption to the rule, especially in contrast to the central role of various forms of Christianity in the Faroes. Iceland did not experience any major religious revivalism in the nineteenth century, merely a national political revival, which among other things led to some free churches being formed around 1900 in explicit opposition to the dominance of the Danish state’s ‘people’s church’ (Pétursson 2001). The cultural historian Nina Witoszek has put forward an interesting perspective on the Scandinavian Enlightenment. She suggests that the Enlightenment is the ‘founding tradition of Scandinavian cultures’, one that is much stronger than romanticism, and that the strength of the Scandinavian Enlightenment is due to ‘the powerful, modifying presence of Christianity’ (Witoszek 1997: 73). The compromise, however ironic it may be, was between rational, pragmatic, liberal agendas and a strong religious, Christian ethos. Many of these ideas have been explored by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist in his historical novels Livlægens besøg, on Struense, the personification of the Enlightenment in Denmark, and Lewis rejse, on the revivalist movements that smoothed the way for the welfare states (see below). Examples of these effective movements include the Pentecostal Movement in many parts of the Nordic countries, the Hernnhut mission in Greenland until 1900, the Plymouth Brethren community in Klaksvík (locally called ‘Baptists’; see above, Chapter 7), the Lastaedian

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congregation in much of Northern Scandinavia, including Storfjord municipality, the Indre Mission evangelical wing of churches in Norway, Denmark and the Faroes, and the many Grundtvigianists (especially in Denmark). They were and are not opposed to rationality, but concerned to install a certain form of thinking about society and people where there is a certain proximity between each individual and God. To obtain proximity, much organised activity is performed, including voluntary poor relief. Morality is central, European decadence the enemy. The major figure is the selected but isolated people coping through hard work and committed effort. Importantly, the organised activities are, to a great degree, civic Bildung (to use a German word denoting non-formal education), the central actor the independent freeholder. The freeholders avoid Romantic stereotypes, acquiring instead the image of the rationalist, educated freeholder (Witoszek 1997: 82–86), or, in short, a citizen, a social producer. Witoszek argues that there is historical continuity in Norwegian political culture, anticipating not only nationalism, but also constitutional democracy: ‘There was an indigenous, individualist, egalitarian ethos which both prepared and supported the 1814 constitution and which ensured its further operability’ (Witoszek 1997: 87). The same argument could be developed for the history of meeting places in Iceland (Thingvellir) and the Faroes (Tinganes), which exhibited a tradition of combining political and religious cultures. For example, it is argued that Icelanders decided to become Christian in the year 1000 during the annual meeting at Thingvellir (see Chapter 3). However, the similarity of such narratives with nationalist ideology may itself raise concerns about cultural essentialism. Where was this ‘indigenous, individualist, egalitarian ethos’ that Witoszek located? Where is this inherent Protestantism localised? As already noted, in the case of Iceland, ‘national revivalism functionally replaced religious revivalism’ (Thorkildsen 1997: 144), meaning that nationalism itself became the enactor. Gullestad has another answer for Norway: a particular form of secularised Pietism is localised in everyday practices. Gullestad draws on her fieldwork among young mothers in Bergen for evidence of a type of embedded morality, presenting concrete examples of striking similarities between the Pietist church life of the laity and the notion of equality as sameness. Although the documentation is not detailed, as she acknowledges, the correspondence between Pietist revivalism and the ‘equality of sameness’ cannot be a coincidence. ‘The lay organized church is by definition egalitarian, stressing the community of brothers as against the hierarchy of the clergy. Pietist revival is further characterized by a strong dividing line between “us” (the converted) and “them” (the non-converted)’ (Gullestad 1992: 219). The ideas are circulated through education, prayers and nationalism, and thus not only lived in everyday life, but also as a matter of governmentality. Consequently, to see this only as a continuity of everyday life practices paving fertile grounds for certain political

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arrangements from above would be to miss the point. Governmentalisation is with us the whole way; the ‘from above’ and the ‘from below’ come together. To give another example, teachers and priests are central ‘governmentalisers’ and play significant roles in nation building. In Greenland the catechists, combined preachers and teachers, were trained by Danish and German missionaries as early as the eighteenth century. A catechist seminary was established in Nuuk in 1845 (Thuesen 1988, 1995), and catechists became an important part of the local Greenlandic elite, having close contact with Danish colonial rule. The establishment of a unified Greenlandic church and school system at the beginning of the twentieth century became crucial for the development of the idea of the Greenlandic nation and the cultural values ascribed to it. But this change is only possible through the everyday practices of, among others, catechists. National and religious identities are simultaneously lived and construed, practised and imagined, incorporated and narrated, performed and governmentalised. There are a number of similarities in the development of church–state relations since the Reformation in the Nordic countries, but there are also differences. First of all, again there are contrasts between the Danish and the Swedish realms. Reformation was implemented much more rapidly in Denmark than in Sweden. The Danish church, and its not insignificant property, became a part of the state, and of the latter’s further expansion (Thorkildsen 1997: 139). Furthermore, while Pietism was suppressed in Sweden, it was encouraged by the Danish king. This constitutes a major distinction between the Western Nordic ‘low church’ and the Eastern Nordic ‘high church’ (Thorkildsen 1997: 141). Finally, the Western Nordic church has diverse traditions. In addition to the lesser importance of strict religion in Iceland, Greenland did not experience the Reformation directly, since no Christians were settled in Greenland at the time. Afterwards, Danish Pietism and the German Hernnhut mission became crucial elements in the colonial heritage of the country. The Faroes have had many revivals and are still a rather religious society. Norway in the nineteenth century experienced a split between nationalist and revivalist movements (Thorkildsen 1997: 149). However, even with these different histories and their local and regional variations, Protestantism is the common organiser of territorial administration, through both church and state. Furthermore, there is a certain form of associative organisation of people, an ‘egalitarian individualism’ (Gullestad 1992) for those who are included, paving the way for a certain form a citizenship, where every citizen has a direct Gesellschaft relationship with both God and the state (see Stråth and Sørensen 1997: 12). At the same time, this relationship is conditioned by the people as Gemeinschaft, construed through imagined sameness.

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In the Nordic Atlantic area, the stronger influence of Pietism framed an understanding of societies as not for just anybody, but only for the chosen: people first, individuality second. It is no coincidence that resistance to the EU in the Nordic countries has often been framed in terms of the ‘Nordic Gemenskap/Fælleskab (Gemeinschaft)’, as opposed to the alienation of the EU Gesellschaft (Trädgårdh 2002: 94–95). Nordic Atlantic communities (Gemeinschaften), nationally but also locally and transnationally, have been defined with the help of boundary making that indicates who belongs to the chosen people and who does not. The influences of this boundary making are alive in the practising of imagined sameness. Boundaries came with the political culture of statist reformation and Pietism, where the state not only took over the church’s property, but also its project (Ingesman 2000: 82). These complex and ambivalent processes paved the way for the specific Nordic Atlantic compromise, or even synthesis, between the Enlightenment and Christianity. The Nordic Atlantic nationalist and statebuilding projects cannot be understood without the cultural understandings implied by the ‘governed people’. The church became an instrument in the exercise of state power, performing the registration of people, censuses and the like (Knudsen 2000b: 42–44). However, this was not only a project ‘from above’: it was, and is, a story of governmentalisation, cross-cutting the distinction between above and below. State regulation and redistribution are embedded in local practices. As shown in Chapter 7, this is evident in the case of the redistributive associations of welfare-oriented municipalities. It may be hard to generalise the practices translating these principles over time. However, it is striking to what extent these translations seem to have been generalised in the associative practices of people, where redistributive efforts are only valid for the chosen people, that is, those recognised under the category of ‘imagined sameness’. However, with the increase in mobile networks and flows, boundaries are being challenged, but not necessarily dismantled. On the contrary, remembering Barth’s qualifications, boundaries are not hermetic, but rather result from interactions across them. Therefore, it is worth exploring the political transformations that accompany contemporary socioeconomic innovations, involving many cross-boundary relations.

Socio-economic Dimensions of Nordic Atlantic Nation Building Socio-economic development is one of the fields in which associative practices in the Nordic countries have been crucial. The term ‘associational economy’ (Cooke and Morgan 1998) has been coined to explain how certain regions, in spite of comparatively low investment in research and development, have nevertheless performed with some success. Such success is usually ascribed to certain forms of collaboration, shared understanding,

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organised public life, state facilitators, dense networks or certain political or religious projects. The Norwegian economic geographer Bjørn Asheim suggests that one can find the historical and social background of Norway’s coordinated market economy in its ‘egalitarian social structures’, ‘Protestant work and consumption ethic, as well as concern with the value of social justice and solidarity’ (Asheim 2003b: 177). Asheim views these aspects of the economy, along with the ‘configuration of development’ and of social capital (see the discussion above in Chapter 1), as making society a part of the business itself: This organising form of bringing the society inside the firm through learning organisations based on broad participation, and supported by labour market legislation as well as a strong tradition of co-operation between the labour market organisations, is in many aspects the opposite way of achieving a fusion of the economy with the rest of society than the industrial district model. (Asheim 2003b: 187)

In contrast to the rather localised embeddedness of industrial districts, this Nordic type of broader social business development is built through certain ‘development coalitions’, including public authorities. However, there are few studies in economic geography showing how such processes work concretely. In Chapter 7, I referred to a number of studies of two contrasting Nordic Atlantic localities, Klaksvík in the Faroes and Storfjord municipality in Northern Norway. In both cases, religious associations, including the Plymouth Brethren community in Klaksvík and the Lastaedian congregation in Storfjord, play crucial roles, engaging in conflict as much as cooperation, since none of these revivalist groups enjoys a clear hegemony. Nevertheless, Chapter 7 concluded that these municipalities were capable of the territorial translation of social relations into a common language. However, this was increasingly the case because of the territorial bridging of different stakeholders, rather than that of a territorially bonded community. The point is that the persistence of religious revivals is not the decisive factor, but the territorial organisation of an associative society, both municipal and national, in which people participate in governing themselves. As Asheim points out, there is a rather generalised form of social capital underlying an associative society (see also above, Chapter 1). This may also explain how the Icelandic, Greenlandic and Faroese economies have coped, in spite of over-investment in fisheries, underdeveloped national systems of innovation and outward flows of capital (see Jonsson 1995). The post-colonial fish firm, Royal Greenland, provides an interesting case of the ambivalences involved. My study of the organisation is based on one month’s fieldwork in four localities in Greenland in 1996: the municipal centres of Uummannaq and Ilulissat (revisited 2001), the small village of Ikerasak in Uummanaq district, and the capital, Nuuk (including the Royal Greenland head office).

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Royal Greenland is a vertically organised shrimp and fish company responsible for most of Greenland’s exports. The company runs several trawlers in Greenlandic and foreign waters, as well as fish-processing plants in a number of Greenlandic towns (municipal centres) and in Denmark. In 1996, it bought a large processing plant for ready-prepared products in Wilhelmshaven in Germany, acquired part of a trawler company in Seattle and formed joint ventures with the North West Russian fish company, Sevryba. While building on the colonial heritage of the Royal Greenland Trade (the monopoly trading company), the firm’s objective was to become a major player in the global fish and shrimp trade, particularly as one of the major cold-water shrimp and prawn (Pandulus borealis) producers in the world. In 1996, Royal Greenland informed me that the majority of their staff were employed outside Greenland, and that most of its profits were earned in the overseas division. The strategy was a risky one, due to the typical fluctuations of the global fish market, especially that for shrimp. At the same time, Royal Greenland also had a number of processing plants in Greenland, subsidised by the Home Rule government, following the principle of ‘societal tasks’. Since 1996, an increasing number of these plants have been reorganised into subsidised systems outside Royal Greenland, while other profitable plants in smaller villages (especially in Uummannaq and Upernavik districts), based on Greenlandic halibut, have been merged with several new private fish firms (Bærenholdt 2002b; above, Chapter 5). Royal Greenland’s globalisation strategy was not at all popular. Several Greenlandic interviewees asked why foreign activities could not be ‘done by ourselves’. Moreover, there is a strong public and political awareness of Royal Greenland, with influential Danish business people and former Greenlandic and Danish politicians involved in its board and management. Royal Greenland’s decisions are constantly on the political and public agendas. The fishing industry is not considered high-status employment by many Greenlanders, and work on the plant floor processing fish tends to be a last alternative. Furthermore, most of the managerial staff are Danish. There are also cases where Royal Greenland, like other fish firms in the Nordic Atlantic, ends up seeking immigrant workers. On the one hand, the company is blamed for not creating enough jobs, while, on the other hand, the jobs it does offer do not meet the expectations of many local job seekers. Further modernisation, leading to better jobs, is an expensive possibility, but business rationality dictates moving more jobs from onshore processing to mobile ships with on-board processing. This example illustrates the ambivalences of the project for making Royal Greenland a ‘social democratic’ service and facility for societal development, in continuity with Denmark’s plans for the modernisation of Greenland in the 1960s. Taking into consideration the Danish subsidies, whether used for welfare services or business subsidies, the nationalist agenda for increased Greenlandic self-government questions the rationality

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of continuing the subsidies. The leftist nationalist political parties and movements are also those that are inclined to favour moderately neoliberal economic solutions, pointing to Iceland as a partial model. The project of making Royal Greenland an independent private company is part of this discourse, and is supported by numerous domestic economic reports. The premise of this form of nationalist liberalism is to ‘cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth’ (at sætte tæring efter næring, in Danish). However, this is an ambivalent project, since it implies a collective national actor performing the economy. On the one hand, we have increasing transnational flows and engagements, while on the other, these flows are supposed to be useful for bounded associations. This form of politics is a kind of neo-mercantilism, where political actors seek to produce national or regional ‘closures’. In his critical study of regional devolution in Britain, the British geographer Ray Hudson explains how: Social and political actors often seek to increase the extent of regional closure and represent regions as closed, continuous and internally homogeneous and, as such, legitimate subjects seeking to shape policy. Consequently, while many of the social relations that help constitute regions traverse their immanent boundaries and enrol extra-regional actors in the process of regionalisation, these trans-boundary relationships may, in some cases, produce what may be termed ‘closure’. (Hudson 2006: 161)

Although the post-colonial Danish realm and devolution inside Britain are very different, it seems obvious that Greenland’s national economic strategies for independence also have an aspect of ‘closure’. This may lead to the neglect of questions of internal equity, since a certain form of ‘neoliberal governmentality’ is installed along with devolution (Hudson 2006). The emerging ambivalence is about the associational construction of a ‘we’, defined by imagined sameness, while dismantling the forms of redistribution that are inherent in the historical construction of sameness, in part installed by the colonial administration. The result may be political independence with only weak internal redistributive mechanisms. So far, this chapter has analysed a number of cultural, religious and economic aspects of Nordic and especially Nordic Atlantic contemporary nationalism, pointing to some key ambivalences. The following sections further investigate the historical genesis and character of nationalism, first in what became the nation states of Norway and Iceland, and then in the still home-ruled Faroes and Greenland, to discuss finally the ambivalence of the Nordic project in these areas.

Nationalism and the Nordic Atlantic Nation States The history of Danish dominance in the Nordic Atlantic since Denmark’s merger with Norway (including Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland) in 1380

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is a recurring issue. For good reasons, nationalism as the project of selfdetermination is persistently on the agenda, since we are still globally in a colonial present (Gregory 2004a). Meanwhile, many social sciences have not only neglected colonialism, but also the connected phenomena of the nation and nationalism, a relationship that is more central to modernity than is often acknowledged. The formation of nations must be seen in connection with modernity, whether as the origin of modernity, an invention of modernity, a passage to modernity or a counterweight to modernity (Árnason 1996). The social sciences have taken for granted, in an unreflective way, the existence of an identity between the ‘nation state’ and ‘society’, where the latter should have been its key concept. ‘It often turns out that the “society” which lies at the heart of sociology’s own selfdefinition is created in the image of the nation-state’ (Billig 1995: 53). More contextual sensitivity to the concrete geographies and histories of societies sheds some light on the many ambivalent faces of nationalism. It is clear that nationalism is connected not only with colonialism, whether in the form of the nationalism of the coloniser or of the colonised, but also with discourses of liberalism, both as economics and as political philosophy. For example, classical political discourse about the liberal community of sovereign individuals is associated with the birth of the idea of England as a nation (see Árnason 1996: 56–57). And it remains a striking curiosity that the most classic images of the nation state as a trinity of nation, state and territory are exactly the old colonial states along the North Atlantic rim, namely Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, France, Spain and Portugal. One may add to this collection the later, federal state constructions in Germany, Italy, Canada and the US. But the ‘fit’ is only partial; there are crucial ‘exceptions’, such as the Basque country, Brittany, Ireland (including the six northern counties), Wales, Scotland, Quebec, the Inuit in Northern Quebec (Nunavik) and Labrador (Newfoundland), Nunavut, Greenland, the Faroes and the Sami. The world is far from ‘perfect’; it is the exception that is the rule. Contemporary research on nationalism has contributed significantly to our understanding of the historical constructedness of nations and nationalism. One normally views nations in conjunction with states, and projects of state formation are seen as causally prior to nationalism and nation building (Billig 1995: 19ff.). Moreover, the definition of the ‘nation state’ is frequently confused with the definition of a territorial state per se. Social science often forgets that it is possible to use state power that is not legitimised by reference to a specific people as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991); territorial states without nations was what existed in the era of European absolutism. On the other hand, the social sciences, and social scientists such as Giddens, also tend to forget the cultural side, identity formation and othering, which was historically constitutive for the democratic state-building projects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century

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capitalism and normative modernity (Bærenholdt 1998b). Territorial states and the cultural building of nations are taken for granted as two sides of the same – ‘perfect’ – coin. However, there has been an increasing awareness of the nationalist resurgence that accompanies globalisation. Manuel Castells points to a number of contemporary cases of nationalisms that are not bound to state projects. He also views states as vanishing entities. In his view, ‘the incongruence between social theory and contemporary practice comes from the fact that nationalism, and nations, have a life of their own, independent from statehood, albeit embedded in cultural constructs and political projects’ (Castells 1997: 29). He argues that nationalism is a historical construction and social practice that exists as a shared experience. He stresses four aspects of contemporary nationalism. First, nations are ‘entities independent from the state’; secondly, they ‘are not historically limited to the modern nation-state as constituted in Europe in the two hundred years following the French Revolution’; thirdly, ‘nationalism is not necessarily an elite phenomenon’; and lastly, ‘contemporary nationalism is more reactive than proactive, it tends to be more cultural than political’ (Castells 1997: 30–31). Castells’s emphasis is interesting and relevant to the Nordic Atlantic examples. He defines nations as ‘cultural communes constructed in people’s minds and collective memory by the sharing of history and political projects’ (Castells, 1997: 51, his emphasis). This is a definition open to the recognition of non-territorially defined nations, for example, ones defined by their language. Unsurprisingly Castells sees nationalism as a social movement, but he does not address the ambivalence of the movement, as in the suppression of languages other than Catalan in Catalonia. While we must recognise, with Castells, the practical, shared experience of welfare nationalism in the Nordic countries, we must also comprehend the conflicts associated with nationalism, especially when they emerge from the legacy of colonial administration and cultural othering. While Castells does acknowledge, in a rather pessimistic way, the trend of cultural communes to form only resistance identities, not project identities, he does not address the orientalist problem that coloniser and the colonised share, as they tend to depend on each other in various ways. First, the colonised define their project as resistance to the coloniser. Secondly, the colonised tend to speak in the ‘language’, and use the approach to nationalism, of the coloniser. Thirdly, the two parties cannot forget identification with the other, how they nourished each other in asymmetric, paternalist forms, and how their identity exists only in relation to the other. Finally, the ‘symbiosis’ between the nationalisms of the coloniser and the colonised are often conditioned, but not determined, by socio-economic connections and dependencies (Hroch 1985), as we saw in the case of Greenland above. I shall now discuss these ideas briefly in relation to Norwegian and especially

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Icelandic nationalisms, while Faroese and Greenlandic nationalisms (and home rule) will be investigated in the next section. Most nationalisms are defined in opposition to a colonial power and grow as a reaction to the collapse of a colonial empire. As mentioned earlier, Norway became independent from Denmark and created a democratic constitution as early as in 1814, but it also became part of an asymmetric union with Sweden, until it achieved full independence in 1905. Much of this series of events is embedded in nineteenth-century European geopolitics. When Denmark was forced to surrender Norway in 1814, this was not a result of nationalism, but rather of the geopolitical weakening of the Danish state following the Napoleonic Wars. Wider Norwegian nationalist movements became a later product of popular mobilisation in opposition to the asymmetrical personal union with Sweden. But we should not confuse the causes of the surrender of Norway with the course set for projects afterwards. In his interesting comparative study of ‘oppressed nations’, Miroslav Hroch points to the existence of certain forms of Landespatriotismus performed in the Norwegian bureaucracy, partly merging with the rising commercial bourgeoisie. ‘The victory of this patriotism in Norway was not simply associated with a favourable constellation of international politics, but resulted first and foremost from the distinctive social composition of the group which upheld it’ (Hroch 1985: 41–42). Hroch’s class analysis stresses the essential role of elites. Nationalism’s imagination of ancestry should not be confused either with actual elite mobilisation of the people in the periphery, or with the conditions actualising the national project. But connections between historical possibilities, social forces and the nationalist imagination are flexibly interwoven. Icelandic nationalism is one specific case. Icelandic nationalism draws on the legal tradition of the Althingi. The nationalist movement was strong in the nineteenth century, forcing Denmark to give the Althing legal powers for certain domestic affairs in 1874, home rule in 1904 and an independent state (in personal union with Denmark, i.e. having the same king) in 1918. This transition does not fit Ernest Gellner’s (1988) theory of nationalism as connected with, and functional to, industrialism; Icelandic nationalism came much too early, even if associated with the industrialisation of Denmark. The early Icelandic national project was rather propelled by an early European humanism, reflected in seventeenth-century Icelandic history and literature (the sagas). And, at the same time as Norwegian intellectuals were starting to meet in the Norwegian Society in Copenhagen, the Icelandic Learned Society was founded in Copenhagen in 1779, followed by the Icelandic Literature Society in 1816. These Icelandic intellectual groups facilitated connections between country, people, language and history (Wåhlin 1994: 38). Of course, these projects were conditioned by the actual conditions of trade and travel between Denmark and Iceland, as well as within Iceland.

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While Icelandic nationalism was somewhat sceptical of the trading monopoly (see Chapter 3), it was also conditioned by its operations. In a parallel development, the Althing tradition meant that many officials and all bishops and vicars after the Reformation were Icelanders, recruited from a well-educated landowner class. The nineteenth-century national project could then be seen as an attempt to avoid being part of the Danish system (Denmark had also tried to colonise Schleswig, with little success). Furthermore, Icelanders’ culture and language were surprisingly homogeneous, affected by both the Enlightenment and liberalism prior to the nationalist project (Karlsson and Debes 1987: 17–23), and language today remains the key marker of Icelandic ethnicity (Pálsson 1995: 176). It is also noteworthy that the distance from Iceland to the colonial centre facilitated the nationalist project. At the same time, Icelanders coped for generations with immense distances within Iceland, including travelling to the Althing encounters at Thingvellir. These trips were sufficiently frequent for it to be meaningful to talk about shared Icelandic cultural and political practices, supported by the well-preserved memory of the ninth-century migration from Norway to Iceland. But the colonial power was also part of the national project. First, there was a colonial historical interest in the traces of Norse history in the Icelandic sagas and language, which were said to represent authentic Nordic heritage as such, meaning that the contrasting nations of Denmark and Iceland also shared certain common denominators (see Chapter 3). Secondly, Danish officials and merchants living in Iceland made paternalistic attempts to civilise Icelanders through education in dance, music, gymnastics and housekeeping. However, the picture is complex, as some landless Icelandic workers had better relations with the Danish trading station than with Icelandic landowners (Magnússon 1991: 179–80). Despite these complexities, Icelandic historical geography and ethnography represent remarkable continuity, the plausibility of which is hard to question (Hastrup 1990a: 306). While there are differences in the socio-economic developments of Norway and Iceland, there are similarities in their national projects. It is interesting that Hroch, in his comparative analysis of the production of oppressed nation states in Europe, attributes certain exceptional characteristics to the formation of the Norwegian nation state that can also be found in the formation of the Icelandic nation state.1 It is not merely the fact that both states gained their independence in the context of a defeated or occupied colonial power (Denmark). This is not an exceptional international finding; it is the internal similarity that is striking: The Norwegian nation is the only one of our oppressed nations whose national movement ran its course under conditions covered by the Western European conception of the development of a ‘state-nation’: here political and ethnic unity were largely identical, and the oppressed nation displayed roughly the same

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organic social structure as the ruling nation. This is why the group which pioneered the revival of the Norwegian nation differed so considerably in its social composition from those of other oppressed nations. The bourgeoisie and the topmost strata of the intelligentsia, who were attached to the bourgeoisie, had the foremost place in the movement, whereas in the other cases those groups were to be found predominantly within the ruling nation (Hroch 1985: 39).

While Hroch finds the existence of an internal elite remarkable, he nevertheless underemphasises the fact that the elite were first educated and developed their programme in the colonial capital of Copenhagen. Although the formative role of Norwegian and Icelandic intellectual societies in Copenhagen is somewhat debatable, the existence of national, liberal elites became crucial to the long process of nation-state formation in Norway and Iceland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An analysis of the consequences of the weakness of feudal relations in Norway (as well as in Iceland) is missing in Hroch’s analysis. There was only a minor aristocracy in Norway and none at all in Iceland, patterns that facilitated the rise of freehold farmers, in combination with the merchants and officials that Hroch does recognise. However, this also means that the Nordic countries never experienced thorough bourgeois revolutions to set new stages for universal citizenship. These continuities easily provide historical understanding for the background of the ambivalences of Nordicity. In spite of the ‘historical weight’ of these ‘internal’ explanations, the most important historical fact is that Norwegian and Icelandic nationalisms emerged alongside the nationalism of the Danish coloniser. In consequence, nationalism developed in more connected ways than a comparative study of countries tends to recognise, since a comparative study like Hroch’s concentrates on territorial units rather than on connections among these units. This will became more evident in the next section on the lateremerging nationalisms of the Faroes and Greenland.

Nations without States Faroese nationalism differs from its Icelandic counterpart in several ways. A nationalist movement did not emerge until meetings of Faroese students in Copenhagen in the 1870s and the founding of a Faroese nationalist movement in the Faroes in 1889. The Faroese people never agreed as unambiguously on the national question as did Iceland (Joensen 2003: 51; see also above, Chapter 3). The nationalist leader Jóannes Patursson negotiated a home-rule arrangement with Denmark, but he lost his mandate in 1906 because Faroese opponents of home rule claimed that more independence would mean increasing taxes (Rerup 1989; Wåhlin 1989). The question of national recognition remained in dispute throughout the twentieth century in the Faroes, meaning that sentiments regarding the

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national question have been the most distinctive factor in Faroese politics. While the nationhood of the Faroese has never really been recognised by Denmark, there has not been any doubt about Faroese identity among the Faroese themselves (Karlsson and Debes 1987: 25; Wåhlin 1994: 44). In spite of the absence of a long-term written language, Faroese has been continuously practised since the Middle Ages. The Faroese were a welleducated, literate people at an early period. Schoolteachers have been formally educated in the Faroes since 1870, and the Danish (indeed, more or less Nordic) tradition of folk high schools has also influenced the Faroes. In conjunction with Icelandic precedents, the nineteenth-century highschool tradition, and Grundtvigianism in Denmark (see next section) inspired the formation of Faroese nationalism. The nineteenth-century national movement in the Faroes emerged on the basis of a cultural programme, with special emphasis on the recognition and preservation of the Faroese language, motivated by the construction of a new Faroese written language by V.U. Hammershaimb (1819–1909). This project was strongly supported by the people around N.F.S. Grundtvig and his son S.H. Grundtvig (Nauerby 1995: 44). Hammershaimb participated in the meetings of the Grundtvigs’ Scandinavian Society. Based on the promotion of a common Nordic or Scandinavian cultural and linguistic heritage, the Scandinavian Society supported the right to independence of all the Nordic peoples (Wåhlin 1994: 46–47). It is clear from the Society’s activities that the Faroese national project was first based on ideas of common culture, rather than a project about political rights. The Faroese nationalist leader, Jóannes Patursson, constructed his political nationalism on the basis of this cultural project. Patursson was himself educated in agriculture in Norway, and he married an Icelandic woman. He drew much of his political inspiration from these other two Nordic countries, especially Icelandic home rule in 1904 (Karlsson and Debes 1987: 29–31). Patursson also exploited the idea of the Faroese people being one of the Nordic peoples as part of his political argument for Faroese independence. In the interwar period, Nordic identity was promoted as an alternative to Danish dominance (Wåhlin 1994: 49–50), thus continuing the Grundtvigian tradition. The development of Faroese nationalism was encouraged by increased mobilities, both within the Faroes and between the Faroes and other countries. Tom Nauerby has stressed this point in his book, where he analyses nation building in the Faroes as linked to ‘the increased interconnectedness at the global level which followed in the wake of modernisation’ (1995: 173). Following peaceful British occupation during the Second World War, a subsequent referendum majority for independence was dramatically rejected by the Danish government (Harhoff 1993), and instead the Faroes received home rule in 1948. The Home Rule Law recognises the Faroese language and flag, but not the existence of a Faroese nation. Faroese people

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are legally Danish citizens living on the Faroes, and the Faroes are defined as a ‘self-governed “people’s society” within the Danish Realm’ (Karlsson and Debes 1987: 34, Harhoff 1993: 76). It is noteworthy that ‘the Icelandic solution’ (personal union with Denmark from 1918 to 1944) was considered by Faroese nationalists, as well as in the report to the Danish government by the Danish expert in international law, Alf Ross (Harhoff 1993: 73). Obviously, Denmark was not willing to grant the Faroes this kind of independence after the Second World War. Even more remarkably, the Greenland Home Rule Law of 1978 is more or less based on the same principles as that governing the Faroes, in spite of significant cultural, political, historical and infrastructural differences (Harhoff 1993: 489). There are divergences between the two Home Rule Laws, especially regarding raw materials. For Greenland, the administration of raw materials is performed in a joint Danish–Greenland system, while in the Faroes home rule did not have rights to raw materials originally, but suddenly in the 1980s this right was granted by the Danish government. But this does not change the overall impression that the asymmetric delegation of powers from Denmark to the Faroes and to Greenland corresponds to the political interests of the Danish state (notwithstanding political interests in Greenland, and especially in the Faroes, which favoured limited forms of independence). Greenlandic nationalism arose much later than the other Nordic Atlantic nationalisms, although one can argue that a project for the education of ‘Greenlanders’ was already being created in the nineteenth century (Thuesen 1988, 1995), the Greenlandic language being made a part of education in Greenland long before a similar trend in the Faroes. However, explicit Greenlandic political nationalism did not emerge before the 1960s, again among students in Denmark. This occurred after the formal decolonisation of Greenland, through the 1953 change to the Danish constitution, which made Greenland a Danish county. One of the major issues was the so-called ‘birthplace criteria’ (fødestedskriteriet), which implied discrimination against people born in Greenland, as they had lower wages and fewer rights than people who came from Denmark to work in Greenland. The debate on this issue mobilised the Council of Young Greenlanders in Denmark in 1964 (Karlsson and Debes 1987: 37). Although these criteria were later formally abolished by the home rule government, the issue draws our attention to the specific social mechanisms at work in the asymmetric, postcolonial relationship between the state of Denmark on the one hand and Greenland on the other. Furthermore, Greenland’s membership of the EEC, which dated from 1973 (as a county of Denmark, since the majority vote in Greenland had been clearly against EEC membership), led to claims for self-government or independence. Thus the Faroese and Greenlandic people have been granted partial selfgovernment, based on the delegation of power from the state of Denmark

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to each of the two home rule governments. Although this delegation de jure can be withdrawn, this is generally considered to be impossible de facto. Nevertheless, this asymmetric relationship expresses the idea that Danish sovereignty over the Faroes and Greenland cannot be questioned. So, while the Danish state, in an apparently enlightened way, has granted home rule to the Faroese and Greenlandic peoples, this does not imply recognition of the Faroese and Greenlanders as peoples.2 Although Denmark has given both territories (especially Greenland) some right to participate in international relations, there have also been numerous cases of Danish sovereignty being exercised, ranging from secret agreements with the US over the Thule Air Base to recent reports to the United Nations about the ostensible lack of political aspiration for self-government in the Faroes and Greenland. Especially in international relations, Denmark is exercising its waning imperial power over the Faroes, but particularly over Greenland, because of the part these territories play in matters of global security, research and environmental protection (Harhoff 1993: 488). Politically Greenlanders and Faroese are citizens of Denmark, and as such, the two home rule governments are involved in redistributive mechanisms, allocating block grants of around DKK 1 billion annually in the Faroes and around DKK 3 billion in Greenland. While these subsidies are important, Faroese and Greenlandic nationalists resent them because they imply, in the Anglo-American liberal world, that their societies are collectively ‘on welfare’ (this meaning is quite different from that which pertains in Scandinavia). In other words, a redistributive mechanism exists that does not imply a recognition of equal rights. It is redistribution without recognition, and nationalists in both countries prefer recognition to redistribution. However, there is also ambivalence about home rule government, especially in Greenland, since there is doubt whether, with independence, replacement revenues for Danish subsidies could be generated on a sustainable basis. But even Greenlandic nationalists believe that there is a case to be made. Denmark forced the removal of inhabitants from the Thule Airbase area shortly before the abolition of Greenland’s formal colonial status in 1953. To this day (as of the time of writing, in November 2005), no Danish Prime Minister has accepted responsibility for the relocation. Instead, Denmark financed the construction of a new airport. Redistributive compensation, but no recognition of rights, seems to be the price of exercising of power. The Danish position has some logic, since the secret agreement with the US over the Thule Airbase gave Denmark no control over its actual use. Instead, Denmark apparently received a reduction in the amount of military support it was expected to provide NATO (see Grønland under den kolde krig, 1997), that is, a redistributive compensation. Hence, it is no surprise that there is Greenlandic speculation about how much compensation could be obtained from the US, and whether this compensation is potentially

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sufficient to secure Greenland’s economic independence from Denmark. Indeed, the 2004 agreement on new military installations at the Thule Air Base (as part of the US defence against missile attacks) included new possibilities for trade and student exchanges between Greenland and the US. While this may constitute a new redistribution and the opening of new connections, it does not provide any recognition of political rights (for a parallel analysis of the role of military installations on the Faroes, see Johansen 1999). Nationalism in the shadow of deeply asymmetrical relations, that is colonialism, takes ambivalent forms. The post-war Social Democratic project for the modernisation of Greenland led to the importation of Danish teachers and officials at a level never before experienced. Danish was increasingly introduced as the educational language, Greenlandic school pupils in sixth grade stayed for a long period in Denmark, and, at the most extreme, a selected group of Greenlandic youngsters were taken from their families and moved to Denmark to be educated as a new modern elite (Bryld 1998). It is therefore no surprise that radical Greenlandic politics in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as government practices in the 1980s and early 1990s, were largely a response to Danification through Greenlandisation. Unfortunately, pursuing political recognition and indigenous rights did not always make educational progress and international transitions for Greenlanders easier (Bærenholdt 1999). Nevertheless, the Greenlandic government and political elite have succeeded in placing Greenland centrally on a number of international agendas, especially in indigenous affairs (see Chapter 9). In other words, cultural identifications are widely recognised and even celebrated. Greenlandic nationalism has created a view of the indigenous way of life as one based on a subsistence lifestyle, where the role of the hunter is not unlike the role of the farmer in the other Nordic nationalisms. These cultural projects are not only heavily influenced by a colonial discourse on how to preserve the authentic Greenlander (see Chapter 5), but also by the cultural nationalism of Danish Grundtvigianism, which translated ‘Dane’ into ‘Greenlander’. One positive and supportive interpretation here would be to emphasise the cultural nationalism of a Gemeinschaft project, as suggested by Otto Bauer in the context of the Austrian–Hungarian empire (see Østergaard 1991). Another, more critical interpretation would be to analyse the allocation of specific identifications (and subsidies) as a project of performing ‘zones of indistinction’ (Agamben 2003; Bolt 2003; Bauman 2004; Diken and Laustsen 2004). In this second, perhaps more realistic interpretation, it is still within the power of the sovereign (the Danish state) to decide the terms of inclusion and exclusion through the use of territorial power. This is most clear in the right of the sovereign to suspend laws. Not that this is actually done, but just the potential (potenza) to do so has powerful consequences.

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The strength of this second possible interpretation became clear in the negotiations between the Danish and Faroese governments over recent Faroese claims for further independence (Nyborg-Jørgensen 2004). The Danish government (Social Democrat-led until 2001) suggested that Danish subsidies would be quickly abolished in the case of further Faroese independence. This argument was reiterated in Denmark’s analysis of the costs of financing education and welfare for Faroese people living in Denmark. These arguments were followed by considerable rhetoric in the Danish parliament about the strength of the ‘historical bonds’ between Denmark and the Faroes (Nyborg-Jørgensen 2004). Given the longstanding division among the Faroese themselves on the national question, the Faroese political constellation leading the negotiations broke down, followed by domestic electoral losses for the nationalists. It is the structure of the argument that is interesting. The Danish political establishment sentimentally talks about historical bonds between people, without expressing any consideration for other (geopolitical, commercial, symbolic) interests in keeping the Faroes within the realm. The same argument could easily be applied to Greenlanders, and possibly in stronger terms, since they represent both an immense land (symbolically compensating for national losses in 1864; see Hvalsum 1999) and an indigenous people. Danes and Danish educational materials demonstrate considerable concern for Greenland, and in ways that are more obviously paternalist than in the case of the Faroes. And, if anyone cares to question the care taken, there is always the block grant to serve as a reminder. In this sense, the ambivalence of Danish Nordicity reflects a certain form of solidarity that could be called ‘colonial modernity’: performing exclusion by way of inclusion. In his analysis of the new distanciations produced in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, Derek Gregory shows how ‘colonial modernity is intrinsically territorializing’ (2004b: 205) through its complex use of distinctions and connections. Capital movement may de-territorialise and support migrant processes, but these processes go along with territorial power exercised in attempts to maintain control (Diken and Laustsen 2004). We have seen the socio-economic dimensions of Royal Greenland’s globalisation strategies, as well as many other actors in the Nordic Atlantic. But we also see the consistent political projects of reproducing and defending the cultural sameness of the Faroese and Greenlandic peoples that is supported by Danish nationalism. The Faroese and Greenlanders are nations without states, but they are only recognised as zones of cultural sameness within the territorial state of Denmark. The latter is a form of recognition that is conditioned on the tacit acceptance of an asymmetric, if not paternalist relationship. Some would say that this acceptance is made tacit by the redistributive block grant, which effectively prevents Danish interests from being recognised as anything other than those of a generous and enlightened people in taking

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‘responsibility’ for the Faroese and Greenlandic people, who are therefore actually being included by way of their exclusion.

Nordism: a Tacit Project? The idea of the existence of a Nordic community is widely debated, and, apart from the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council (see Chapter 9), there are few external markers of Nordism. However, the silent reference to a form of community among the Nordic countries – Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, accompanied by Greenland, the Faroes and the Åland Islands – is widely exploited within the Nordic countries themselves. Internationally the notion of Scandinavia is used more frequently, but the problem with this is that it actually only refers to Norway, Sweden and Denmark (the Scandinavian languages), if not only to Norway and Sweden (the Scandinavian peninsula; the word originally comes from the southernmost region of Sweden, Scandia). However, the idea of Norden was originally supported by seventeenthand eighteenth-century collections of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, which were taken to the colonial capital, Copenhagen, though most of them have now been given back to Iceland (they are exhibited in the Árna Manússonar Institute in Reykjavík). The manuscripts represent a very central heritage not only for Iceland, but for all the Nordic countries (except Finland), and they were heavily used during the nineteenth-century collapse of the Danish empire to construct national romantic narratives. These narratives were often expressed through Viking symbols, and interestingly, they perceived immigrating Icelanders as the authentic Nordic people (see Chapter 3). Alongside this Nordic cultural project, there has also been a Nordic political project, normally called the Scandinavian movement. It emerged in parallel to the more successful projects of unification in Germany and Italy, but finally collapsed with the Danish loss of Schleswig in 1864. Again external geopolitical interests were involved in maintaining divided control of the entrance to the Baltic Sea (Østergaard 1994). The Scandinavian political project was thus superseded by the persistent Nordic project of cultural cooperation, performed through civil networks and associations (especially the Nordic Associations, founded in 1919) and later a number of transnational organisations. While some of these forms of cooperation in the Nordic Atlantic area will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, I shall now concentrate on the central cultural meanings of the Nordic cultural project. The Danish priest, poet and politician N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) was one of the key intellectuals of nineteenth-century Denmark, although he is less well known internationally than Søren Kierkegaard. Grundtvig is

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normally regarded as the founder of Nordic folk high schools, and he was also one of the main creators of the Nordic cultural project. In his study Grundtvig og Norden, the Danish historian Gustav Albeck depicted Grundtvig’s basic idea about Norden as being a ‘spiritual unit’ with a certain role to perform in his unified narrative of Christendom and Nordic history. Grundtvig anticipated that a Nordic mission would become the sixth of the seven chosen people to carry Christendom according to the Revelation of St John the Divine. This sixth people, ‘Philadelphia’, would take over responsibilities with the mature civilisation of humanity (Albeck 1942: 35, 58). Many of these ideas were spelled out in Grundtvig’s frustration at the loss of Norway in 1814 (the remains of the medieval ‘Nordic Union’), though he later came to terms with this situation by acknowledging that Denmark is ‘the country of rebirth’, ‘history’s Palestine’ and ‘the heart of Norden’ (quoted in Albeck 1942: 49, my translation from the Danish). Throughout his writings, Grundtvig persistently saw world history as being associated with a succession of main chosen people, all of whom were seafaring people, and among whom ‘High Norden’ was supposed to be a gift to humanity (Albeck 1942: 63, 102). It is obvious that Grundtvig’s project was cultural–spiritual rather than political. He thus took a different route from that of the ‘National-Liberals’ or ‘Student Scandinavism’ in the 1840s. While these political movements were more firmly connected to European thinking about nationalism and liberalism, Grundtvig actually became less interested in the political project of state making. Although there is no reason to overestimate the influence of a single person, few ideological references are made by so many people as to the ideas of N.F.S. Grundtvig. This is especially true in Denmark, but there are traces in the Nordic Atlantic too. His ideas about popular and lay knowledge, though always ambivalent towards more intellectual scholarship, and his ideas about freedom, mental broadness and tolerance are often associated with Danish national feeling. However, these ideas were problematic, since their unspoken precondition was the ethnic homogeneity of the population. The same was true of the development of the welfare state during the twentieth century. Denmark is a nation that regards itself as liberal and tolerant and places a high value on social equality and social cohesion, promoted through a well-developed welfare system. It has nurtured a longstanding interest in global humanitarian issues, in this way building an image of external as well as internal solidarity. This solidarity is the foundation stone of the welfare state, but what has gone largely unrecognised is the degree to which it has been based on a cultural concurrence of equality and likeness. (Koefoed and Simonsen 2007: 327)

While this analysis addresses the various nationalisms existing in Denmark, it also suggests Danish expectations about how other nations in the Nordic

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Atlantic ought to perform, as suggested by Marianne Gullestad’s term ‘imagined sameness’ for Norway. The Nordic Associations (one per country) founded in 1919 came to define the backbone of cultural Nordicity as a cooperative spirit based on common cultural identities that complemented national identities (Janfelt 2000). This was quite easily achieved through the shared heritage of the national projects of Norway, Iceland and the Faroes, though matters were more complicated in the case of Greenland (see Chapter 9). The Grundtvigian wording of this complementary role of the various identities would be ‘Multifarious, though fundamentally the same’ (‘Mangfoldig, dog ens i grunden’, Janfelt 2000: 31). The fundamental sameness that Grundtvig anticipated of all Nordic people was rooted in the imagination of a chosen Nordic people, who had been given a historical mission in the development of Christendom. One cannot help linking this nineteenth-century thinking with the self-sufficient statements of many Nordic politicians of the early twenty-first century (see Koefoed and Simonsen 2007 for their analysis of the Danish Prime Minister’s 2003 New Year speech; see also Simonsen 2004). This is not to employ historical determinism, but only to put the contemporary in perspective. Furthermore, there is a tacit role for the Lutheran church throughout the Nordic Atlantic countries, in two ways. First, as argued in Chapter 7, from the Reformation the church became part of the power apparatus of the state, including the municipal authorities. This organisational merger promoted the early introduction of obligatory primary education in the Nordic countries. Secondly, the Lutheran churches claimed responsibility for people as such, pursuing identity and sameness between people who later became increasingly ambiguously bonded in coping with globalisation (Lodberg 2000). Had these identifications only been part of the preaching within the limited spheres of the church, this would not have been so problematic. But the ideological preaching of ‘imagined sameness’ became part of political culture in Denmark and the Nordic Atlantic countries of its former empire. I have thus argued – especially for the post-colonial relations between Denmark, on the one hand, and the Faroes and Greenland, on the other – that Nordism may represent a form of post-colonial ideological practice reminiscent of the plea of the Danish poet, politician and priest Grundtvig for a special mission for the Nordic peoples. Nordic peoples were expected to be alike, but the Danish people more alike (!), that is, on higher ground than the others. The Nordic nations were recognised because of their sameness, but with Danes as the primary people. As such, Nordism supports the idea of nationhood, as long as nations share a common heritage. When Denmark is assigned a special role, this does not contradict the post-colonial nature of Nordism, but is a recognition of its ambivalent post-colonial heritage.

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Nordism is Janus-faced. It is international and humanitarian for external use, but the principle of sameness defines the limits of internal tolerance. Redistribution in the form of social innovations and welfare regulations addresses those who are recognised as citizens, and, because of the territorially universal welfare systems, recognition is more or less translated into a right to welfare. For example, ‘Because the welfare system includes all who reside in Norwegian territory, the immigration rules exclude the majority of potential immigrants’ (Lotherington and Fjørtoft 2007: 115). Social distance is met by various forms of redistribution, conditioned by territorial citizenship that is based on cultural ‘proximity’. Redistribution is conditioned on recognition, but recognition is limited. This chapter has stressed a number of rather tacit restrictive mechanisms inherent in Nordism. People included as such, or only partially, take part in a system of governmentality where cultural distance is used for demarcation. Nordism copes with cultural distance by distinguishing practices that define the recognised in terms of sameness. Furthermore, sameness is translated into, and practised by way of, proximity. Cultural distance is used to celebrate the mission of the selected Nordic peoples, as opposed to other people. These darker sides to Nordism are increasingly revealed when welfare-state systems are challenged by immigration. But the historical background goes back at least to the institutionalised merger of state and church, in which the later nation states took over responsibility for the missionary care of people who were recognised as citizens. Now there are differences among the Nordic nation states, and this chapter has concentrated on the Nordic Atlantic area of the former Danish empire. In these latter areas, coping practices have been more or less connected with various lay Pietist movements facilitating govermentalities through ‘from-below’ popular participation, hand in hand with ‘fromabove’ nation-state intervention (in so far as independent nation states were established first in Norway and then in Iceland). In the cases of the Faroes and Greenland, this is still not a close relationship, since the Nordic (Grundtvigian) ideal model of correspondence between people and state has not been established. However, the ideal model is also ambivalent, as it is perfectly possible to recognise only the cultural identity of the Faroese and Greenlanders as nations among the other Nordic nations, without political recognition. This is possible so long as combinations of distanciation and territorialisation are secured by means of redistribution. In this way, the shared experience of nations without states (Castells’s vision) is vital, involving complex patterns of asymmetric othering. The nationalist projects for further self-government and independence, supported by some but not all Faroese and Greenlanders, not surprisingly respond to their distanciation through claims of recognition rather than redistribution by way of what could be called ‘post-colonial gifts’.

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Another interpretation is also possible. Nordic modernity, colonial modernity included, also has a front side. It may represent the utopian dream of many globally – the Nordic/Scandinavian model, like all other utopian projects of modernity, is a territorialised vision of the good society (Bauman 2004). It is the very same vision of a society that shares a more dystopian vision of egalitarian individualism, where people are brought together in their goal of sharing wealth, but only among the selected, the converted, the real people. Though the recognition of people has been discussed as positive, this is in fact more complicated. The recognition of people as constituting a collective identification with one another does not in fact mean acknowledgement of the other. Acknowledgement is a weaker alternative to recognition, because it does not presuppose certain identifications, does not suggest specific bonds and boundaries to be used for exclusion and definition, by way of contrast with the other. Acknowledgement should go beyond the bonds of ‘tolerance’ and ‘reciprocity’ that are implicit in the notion of recognition. With reference to Levinas and Derrida, Clive Barnett suggests an ethics where ‘responsibility would be understood as being formed in a mode of responsiveness to claims for acknowledgement (of pain, or suffering, distress, etc.) rather than mere recognition (as the same as you, or as wholly different from you)’ (Barnett 2005: 19; see also above, Chapter 2). Such an idea, reminiscent of the mundane and non-strategic practices of coping, could be another, utopian version of Nordicity. However, the remaining problem is the socio-economic (re)production and (re)distribution of wealth and welfare. This is what the solidarity – the shared practices – of nationalism is usually about. Redistribution is the reason for making bonds and boundaries, and in practice the concept of recognition is more about rights to resources than anything else. The ambivalence of Nordicity is thus also a form of ambivalence over the concept of coping as defined in its three dimensions: innovation, networking and the formation of identity (see Chapter 1). The modernist idea of a fit between socio-economic and socio-political innovation, crosscutting networking and making sense of all this by means of identification becomes dystopian when the fit is territorially bonded around ‘us’, in contrast to ‘the other’. To overcome dichotomies between us and other, territoriality and mobility, bonding and bridging, inclusion and exclusion, the modernist answer is zones of indistinction where some are ‘more alike’ than others. In other words, the all too easy response is to include people in the networks in order to perform restricted roles in the celebration of Nordicity. It is worth remembering that the dystopia just outlined is not a strategic purpose of Nordic policies. Furthermore, there are international aspects of Nordic engagement that are no less ambivalent than the ‘domestic affairs’ discussed in this chapter. Highly profiled Nordic involvement in the United

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Nations, humanitarian work and development aid goes along with military invasions, the re-routing of refugees and the like. The Nordic states and nations are often among the most generous when it comes to helping the suffering. For example, the collection of money for distant victims of war, hazards and poverty always reaches impressive levels among Greenlanders, while at the same time their politicians try to win more advantages from the US in compensation for new military installations in Thule. This is the Janus face of Nordicity, if not of coping and social life in general. We acknowledge others, while we also seek to protect … yes, but who? Should/could we acknowledge ourselves as others, or to be the same as the others? One vision is that of the common global fate of people on the earth; our sustainable future envisioned by the gaze from a de-territorialised spaceship of the earth as other. Coping practices across territorial boundaries and social bonds emerge with various forms of transnationalism and crossborder cooperation, to be further investigated in the Nordic Atlantic – and Arctic – context in the next and last chapter. However, let us not forget, as Fredrik Barth emphasised, that all boundaries are sustained rather than dismantled by their perforation.

Notes 1. Hroch’s (1985) comparative analysis includes Norway, Bohemia, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Slovakia, as well as the Flemish movement and the Danish minority movement in Schleswig. 2. Recognition of the Faroese and Greenlanders as distinct peoples has been a major issue in the projects for further self-government in both countries. According to Grønlands Radioavis (Greenland broadcasting from Denmark Radio), on 15 March 2005 the Danish Foreign Ministry presented a note recognising the Greenlanders as one people to the joint Greenlandic–Danish self-government committee. This in fact means the recognition of all Greenlanders as if they were West Greenlanders, but specifically not recognition for East Greenlanders or the Thule Inughuit (see Chapter 3).

9 TRANSNATIONALISM AND ‘SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’


Introduction Since the 1970s, the political practices of social organisation in time and space have increasingly responded to environmental problems and what emerged as ‘sustainable development’ with the Brundtland Report. People organise societies in new ways to meet such challenges, and these forms seek to match the problems people face at a distance, mobile problems, and problems in common among many who are otherwise distant from one another. Few ideas have been so closely associated with the Nordic countries as ‘sustainable development’. Nordic societies often think of themselves as promoters of these ideas, although they are now, more or less, in retreat. Especially in the Nordic countries, transnational cooperation projects have been linked to the objectives of ‘sustainable development’, an idea that also seems often to be rather a means of cutting across boundaries with reference to the Brundtland Report: ‘Ecological interactions do not respect the boundaries of individual ownership and political jurisdiction’ (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 46). Crossborder pollution and more or less global environmental problems are used as arguments for developing transnationalism and trans-regions, if not a global commitment, to an extent where observers feel that this must be so because of the undisputed status of the argument, though in fact it is to obtain other, economic, political or security, objectives. Nevertheless new forms of mobility, new forums and new ways of meeting thus emerge, and new cross-border ‘social regions’, if not ‘societies’, are produced. This chapter shows how the discourse on sustainable development was used to set new agendas and propel activities within very different forms of transnational cooperation during the 1990s. The chapter takes off from a

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discussion of the use of the concept of sustainable development as compared to globalisation and environmental problems, stressing the extent to which ‘sustainable development’ is used to promote a diversity of social interests and positions. Then research on international regimes, geopolitics and the political geography of environmental problems is reviewed, concluding with a discussion of the constructivist international relations research in the Nordic countries, which was directly involved in regionbuilding projects in the 1990s. This decade is one of special interest, since it followed the end of the cold war, also paving the way for new roles for the European Union in (mostly the Eastern) Nordic countries. A major case of interest is the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (NORA), but the analysis also covers other forms of Nordic cross-border cooperation, more ‘high politics’ or interstate forms of cooperation and NGO-based cooperation and networks, though themes of overall security and international policy are not given priority here. With special emphasis on the examples of the strength of weak ties in the ‘low-politics’ form of cooperation that is typical of the Nordic model, the chapter explores transnational and trans-state innovation, networking and formations of identity as novel but ambivalent ways of coping with distances. However, there is no perfect fit between these dimensions, as a number of the emerging social forms do not come along the same routes. While constructivist region building was more concerned with how new transnational regions could be talked into life, sustainable development innovations are practised on other agendas. Meanwhile, Nordic cross-border cooperation more silently developed networking projects along the traditional, more tacit Nordic paths.1

Sustainable Development versus Globalisation ‘Sustainable development’ and ‘globalisation’ were two of the most common words used regarding social development in the 1990s. They are very different from each other, but also interdependent. ‘Sustainable development’ is a normative term originating from one of the most influential texts – the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future – arguing for harmony between human beings and the environment, as well as for economic and social justice between humans (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). In contrast, ‘globalisation’ is a descriptive but also analytical term for increased global integration and interaction, first of all valid for capital, information and amusement in North America, Western Europe and East Asia, based on the potentials of information technology. But it is also a concept in social theory for distant, cosmopolitan, complex and glocal social relations (Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; Beck 2002; Urry 2003). All the various concepts of sustainable development and globalisation connect local actions with dynamics that

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unavoidably cross the boundaries of nation states, but there is no single understanding of the concepts and how they are related to each other. In one version, discourses and practices of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘globalisation’ compete and are even in contradiction with each other. Along these lines, the observation in the late 1990s was as follows: ‘Five years after the Rio conference the political discourse has largely changed. “Globalization” has become a new key word threatening to erode the political and normative consensus fostered by sustainable development, in favour of strategies related to competitiveness between nation states and transnational geo-political alliances’ (Becker et al. 1997: 13). It is true that ‘globalisation’, whether in its economic or cultural sense, became part of a discourse from which questions of environmentally sustainable development are most often absent. Urry’s suggestion of finding inspiration for trans-disciplinary work with global relations in complexity theory (2003) belong, along with Beck’s (1995) and Harvey’s (1996) concerns, to social theories alongside the dominant, mainstream or hegemonic discourses. Meanwhile, in the political debates, ‘sustainable development’ was also criticised for accepting economic growth, apparently unsustainable to the environment itself, but the critics often forgot that Our Common Future was concerned with growing poverty and a lack of equality as much as with the environment. From the perspective of ‘Third World’ poor peasants threatened by the socially provoked erosion of the natural resources that are vital to their livelihood, local economic development is a necessary element of a coping strategy for a better life. Although the notion of ‘development’ has also been widely criticised, such forms of socio-economic development for better livelihoods are very different from the economic growth of the transnational corporate agents of globalisation. Sustainable development differs from economic growth, as it includes a vision of spatial but also temporal equity. Sustainable development is a project about ‘ecological modernisation’ that includes environmental equity as a form of (re)distributive justice (Harvey 1996). It is a modernist Enlightenment project, with a belief in opportunities for the poor and for the environment in making use of ‘better’ growth and ‘good’ science. Sustainable development is also a global and transnational political vision, characteristic of UN discourse, towards the formation of a cosmopolitan democratic community (Held 1995). It argues for an imagined global community that needs cooperation between countries and states, and where multilateralism is a central point (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). In Elias’s words, humanity is conceived as a single ‘survival group’ (1978, 1987). The Brundtland ideals of equity are both spatial and temporal, and the dissatisfaction with mainstream economic globalisation is obvious in both dimensions: Spatially, the global redistribution of growth and scarce resources is a significant problem. Especially since the Rio Conference in

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1992, it has been repeatedly stressed that the earth as a human habitat will not survive very long if the living standards and use of natural resources of all humans on earth reach the level now enjoyed by people at the centre of the triad – North America, Europe and East Asia. The universal perspective on the planet’s imagined community is therefore also temporal, also including future generations, according to the famous definition of sustainable development: ‘to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 8). Therefore ‘sustainability’ introduces a concept of time focusing on the quality of life in a long-term, everyday horizon (Nielsen 1996). In contrast, the mainstream economic globalisation discourse is mostly about the expansion of economic space, with little account being taken of the longterm consequences, thus contradicting the time concept of sustainable development. Economic globalisation implies increasing speed in the mobility of financial capital, amusement and information. In social theory, globalisation has been understood as both the compression (Harvey 1989) and the distanciation (Giddens 1990) of time and space. But distanciation in time in particular does not seem to be a valid characteristic of globalisation. A more accurate approach to globalisation would be to analyse the spatial expansion of synchronic connections as a matter of spatial distanciation and time compression. Globalisation means coping with longer distances in shorter time spans, that is, coping with higher speeds. Economic globalisation discourse does not in itself have a concept of durable temporality. This is in contrast to sustainable development, which contains a moral commitment to global citizenship, using the potentials of global interaction to restore the continuity of dwelling over time, which has been disrupted by forces of global competition and the mobility of capital (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 273). In other words, sustainable development is a global vision of coping in time in order to secure enduring human life on earth. However, the forces for this vision seem only weak. Formally, it is organised almost only in the United Nations, which has little power in relation to strong territorial states and multinational corporations, while sustainable development and environmental protection have also been placed on the agenda of the European Union and of a number of international agreements, for example, the Kyoto agreement. When it comes to concrete actions, environmental protection and sustainable development generally have a lower status than, for example, economic growth or security issues. But we also see how sustainable development is included under the headings of socio-economic development, while environmental protection achieves a higher priority for itself when it is redefined as environmental security in the management of, for example, nuclear waste.

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Meanwhile, there are crucial interdependencies between the weakness of global environmental politics, the strength of international capital, the continued strength of territorial states and the ambivalences of everyday environmental practices. From the perspective of everyday coping with environmental problems, the central problem may be that people do not trust the use and commitment of actions taken by states, businesses or even themselves. While ‘sustainability’ embraces an everyday life aspiration for long-term temporalities, it also has connotations of powerlessness. People do not expect individual actions to make a difference and also perceive collective actions as unrealistic, ‘given people’s sense of the prevalence of “short-termism” with the state and business’ (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 229). Acknowledgement of problems and knowledge about problems does not lead to action, since actors do not trust other actors to act proactively, based on what is known. Yet another problem is that the agendas of environmental problems and sustainable development are so complex. Highly diverse problems are grouped together under the same headings, where conflicts and differences between social interests, positions and perspectives are not acknowledged. The imagined, global community surrounding Our Common Future blurs these distinctions and conflicts. Furthermore, as long as these differences are not acknowledged, they cannot be bridged.

Diversities of Environmental Problems and Social Positions in ‘Sustainable Development’ Since so many problems, values, positions and interests can be placed under the heading of ‘sustainable development’, the concept does not answer the crucial question of ‘whose values should matter?’ (Chaturvedi 1996a: 232). The environment does not answer this question, as environments are placed in the plural because of the diversity of social interests in the environment. One perspective would invoke peripheral or rural areas as being dependent on the use of specific natural resources, which are threatened not only by mismanagement, but also by pollution and consumer boycotts. There can also be other risks paving the way for new bonds and bridges among people living in the same region, thus also defining themselves in relation to ‘outside’ others: groups confront each other whose social characteristics and shared traits are not based on their position in the social hierarchy, cutting across the latter, they are grounded in the geographical location of an industrial consumed and despoiled ‘nature’. The contamination of marketed nature means that the regional situation coincides with the social one; more precisely, the former conditions the latter. (Beck 1995: 154)

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Indeed, environmental problems can have consequences affecting everyone living in certain areas, leading people to define a region of common interest of, for example, hunters (in Greenland), fishermen or farmers in protecting the environments their professions are based on. However, the problem will easily arise of whether or not whole regions will continue to define themselves according to the interests of, increasingly, a minority of people engaged in the primary sector. If there is a localised complex of processing, services and knowledge sectors in relation to the primary sector, common regional identifications may be produced. Otherwise regional and national identities are based on identifications with hunting, fishing or agriculture, as has often been the case in the Nordic Atlantic. These identifications often only become stronger in the transformations, where the primary-sector occupations lose their economic importance. Meanwhile, natural resources are being increasingly transported, since territorial systems of ownership, control and identification collapse with liberalist systems of resource management, such as Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQs; see Chapter 5). Therefore slowly emerging interests that bridge people would be more likely to become organised around certain goods and services that are consumed collectively according to explicitly territorial systems, for example, systems of water supply. Beyond various identifications, environmental problems are expressions of social interests, of social classes. When it comes to waste, noise and air pollution in urban localities, as well as the export of waste to poor areas (‘toxic imperialism’), it becomes clear how environmental problems are social problems (Harvey 1996). Although living in the same area, those with better incomes can better afford to buy water to drink than those without. Furthermore, social segregation according to environmental problems is widespread. Local impacts of waste, air pollution and noise mostly affect the sites of dwelling for the relatively poor. For privileged social groups, therefore, sustainable development is a more abstract term, which mostly appears concrete in their roles as consumers and owners of private property. Environmental risks become questions of healthy food and the environment as the object and stage of leisure and tourism. For example, animal rights movements approach animals as if they were pets, quite contrary to the perspective of hunters surviving from killing seals, whether for subsistence or commodification. Furthermore, privileged social groups also represent information centres of discursive ‘relations of definition’, which ‘are not property relations, but basic principles underlying industrial production, law, science, opportunities for the public and for policy’ (Beck 1995: 130). These ‘relations of definition’ tend to universalise the criteria and values of environmental problems and sustainable development, including in peripheral areas. This is, however, also a political question of the level of sovereignty and of alternatives. While self-governed areas in the Arctic, for example the

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home rule government of Greenland, protest against mining, extraction and the transport of oil and gas by others, these industries can also be included in a strategy for sustainable socio-economic development when the home rule government emphasises instead incomes from oil and minerals as a substitute for dependence on subsidies from the post-colonial centre. ‘Sustainable development’ clearly depends on relations of definitions determined not only by social living conditions, but also by political ambitions. The ambivalences of Nordicity (Chapter 8) are also at play in this field. Environmental protection and sustainable development involve bonds and bridges among people and elites, who calculate the extent to which a defined ‘we’ versus others can win or lose. There are different social positions, but also different environmental problems open to the making of social distinctions. Use of natural resources, industrial pollution, consumer contamination via products and the pollution of especially urban environments are not the same problems for everyone: they follow different routes, and some of the problems are rather local. However, the imagined, global community has especially been evoked in relation to possible global hazards such as the greenhouse effect, with its long-term threat to life on earth. Nonetheless this ‘global’ problem is more a problem for some than for others, and even attempts to generalise the threats to coastal areas can be questioned, given the diversity of coastal environments and management systems in the world. Global warming may also bring certain advantages to some peripheral areas. Other areas, such as Northern Norway, may come to experience colder climates if the circulation of the complex systems of ocean currents changes, though this seems to be only a minor change compared to global warming. Finally there is the vision of sustainable, time–space-equitable, socioeconomic development, which was the vision of the Brundtland Report. As we shall see, political elites in the peripheries tend to concentrate more on these agendas than on the centres’ projections of environmental protection to them. Rather than any objective goal, ‘sustainable development’ is a phrase that is common to very different interests and concerns. Therefore how it is used politically to form various social associations and organisations is an open question. Transnationalism, cross-border cooperation and international regimes cannot escape coping with the apparently contradictory social interests and concerns of various kinds of environmental problems and sustainable socio-economic development.

The Geopolitics of Environmental Protection In approaching sustainable development and transnational cooperation, there is a body of literature on the international regimes of the environment of the Arctic. Working with reference to a model of the process of

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establishing international regimes, Oran R. Young and Gail Osherengo have addressed questions of environmental regimes in the Arctic (Young and Osherenko 1993; also Young 1994, 1998). In his book on the formation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR), Young entered the debate on sustainable development in the Arctic, arguing that the very lack of clarity in the concept of ‘sustainable development’ may be a political advantage: ‘the very porosity of the concept is one of its attractions from a political point of view. A variety of actors can join forces under the banner of sustainable development, as long as no one becomes too particular about the operational content of the commitments they take’ (Young 1998: 48). If nothing else, the concept of ‘sustainable development’ has been used in the documents of several political regimes; indeed, who would not like to state a commitment to such a ‘good’ concept that does not exactly call for great commitments when it comes to practice? For the study of regime formation this problem is unimportant, as these studies focus on the process of negotiation in establishing regimes, though not on the implications or effects or on the social contexts and productions that are implied. Young and Osherenko analyse the process of regime formation based on a model of institutional bargaining that is tested using a systematic hypothetical– deductive methodology. The model departs from the possible emergence of ‘contract zones’ or ‘zones of agreement’ in the process. Among the interestbased factors potentially forming a contract zone are uncertainty and exogenous shocks. An unforeseeable scenario of the effect of the regime is likely to make it easier for all parties to work to establish a regime in a longer time horizon, thus potentially sharing the risk. ‘Events such as the nuclear accident at Chernobyl or the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica engender a sense of urgency that spurs quick action to conclude international agreements’ (Young and Osherenko 1993: 15). The authors also find regimes easier to establish if they concern – or deal with challenges as – technical problems. Therefore the existence of a scientific consensus is crucial to establishing a regime. Political geographers like Peter Taylor and Sanjay Chaturvedi have raised a number of more fundamental questions about the future of the sovereignty of states. The geographical mobilities of ecological despoliations are threats to the Westphalian sovereign territorial state system, as these mobilities contradict the ‘modern sovereign state as a power container, formally all powerful with its territory’ (Taylor 1994: 153). The Westphalian sovereign territorial state system has been exported to the Arctic and other peripheries as a part of colonialism. It is exactly the problem of territoriality that drives the formation of ethnic identity and the political claims of indigenous people in the Arctic (Chaturvedi 1996a: 145). It is therefore the irony of history that the post-colonial striving for selfdetermination sometimes replicates the discourse of the territorial states of

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the colonisers (see also above, Chapter 8), while one can ask whether the politics of sustainable development might be better handled by political forms other than territorial states. In his interesting The Polar Regions – A Political Geography (1996a), which is within the new tradition of critical geopolitics, Sanjay Chaturvedi points out the weaknesses of the Brundtland Report in raising questions of values and of the empowerment of people. Following the arguments of the Finnish peace researcher, Jyrki Käkönen, Chaturvedi (1996a, b) puts forward a community and civil society approach to sustainable development and argues in favour of regionalisation from below, potentially superseding state-centric models and transcending post-colonial patterns of domination. Chaturvedi’s and Käkönen’s normative and programmatic approach therefore differs significantly from the strictly systematic and more narrowly focused works of Young and Osherenko. Chaturvedi and Käkönen raised a wide range of relevant research questions, but they tended not to go into detailed studies. The community or civil society approach therefore remains a discursive exercise, since neither community nor civil society studies were undertaken. Meanwhile, the bottom-up approach has suggested new forms of geopolitical practice in response to the dominance of nation states and of unified states, still heavy militarised, state-subsidised and dominated by centres. Another strand of the new geopolitics has been promoted by political geographers stressing that environmental problems and eco-politics are major challenges to traditional territorial approaches to politics (Dalby 1992, and most recently Larsen 2005). Peter Taylor did not see any major threats to states coming from globalisation, either economically or culturally. But he anticipated that the unsustainable use of ecosystems following the logic of economic growth would undermine the whole Westphalian sovereign territorial state system (Taylor 1994: 161). Taylor continued by deconstructing the often taken-for-granted linkage between state, nation and territory of state-centric thinking, and introduced an alternative analysis of the plurality of states, nations and territories. Every state exists in a system of inter-stateness denoting the mutuality of the sovereign recognition of states accepting the principle of non-interference in others’ internal affairs; every nation exists in a system of the internationality of nations that exist in the context of multiple nations; and every territory is produced in a system of inter-territoriality within all the occupied land of the world, including international laws on the sea, air and Antarctica. While these ‘inter’ forms imply the continuation of states, nations and territories, the corresponding ‘trans’ forms would imply the withering of states, nations and territories. Taylor argues that economic globalisation is a contradictory process of both inter-stateness and transstateness, whereas a commitment to sustainable development implies the abolition of inter-stateness and inter-territoriality, while ‘inter-nationality

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need not to be incompatible with a sustainable world’ (Taylor 1995: 15). Thus Taylor’s concept of nationality as cultural groups or Gemeinschaften reminds one of the ideas of Otto Bauer or Manuel Castells (see above, Chapter 8). When it comes to colonised territories and peoples (the majority of the world), these are not taken much into consideration in the approaches of international relations and political geography. The Eurocentric Westphalian territorial-state system and the nineteenth-century nation-state system are taken as the points of departure, which is no coincidence, given that political liberation movements in the colonies most often constructed their projects as shadows of the modernist European state system. In the nineteenth century, ‘the nation-state system really only characterised the dozen or so societies of the North Atlantic Rim’ (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 266), since the majority of the world’s population was living in the empires of a foreign nation state. The political geographies of Chaturvedi and Taylor did not really address the intricate relationships between politics and culture. The awareness of colonisation in Chartuvedi’s work and the concept of internationality defining nationalities in relation to each other in Taylor’s work open doors to defining ‘“people” freed from the state-territorial limitation(?)’ (Knight 1988: 121). However, just like abstract reference to community-based sustainable development, also cultural diversity, multiculturalism and other implications of political correctness imply the risk of revitalising the essentialist definitions of ‘there are cultures’ that separate people-hood from practice. The alternative is to regard cultures and communities as ongoing social practices of identification (Friedman 1995: 89). Approaching transnationalism and ‘sustainable development’ as coping practices means examining in concrete terms how cross-border projects are performed, but these are processes that also involve the contribution of region-building researchers.

Nordic Region Builders Constructivist approaches are increasingly being used in political science and international relations theory, questioning the dominance of methodological individualism and the taken-for-granted nature of states in main stream international relations theory, which is based on more or less modified rational choice methodologies (Checkel 1998). Contrary to the marginal position of these approaches in the US, constructivist international relations theories have had considerable impact both academically and politically in the Nordic countries. It is even possible to talk about a Nordic school of constructivist region-builders (Neumann 1994; Tunander 1994; Joenniemi 1997; Wæver 1997), who are also associated with what became

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known as the Copenhagen School in International Relations (Wæver et al. 1993), though recently Ole Wæver prefers to call these post-structuralist rather than constructivist theories (Hansen and Wæver 2002). The constructivist region builders are interesting since they were themselves directly involved in the construction of cooperation regarding the Baltic Sea, followed by the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Contrary to the works on international regimes (Young and Osherenko) and political geography (Taylor and Chaturvedi) discussed above, here the concept of sustainable development plays a less significant role (but see the less constructivist contribution from Stokke 1994), the focus being more on the post-cold war situation. In one of his many works, Ole Wæver reflected on the role of being ‘region builders’ in the post-cold war era, asking, ‘What happened when the Prince lent his ear to post-modern advisors?’ (Wæver 1997: 296). Wæver recognises the public use of the term region as a territory, which can extend from ‘micro-regions’ within states, via ‘trans-regions’ crossing borders, and including micro-regions and both state and non-state participants, to ‘interstate regional cooperation’ between states and ‘quasi-continental regions’, while in many cases specific projects combine more than one of these types. From the outset, regions only differ from states in being nonsovereign, and region builders have experimented with how far a postsovereign reality can be practised. Baltic Sea cooperation was the starting point, located in the context of the newly independent Baltic states and the expansion of the European Union. This was clearly a context of unsettled social relations, open to the production of societies. First, around 1990, the region was all talk and cultural events. Also, the German–Danish initiative to establish the Council of the Baltic Sea in 1992 consciously avoided fixed and inflexible formal institutions. The region was ‘talked into existence’, and many different Baltic networks exist alongside one another, with few formal ties in between. Contrary to the more eager Norwegian initiative to establish the Barents Region in 1993, which was directly inspired from the Council of the Baltic Sea (Stoltenberg 1997), Baltic Sea cooperation was never placed into uniform or twofold structures. Thus a rather fluid situation was created, but Wæver acknowledges that economic development is more than a question of identity formation. ‘Identity building is only a pre-condition, it is not a guarantee for success’ (Wæver 1997: 306). A crucial problem with region building is whether or not regional projects can meet the expectations of stakeholders, for example for socioeconomic development or solutions to common environmental problems. Thus trans-regions need to perform innovation and networking, along with the formation of identity. In one study of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, a trans-region was defined as ‘a constructivist defined formation crossing one or several nation-state borders, with institutions for decision-making, economic complementarity, and common economic interests, and with a

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significant social exchange and feeling of affinity among the population’ (Aalbu and Wiberg 1997: 88, originally in Norwegian in Aalbu et al. 1995: 66). The four criteria set up by this definition have the advantage of including crucial socio-economic and sociocultural aspects, criteria that can also be used for concrete analyses of transnational cooperation. Yet this definition of the trans-region only describes an institutionalised formation in state-of-the-art terms, not as process or practices. Several definitions of dynamic processes of regionalisation and of regionalism are proposed in the literature, but there are no clear-cut definitions that everybody agrees on. The confusion is partly due to the fact that the concepts are also used for other processes than the formation of trans-regions, from regionalist separatism, administrative regionalisation and identification, and in scales from micro-regions to quasi-continental regions (see Lindström 1999). But, first of all, the definition by Aalbu and Wiberg rests on a notion of a transregion as a stabilised system of coping practices of what I have called territorial bonding (see above, Chapter 1). The definition closes a number of the doors that Wæver and others wanted to keep open for mobility and bridging in the 1990s. Furthermore, it is a definition of a ‘fit’ between the economy, politics and identity, not unlike the modernism implicit in the idea of a ‘fit’ between the practices of innovation, networking and the formation of identity in coping strategies. Nevertheless, trans-regions, nation states and the European Union do in fact stabilise regional constructions by closing borders, and this is more or less what has happened in the Baltic Sea region with the EU membership of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But borders also stabilise mobilities and set new agendas for bridging practices, whether these involve socio-economic innovations, socio-political networks or sociocultural formations of identity, which all contribute to the building of social orders. These orders may well become very different from what could be expected from the statements of the formative social movements. For example, environmental questions were central to the ‘low-politics’ mobilisation of the social movements of the early 1990s in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, though they ended up being formative in respect of highpolitics nation-state building too. ‘The “green ferment” in the area was neither about environment nor about regionalism, but about combating the Soviet domination, about re-establishing the respective nation-states and about Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nationalism … The Eco-protest mushrooming in the Soviet Baltics in 1988–1990 assumed the role of a starter for “high-politics” movements’ (Zydowicz 1997: 73). Transnational regionalism and sustainable development projects often turn out to be about different objectives from those expected. This is how coping practices produce societies. Environmental protection and especially sustainable development play different games in practice from those in words. From marginal social and socio-regional positions, environmental protection and

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sustainable development have other meanings compared with the ‘relations of definition’ of the centres. Social equity and acknowledgement can be a much more urgent question. So, ironically, building nation states pursuing economic growth and social equity could look like a condition for – if not the definition of – sustainable development in marginal areas, including the Nordic Atlantic, that want to transcend their marginality. From here, we turn to concrete examples.

Nordic Cross-border Cooperation There are a number of cross-border forms of regional cooperation within the framework of the Nordic Council of Ministers, which have been established as formal arrangements funded by the Council, territorially following the borders of counties and partly municipalities within the Nordic countries (Nilson 1997). Cross-border cooperation has been associated with the concepts of region and regional policy by modern states, where a region forms part of the territory of a state, and the basic objective of regional policy is to achieve territorial equality within the nation state (Bærenholdt 1998b). Border regions are generally expected to be marginal, so that cross-border cooperation may logically be an instrument of regional policy. This basic understanding is valid for both Nordic and EU crossborder – also called trans-border – regions. Each of the Nordic cross-border regions has its committee, with state, regional and local level representatives of politico-administrative bodies sitting on it. The objectives of cooperation are most often economic development and cultural cooperation, including tourism and infrastructure. Each committee has a small budget from the Nordic Council of Ministers, and firms, municipalities and public organisations apply for funding for projects involving participants across borders. Often funding is provided in cooperation with other Nordic institutions. This Nordic type of cross-border cooperation is clearly limited to ‘low politics’, funding is limited, and the politico-cultural symbolic images are generally weak. However, this does not prevent these weak institutions from having strong effects. The lack of success claimed in certain studies (Nilson 1997) does not always take into account the modest objectives and funding involved. Among the various Nordic cross-border forms of cooperation, there are major differences in the types of region included, the scale of the territory or population involved, the content of the cooperation and the public identity of the region. One extreme is the Øresund committee, representing areas that are not at all marginal in the general Nordic context, although Scandia clearly has a more marginal role on the Swedish side. This may be the reason why the Øresund region has been the object of much more attention on the Swedish side, another possible reason being banal Danish

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nationalism. The Øresund project is also an EU-supported Euro-region, but, as an international urban, metropolitan, development project, it does not fit into the traditional welfare-state regional policy understanding of the Nordic countries. It is mostly focused on entrepreneurial activities, promoted through knowledge-intensive networking. Such Schumpeterian innovation policies have had an increasing role in regional policies in all the Nordic countries since the 1980s. Most of the other Nordic cross-border cooperation projects do not have any significant image, some being more artificial than others, and the scope of areas included is limited (for example, in the Mid-Nordic Committee, Lysgård 1997). At the opposite end of cooperation from Øresund, the North Calotte Committee and the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (see next section) represent the classic form of Nordic regional cooperation, that is, regional policy to overcome uneven development within nation states and to strengthen Nordic cultural transnationalism. Today these two ventures are being challenged by competing, stronger, more ‘high-politics’-oriented initiatives. The North Calotte Committee was founded in 1967, following an initiative of the Nordic Associations (the NGOs ‘Foreningerne Norden’) in 1960. It includes the northern counties of Norway (Nordland, Troms and Finnmark), Sweden (Nordbotten) and Finland (Lapland). It has worked as an obviously ‘low-politics’ form of cooperation that has had stronger cultural than economic consequences. Since each of the ‘national’ regions involved are sparsely populated and their economies have been dominated by a combination of natural resource and public service industries, the potential for trade and economic cooperation within North Calotte region has been limited, apart from some cooperation in the common forestry sector between Nordbotten and Lapland (Wiberg 1996). The territorial area of the North Calotte was also included in the very different Barents Euro-Arctic Region initiative (see later section). Today the EU has become a major regional policy actor and trans-border agent in the North Calotte region, implementing various INTERREG programmes with funding from both the EU and non-EU Norway.

Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (NORA) The Nordic Atlantic Cooperation was established in January 1996, when it superseded the West Nordic Committee, which had been founded through cooperation between the Faroes and Iceland in 1980, building on earlier initiatives and networks between the Faroes and Eastern Iceland. Greenland was included in 1983. Finally, Northern Norway, but also the coastal parts of Western Norway, entered the agreement in 1996, when the name was changed to the Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (NORA) (Bærenholdt 2002d).

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NORA differs significantly from other examples of Nordic cross-border cooperation, since it includes the whole territory of the sovereign nation state of Iceland alongside the whole of home-ruled Faroes and Greenland, still within the Danish realm. It is therefore not only a ‘trans-region’ but partly also an example of ‘interstate regional cooperation’. However, the asymmetric role of the different stakeholders has caused some problems, since the political interest in cooperation is much higher in home-ruled Greenland and especially the Faroes as a response to Danish dominance, while Iceland sees fewer advantages in cooperating with the Faroes and Greenland. With the 1996 extension of the arrangement to Northern and Western Norway, on the one hand, Iceland found a larger counterpart, while, on the other, the institutional complexity increased with two different areas of Norway (each having internal regional cooperative arrangements of their own), as well as a representative of the Norwegian Ministry of Municipal Affairs. The rationale for the extension of cooperation to Norway was found in the similarities and common interests in regional development in fisherydependent areas and in the potential for overcoming conflict and competition between Iceland and Norway, especially in the light of Norway’s orientation towards EU and Russia in the mid-1990s (Bærenholdt 1996b). In addition, NORA includes all the Nordic regions that are dependent on fisheries but are not in the EU, since they have resisted losing control over their marine resources, which would have been a consequence of the EU common fisheries policy. Nordic Atlantic Cooperation covers a marine area with common networks and identifications. Two other West Nordic organisations – the West Norden Fund and West Norden parliamentary cooperation – have not been extended to Norway. In recent years, Nordic Atlantic Cooperation has tried to promote sectors other than fisheries that also used to have traditional values. There are also new interactions with EU INTERREG projects in the Northern Periphery programme, for example in tourism. Many concrete projects identified with the West Nordic and Nordic Atlantic Cooperation are found in the original ‘core area’, namely Eastern Iceland and the Faroes. On the other hand, in some areas of Greenland, few people know of projects within Nordic Atlantic Cooperation. During qualitative interviews with fifty-two individuals within the fishing industry, primary schools and administration in Uummannaq (including the village of Ikerasak), Ilulissat and Nuuk in 1996, I found only a very few who knew about this cooperation, and only in relation to activities in the capital, Nuuk. This observation parallels another observation, that Nordic identification and cooperation did not play any role, visible or acknowledged, in the Northern Greenlandic municipalities of Uummannaq and Ilulissat, apart from town-twinning arrangements. The impression may well be different in other areas, where there is more co-operation with Iceland

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especially, namely Southern Greenland (sheep farming and tourism) and Eastern Greenland (air transport and tourism). However, Nordic cooperation has generally had a low level of awareness among the Greenlandic public, especially when compared with the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC; see below). But the Nordic influence does exist more silently, for example, within the educational sector (Bærenholdt 1999). Nordic Atlantic Cooperation is in line with the general characteristics of Nordic cross-border cooperation, acting ‘as a coordinating link for activities at the regional level, working mainly introvertly, towards the national system, instead of extrovertly towards the international system’ (Nilson 1997: 403). However, as already mentioned, in recent years, Nordic Atlantic Cooperation has also coordinated contacts and involvement in the financially stronger EU INTERREG programmes, where, for example, Iceland pays for participation by means of direct funding. EU-type regional policies are therefore coming to play a role in the Nordic Atlantic, and this is especially significant for the Faroes and Greenland, which do not have any strong regional polices, just as Denmark has no regional policies for specific areas of the Faroes and Greenland (Bærenholdt 2002b,d). Meanwhile, Nordic Atlantic Cooperation hardly meets the criteria listed for trans-regions by Aalbu and Wiberg (1997, see above). There are ‘common economic interests’, but not much ‘economic complementarity’ or ‘significant exchange and feeling of affinity among the population’ apart from relations between Icelanders and Faroese. There are ‘institutions for decision making’, but these bodies have low budgets and powers. Major priorities of the countries involved in the fields of in-dependence or sustainable development are not high on the agenda in NORA. The main feature of NORA is rather the tacit facilitation of projects in socioeconomic development and networking. NORA, like other Nordic transnational arrangements, underpins the existing social order by means of a tacit reference to common Nordist traditions.

The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) The NGO Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) has played a significant role in the political and cultural development of the Arctic. For example, the setting up of the Nunavut Territory in Canada in 1999 was the result of a long process, which also involved the ICC (Langlais 1997). During fieldwork in Greenland in 1996, I found widespread identification with the ICC among Greenlanders. The ICC has a high political status in the territory, although only a few concrete activities take place between the general assemblies every three or four years. The symbols and public relations involved in such events stand in sharp contrast to the hidden existence of Nordic Atlantic Cooperation in Greenland, and this is no coincidence.

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The ICC was founded at its first general assembly in Nuuk in 1980, following an Alaskan initiative of 1977. It included Inuit in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. In 1983, the ICC was recognised as an NGO by the UN. In the following years it played a significant role in the international activities of indigenous people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Inuit from Chuchotka in the Russian Far East were also included in the ICC. In Greenland, the ICC represents an ideological and geographical alternative to post-colonial transatlantic relations and has been important in the formation of new identities, especially among Greenlandic youth (Dahl 1986: 190). The cultural identification of Greenlanders as indigenous or fourth-world people: resulted from the work of anthropologists and eskimologists on the one hand, and Greenlanders in Denmark on the other hand. It was in the early 1970s, in particular the period around the Arctic Peoples’ Conference in 1973 in Copenhagen and, subsequently, the formation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1975. For Greenlanders, these were occasions for a wholly new and global approach to an understanding of their own situation. (R. Petersen 1991: 20)

Inuit identity was not used as a political project in Greenland before the 1970s, and the formation of the ICC in 1980 thus became a formative event. Until then, there had only been very little contact with Inuit in Canada and Alaska (Hansen 1992). The use of the word ‘Inuit’ (singular: Inuk) is itself crucial, and should be compared with the Greenlandic word for Greenlander, ‘Kallallit’: Greenlanders called themselves ‘Inuit’ until the word (meaning ‘human beings’) became a common word for all human beings. Especially around WWII and after Greenlanders gained citizenship in Denmark the word ‘kallallit’ came into use. Nobody knows where this word originated from, but it is possible that the Norse men used it. ‘Inuit’ is now used to identify the people living in the Far East of Russia on the Chukotka Peninsula, Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland formerly known as Eskimos (which is Indian for ‘raw meat eater’). (Note from ICC President Aqqaluk Lynge to me, Roskilde University, 6 April 1999)

Inuit identity and networks in the 1980s and 1990s developed and connected people over long distances in a process with some similarities to the nineteenth-century Nordic project, but these connections have so far not resulted in very many concrete socio-economic development projects. A business conference was held in Anchorage in 1993, but had few results. Most socio-economic networks in Greenland continue to be oriented and channelled through Denmark, while social structures in Canada and the US are in many ways different, since native land claims have led to relatively non-political native business corporations, only loosely coupled with the various forms of political self-government. The Canadian model is more liberal, but also more ‘native’, compared with the associational economy of Greenland (see Chapter 8).

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The focus in the ICC has been on questions of land claims, trans-border pollution, human rights, language, culture and arts, and of course, questions of the EU and US trade barriers to products from marine mammals. The ICC has therefore developed into an influential politicocultural NGO in several UN forums, but it does not qualify for the more territorial definition of a trans-region. It is an important mobile bonding association, and as such it is socially formative. ICC president Aqqaluk Lynge stressed that the ICC’s role was precisely different from those of states or governments: ‘As a grassroots movement, the ICC can go into all the areas which cannot be talked about in the nation state. We are not bound by any agreements and can represent the interests of the Inuit’ (Lynge 1998, my translation from the Danish). The ICC is central in Greenland, and its symbolic meaning is profound. Nordic Associations never played an obvious role in Greenland, since circumpolar Inuit bonds are a more attractive alternative to the colonial domination that is more or less tacitly inherent in Nordic cooperation. Not least, the similarities between Inuit languages are mentioned again and again as a fascinating feature by Greenlanders. The ICC is an identity project more than an economic one, the idea of identity and economy being joined together obviously falling apart again and again. ICC bonds are constructed around the idea of the transnationalism of the common Inuit people, with an idea of the people that is not so different from the Nordic approach, only Inuit, not Nordic, in content.

Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) I now discuss another approach to transnationalism, namely the building of regions transcending nations by attempts to construct a proper trans-region in relation to the EU. The Barents Region is very different from both NORA and the ICC, since it is a much more high politics-oriented project that emerged just after the end of the cold war, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But it is not only the conceptual terrain that changes, since another geographical area is also involved, namely the North Calotte plus North West Russia. The Barents Region was founded by the Kirkenes declaration of 11 January 1993, and from the outset it included the three North Norwegian counties (Finnmark, Troms and Nordland), Nordbotten in Sweden, Lapland in Finland, plus the Murmansk and Archangel Oblasts of Russia. Soon after the foundation, the Karelian Republic of Russia was also included. The Nenets Autonomous Okrug, which used to be a part of the Archangel Oblast, obtained separate membership in 1997, and the counties of Oulu (Finland) and Västerbotten (Sweden) joined in 1998 (Hønneland 1998: 278).

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The Barents Region was founded on a Norwegian initiative as a competitor to a parallel Finnish initiative to extend the North Calotte Committee into the ‘Great Calotte’. Yet the process began earlier, most significantly with Gorbachev’s famous Murmansk speech in 1987, when he proposed increased Arctic cooperation. Meanwhile, there were also obstacles in the NATO member, Norway. The Barents Region initiative came from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, within which there were a number of conflicts between ‘European doves’ and ‘Atlantic hawks’. The hawks had links with the Norwegian defence community and NATO structures, while the doves were informed by a group of younger political scientists (Stokke and Tunander 1994), who feared the marginaliation of Norway in relation to European constructive efforts, especially those involving the Baltic Sea (Hønneland 1998: 277–78). ‘It is no secret that the policy initiative (BEAR) stirred considerable controversy in the Norwegian foreign policy establishment, with those emphasizing the Atlantic ties highly sceptical of what they perceived as an institutional creature overly oriented towards Europe’ (Stokke 1997: 163). The Barents Region initiative was part of the launching of new concepts of security policy that were focused more on sustainable development than on traditional military disarmament. But the initiative was also embedded in strong attempts to promote Norwegian membership of the EU, with the (then) Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Thorvald Stoltenberg, being the ‘father of the BEAR’. The European dimension of the initiative was significant (Stoltenberg 1994), though in practice the EU never played any specific role until Sweden and Finland joined it in 1995 (Stokke 1997: 168). Although the Norwegian government did not succeed in obtaining EU membership, it is worth remembering that the idea at the outset was to make Norway more interesting to the EU (as a bridge to Russia) and to make the EU more interesting to Norwegians, as stated in retrospect by the Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs (Väyrynen 1997: 61). Norway’s foreign policy defined the prospects of the initiative, but the high expectations raised and various diplomatic problems with Sweden and Finland may provide negative feedback later. This is also suggested by Oran Young’s analysis of the process of agenda formulation over negotiations to operationalise the Barents Region: ‘Thus, although efforts to shape the discourse during the stage of agenda formation can be extremely beneficial, overbearing actions in this context can give rise to hidden costs that do not become apparent until a later stage’ (Young 1998: 197). Furthermore, the political science discourse informing the initiative lacked a proper analysis of the possibilities actually to establish the region by exploiting socio-economic networks, and the Barents Region declaration text on economic cooperation was much less sophisticated than the text on environmental cooperation (Declaration on Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region 1993). There was a contradiction between the political

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discourse of region building in parallel to nineteenth-century nation building (Jervell 1994) and the actual steps that were eventually taken. Among the problems in implementing the Barents Region were differences in sectoral interests between the Nordic partners (fisheries versus forestry versus mining), problems in finding comparative advantages in cooperation between regions (all of which were dependent economically on exports of natural resources), the formal exclusion of the Barents Sea from cooperation (although Norwegian–Russian contacts in fisheries in reality came to play a significant role; see Chapter 5), the lack of a common budget, the absence of sufficient funding (as compared with the ambitious plans on paper) and insufficient political priority by the respective centres (Bærenholdt 1995, 1996b, 2002d; Aalbu and Wiberg 1997; Granberg 1997; Hønneland 1998; Young 1998). However, region building takes time, and much changed with the arrival of the EU programmes, following Sweden’s and Finland’s EU entry. High politics between the states involved may have shifted the focus to other forums such as the Arctic Council (see next section), while some regional trans-border institutions did work more silently, especially when INTERREG and other EU funding schemes arrived. The trans-border Sami council was also a member of the Barents Region regional council, the Sami council being a parallel association to the ICC (see section above). The Barents Region initiative made conscious efforts to construct Barents identities following the ideas of constructivist political scientists (Tunander 1994). The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs funded historical research into the tradition of Pomor trade between Norwegians and Russians along the Barents Sea coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see above, Chapter 3), as well as drawing up several maps of the Barents Region territory; such efforts were never on the agenda in traditional forms of cross-border Nordic cooperation, where territories and identities were given, not under construction. The general idea was to see the Soviet period of 1917–91 as a bracket in history. Although the Pomor label succeeded as a brand for several Russian and Norwegian firms, there was little basis to these notions of transnational identities. The Norwegian political scientist Geir Hønneland has shown that cultural differences are still significant, as they were rooted not only in the Soviet era, but in the more than millennium of division between the eastern (Orthodox) and western (Roman) forms of Christianity (Hønneland 1995). In addition, the inhabitants of the Murmansk region are especially related to the Soviet period, as the modernisation and social structures of the Murmansk region are almost entirely a product of that era, having very little to do with the Pomor period. Pomor relations had more historical roots in the Archangel region, this being an important reason for Norway wishing to include the region. Furthermore, Pomor history had little to do with inland Sweden, Finland or the Sami, while historically less distant connections between

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Norwegian resistance movements and the Red Army in the Second World War were not mentioned, although still remembered by older generations (Bærenholdt 1996b: 240). Altogether, it seems valid to conclude that ‘the historical transnational community in the area is a myth: the new northern identity is so far a castle in the air; the Barents Citizen an illusion’ (Hønneland 1998: 288). On the other hand, the territorial definitions performed by the region builders did help build bridging, not bonding, social relations. This became especially true with many well-educated young people, who were supported in exchange activities in research, education, culture, the health sector and politics, activities that may have established ‘a sense of belonging in a new multi-cultural European North within some groups’ (Hønneland 1998: 290–91). Labour migration (see Chapter 5) became an important concrete and material connector, with all the ambivalences and concerns this implies. Sustainable development played a significant role in the Barents Region declaration, which referred explicitly to the objectives of sustainable development in the Rio Declaration and the Agenda 21 of UNCED (Declaration on Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region 1993: 218). It differed from other Arctic initiatives (see next section) in that it understood environmental and economic policies as being integrated on paper (Nilson 1996). However, in practice it became difficult to implement the idea that the solution to environmental problems should be based on economic development. In the Norwegian public debate up to the 1994 referendum on EU membership, the Barents Region and the EU were presented as the only possible forums that could respond to the dangers of the trans-border effects of nickel smelters, nuclear power stations and military nuclear waste coming from the Murmansk region. Yet the investments needed to overcome these problems, which were politically of a low priority in Russia itself, would have been tremendous, and, in some of the later developments, it has been the US that has been involved (especially in handling military nuclear waste), not a Nordic entity. Russia had a different understanding of how the environmental and economic aspects of sustainable development were linked; in particular, environmental problems could be used to attract foreign investment. Monitoring the efforts of the Barents Region against Aalbu and Wiberg’s criteria for a trans-region, first the Barents Region did in fact develop common ‘institutions for decision-making’ in a significant two-level structure with an international and a regional council, but there was a lack of funds and commitment, especially at the international level. Secondly, the Barents Region won little legitimacy among the trans-state Sami minority (Helander 1996), which was only represented in the regional, not the international council. ‘Social exchange and feeling affinity’ were not created through bonding with a common identity, but by way of bridging and connecting people in networks, which may easily have irreversible effects

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over time. The major problems were the lack of ‘common economic interests’ and especially the lack of ‘economic complementarity’. This could also be reformulated as a question of whether or not the Barents Region had any success as a regional development policy, and there will be a diversity of answers. Most importantly the Barents Region paved the way for the inflows of EU institutions and funding for trans-border cooperation that followed its foundation. Truly this is a process that might very well marginalise the traditional Nordic forms of cross-border cooperation (Aalbu and Wiberg 1997: 100). In fact, EU regional trans-regional policies do not necessarily need the transnational identity constructions that the builders of the Barents Region (especially Sverre Jervell 1994), inspired by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991), had believed. Brands, symbols and signs in building trans-regions do not need to fit any ‘deeper’ cultural identification with common communities: they are just images fitting the aims of the projects they symbolise. And they may be paradoxical, like a region being named after a sea that is not actually included within it territorially. Of course, those excluded (Iceland, the Faroes, Greenland and many other foreign, e.g. Spanish, fishermen active in the Barents Sea) may be offended. But this exclusion becomes a more general one, namely the choice of the Nordic Atlantic countries to stay outside the EU, and therefore increasingly to pay for their participation in EU programmes themselves. Anyhow, new ‘postmodern’, ‘post-Nordic’ layers sediment themselves in the Nordic Atlantic (or ‘the Northern Periphery’ in EU-speak).

The Arctic Council: Environmental Protection versus Sustainable Development Finally, the Arctic Council was established on 19 September 1996 in an interesting initiative, originally proposed by Canada. It includes the eight Arctic states: the US, Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Most of these were also members of the Barents Council, but the Arctic Council has clearly a higher international priority, for example, for Denmark and Iceland. Add to this three ‘permanent participants’ in the Arctic councils: Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC, see above), the Sami Council, and the Association of Indigenous Minorities in the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation (RAIPON). The Arctic Council was founded on a two-pillar strategy. First, environmental protection is an objective that continues earlier steps taken under the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS, known as the ‘Rovaniemi process’). Secondly, and more problematically, it was based on sustainable development; the US was not eager to accept this heading, which might explain the seemingly odd division between the two pillars (Young 1997: 260). On the other hand, the interpretation of sustainable

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development as economic development is a perfectly possible use of the Brundtland Report in the periphery. The US has been against this definition of sustainable development, as it has also been against allocating a common budget to the Arctic Council. However, the Arctic Council does not qualify for the notion of a ‘transregion’, since it is more clearly a form of inter-state cooperation and it does not have any regional component. It has ‘institutions for decision-making’ but little common identity or potentials for common economic interests or complementarity. It is therefore hard to see how the Arctic Council should be able to form societal links, but it does produce a certain form of Arctic mobile bridging transnationalism which will probably become more concrete with the activities of the University of the Arctic, performed at a distance and through travelling.

Mobile Bonding versus Territorial Bridging The diversities of transnationalisms and trans-regions are complex phenomena that cannot be presented in the same format. The preceding sections have described the processes of formation and working of rather different types of cooperation, from NGOs (like the ICC) via low-politics Nordic transnationalism to more high-politics European Union and international cooperation, including the attempt to construct the Barents Euro-Artic Region as a trans-region. Inuit and Nordic transnationalism have been defined through cultural sameness. While the formation of cultural identity is central to the performance of the ICC, Nordic crossborder cooperation takes Nordicity for granted, recognition of identity among participants being a sine qua non for involvement. Analysed as coping practices (see Chapter 1), these transnationalisms perform mobile bonding, since they make their identification through sameness a driver for mobility and exchange. They do not question, let alone touch, any aspects of the sovereignty of the states involved, and no attempts are made to use territorial borders as instruments for redistribution and recognition. In contrast, the European Union type of trans-region, exemplified by the Barents Region effort, is built on territorial principles: participation is based on location in new combinations of administrative regions, and objectives are guided by principles of internal EU redistribution to poor, peripheral and marginal areas. On the other hand, no identities are taken for granted. Brands, symbols and identifications are explicit, especially since they cannot be taken for granted, but these signs are not used to exclude or include via the bonding of some at the expense of others. Territorial principles are used to bridge physical, social and cultural distances. The difference between these two modes of transnationalism is not only related to traditional Nordic cooperation versus EU regional policy: it also

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mirrors differences in the organisation of innovation in Western Nordic as opposed to Eastern Nordic countries. Within the relatively small economies of Iceland and the Faroes, but also more broadly in the coastal economies, including that of coastal Norway, there is a tradition of entrepreneurship based on networks between individuals belonging to kin, community, locality or nationality, which may be called a ‘network’ economy (Bærenholdt 2002a). Compared with this, innovation processes in Eastern Norden (especially Sweden and Finland) have rather become organised as ‘project economies’, in which there are almost always kinds of public funding and regulation involved, and where social policies play a more significant role. This is also, however, to a certain extent, the case in Greenland. In this context, much of the cooperative work of Nordic Atlantic Cooperation has been stimulated by existing professional networks between entrepreneurs, especially in Iceland and the Faroes, while it may have been more difficult to include newcomers. Bonds have been strong, based on identification with, among other things, fisheries (see Chapter 5). In contrast, if ‘project economies’ had not been launched before, the introduction of EU programmes creates project economies. Interestingly, it seems that these economies are more open to new participants, especially since no specific identities, cultures or professions are taken for granted. Increasingly, the two modes of transnational cooperation now overlap in the Nordic Atlantic societies. Paradoxically, it may be that it was not until the introduction of EU programmes that a sense of a common Nordic Atlantic society existed. This is not because Nordic Atlantic Cooperation was not successful or had too few funds, but is rather because traditional Nordic cross-border cooperation had more tacit methods, processes and results, and, furthermore, it did not challenge definitions of sameness and belonging. This might have been one of the reasons for the weaker identification with Nordic cooperation in Greenland, since Greenlanders increasingly took Inuit rather than Nordic identity for granted. Meanwhile, the distinctions between Nordic mobile bonding and European Union territorial bridging are increasingly becoming blurred with the intervention and participation of the European Union in programmes beyond one of its most significant borders, namely the border between the European Union (Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland) and Nordic Atlantic Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. Nordic Atlantic governments, on whatever level, are eager to take part in cross-border regional development programmes, which may help them to perforate the borders in their national and home-ruled zones, as well as relieving their physical, social, economic, political and cultural isolation. These programmes may refer to common destinies in terms of sustainable development and coping with cross-border environmental risks (as in the case of the Barents Region), but their main purpose is again socio-economic

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(as in Nordic Atlantic Cooperation and its involvement in the EU’s INTERREG Northern Peripheries programme). This is not actually because the areas are poor, but rather because they want to sustain their wealth by increasingly finding alternative incomes to those from marine natural resources (and eventually colonial grants for the home-ruled parts of the Danish realm). These corporations and attempts to build trans-regions do not really perforate borders or zones of indistinction, nor do they address questions of migration and refugees – a challenge that is no less a common problem than the environment. Coping with human migrants and refugees is thus kept within the apparently secure, safe and certain insular systems of the regulation of citizenship. Cross-border human mobility may be a driving metaphor of the European Union, but however progressive Nordic mobile transnationalism or European Union bridging policies may look, they are also bound by the bonding and territorial principles that ultimately have no response to the challenge of the flows of migrants and refugees. Giorgio Agamben puts it this way: ‘Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is – only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable’ (Agamben 2000: 25). While sustainable development and environmental problems among non-humans can be addressed, contained and wrapped, the challenge of the flows of humans, including to the peripheries (see Chapter 5), demands coping in ways that may produce new Nordic Atlantic societies. It is still a little early to pose these questions, but are there possible retreats (refugia) in the northern peripheries, not unlike the past openness to use the commons for frontier settlers? Probably not. Transport, fisheries and tourism make possible new societies as routes. In one sense, globalisation is performed ‘from below’, not least through the connections at a distance provided by various forms of networked and project economies. Some of this happens under the banner of sustainable development, but their possible environmental consequences are debatable and outside the scope of this text. Certainly we should overcome the distinction between social construction and material reality; international relations also need to get beyond these dichotomies (Hansen and Wæver 2002). There are no ontological differences between physical, social and cultural distances, equally constructed and material, social and real. But, in studying coping with distances, transnationalism, cross-border projects and the like, our notions of ‘society’ and ‘people’ are, and should be, challenged. Borders that we may have expected to separate may also become points of connection, thus producing, if only slowly, new societies beyond the notion of people as nations. In the final section, I present a short general conclusion to the arguments and studies of the book.

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Conclusion Practices of coping with distance produce societies in various ways in the Nordic Atlantic. People connect and live together over distances to such an extent that we can envisage a process of ‘globalisation from below’, which has been going on for centuries in the region. Certainly these practices have been and are deeply associated with the two notions of colonialism and nationalism, which are deeply intertwined with each other. But the geography and history of the Nordic Atlantic also include the emergence of new and multiple forms of society, which combine independence with connectivity and the acknowledgement of others. Coping with the immense distances and the many cases of isolation in the Nordic Atlantic – not only physically, but also culturally – mobilises creative international cooperation, cultural industries, mobile living and municipal entrepreneurship. Much of this comes together with the mobility and accumulation of capital that may contradict essentialist definitions of cultural sameness, or may be combined in dominant national-liberalist policies. Certain paths have been laid out, but the fates of many other processes are undecided, among which are the future of Nordic Atlantic tourism, the question of independence for the Faroes and Greenland and relations with the European Union. This book has suggested a broad coping approach that acknowledges the contributions of the multiple practices of innovation, networking and identity formation in producing, destabilising and remaking societies. The terminology of territoriality-mobility and bridging-bonding has been used in an attempt to deconstruct strong dichotomies in social sciences between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The idea has been to approach the making of societies envisaged as ‘from below’ but in fact more precisely to go beyond hierarchical notions of societies as levels or scales, in effect using a flat ontology, which acknowledges a diversity of materialist constructive practices involving their non-human dimensions. It still, however, takes an anthropocentric approach to how people, together with technologies, environments and artefacts, make societies. Priority has especially been given to the mobile bonding societies of people on the move, the fishing and tourist industries, migrants, tourists and the potential territorial bridging across differences in the making of redistributive regimes in municipalities, states and transnational cooperation. Mobility helps to build new communities, identities and meanings, but it is still through territorial definition that societies have the potential to include the marginalised other. The idea has been to reinstall an active, concrete, practical concept of society, in contrast to the abstract and general concept that has been dominant in social sciences, a concept of society associated with the primary meaning of society as ‘fellowship’ (Williams 1983: 291) or ‘survival group’ (Elias 1978, 1987). Across chapters and themes, the analyses have come to a few main conclusions about the Nordic Atlantic. First, the Nordic Atlantic countries

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share a common colonial history that is both well known and kept more or less tacit. The temporal variation in decolonisation is wide, from the abolition of the Finnmark Monopoly in 1798 and Norway’s separation from Denmark in 1814, to the formal abolition of the Royal Greenland Trade monopoly in 1950 and the introduction of home rule for Greenland in 1979, with Denmark at the beginning of the twenty-first century still internationally in control of Greenland and the Faroes. But across these variations runs the common stream of Denmark’s so-called ‘gentle’ colonial administration, famous for its comprehensive paternalism, acknowledging and civilising colonial subjects as long as they do not transcend the images of their otherness. This ‘recognition’ fits the tradition of colonial trade that framed how locals could be included first in fisheries and later in tourism. But later, fisheries and tourism became the carriers of coping practices making mobile bonding societies. Together with the formation of transport systems, these practices have been crucial to the networks and flows, constitutive of national and transnational projects as well as communities of fishers and the like. While these practices were reactions to and protests against the colonial heritage, they also tend to carry this heritage along with them. Admittedly, societies have not just been produced unintentionally: at least much in colonial civilising projects seems to have had quite intended consequences, as manifested in material cultures, from unified transport systems to the heritage industry. Among the people living in the Nordic Atlantic there is a strong sense of the heritage of migration and colonialism, which contributes to the making of societies with reference to the mobile traditions of the Inuit, the Sami, the Norse (Vikings), the sagas, Protestant missionaries, colonial trade, Pomor trade, and military constructions and connections, especially in and since the Second World War. Thus, if this heritage is not always so outspoken, this does not prevent it from being effective. Also it may be more effective for some than for others, such as the role of the sagas in the making of the Icelandic nation. Secondly, the history of nation building in the Nordic Atlantic is ambivalent in several senses. Alongside the strong ethos for doing good and having a strong individual relationship with God (and the state), the lay Protestant creation of territorial administration and solidarity paved the way for coping with distances through the integration of society, culture and belief by way of sameness. This has contributed to a widespread aspiration towards the sharing of wealth among those who are included. These forms of solidarity and redistribution work in municipalities, nation states, home-ruled governments in the Faroes and Greenland, and potentially in transnational cooperation, especially if committed to the common denominator of the chosen Nordic peoples. Furthermore, Norway and Greenland in particular have established central roles in international relations that are ascribed to universalistic UN projects of solidarity, conflict resolution and indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, they have also

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avoided the attempt of the European Union to transcend borders and redistribute among its members to the advantage of the regional development of the peripheries of the Union. In this sense, the Nordic Atlantic projects of society making are ambivalent with regard to the transcending of national boundaries and territorial units of redistribution. In addition, there is the unsatisfied and ambivalent striving for independence by the Faroes and Greenland. Though transport is always an issue, especially in Greenland, in contemporary politics it is no longer physical distance that is the most apparent distance to cope with. Coping with the distances that are embedded in the imaginations of nationalism, colonialism, culture and migration is a much more problematic challenge in the Nordic Atlantic. This is especially the case when solidarity becomes an ideological project of identification rather than a question of real redistribution and welfare. Thirdly, interesting examples of mobile bonding and territorial bridging are being combined in the Nordic Atlantic. These include the new challenges and possibilities acquired through labour migration and the increasing performance of societies as routes of connectivity and redistribution. Creative municipal authorities in the peripheries can be surprisingly successful in integrating strangers when their crucial contribution to the maintenance of fishing industries and settlement is acknowledged. Though migration, settlers and non-permanent settlements have a thousand-year history in the Nordic Atlantic, this is a kind of heritage of difference and mobility that is not always acknowledged and welcomed to the extent that we have seen in the cases of the North Norwegian Cultural History and the reopened National Museum of Iceland. However, there is more to the specificities of the Nordic Atlantic than nationalism, colonialism and heritage. And there are more or less clear regional distinctions and inequalities within Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland. Common to these countries is the regional development of certain areas to such extent that they can no longer be seen as peripheral. This is the case with the agglomerations of the major North Norwegian towns and their large surrounding labour markets, led by Tromsø and the county of Troms, with the buzz of the Reykjavík metropolitan area, and to some extent with the whole of the Faroese ‘mainland’ and potentially Greenland’s few ‘growth centres’, if not only the capital of Nuuk. No less common, then, is the marginality of distant localities in Greenland, especially in the far north, the east and the south; the southern islands in the Faroes; the large non-metropolitan ‘hinterland’ of Iceland and especially those not on the Circle Road; and the more isolated localities in Finnmark and to some extent Nordland in Northern Norway. The scale of these disparities, and the regional policies for coping with them, differ widely among the different Nordic Atlantic countries. Iceland is most profoundly engaged with its national-liberal entrepreneurship and capitalist development, including the introduction of ITQs in fisheries and

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the development of cultural industries, but the distribution of the wealth that is created is socially and regionally unequal. Northern Norway, on the other hand, in spite of cuts in and restructurings of the welfare state, is still taking part in processes of social and regional redistribution, though this does not fully compensate for the marginal position of certain groups and localities in the North. The Faroes and Greenland, in pursuing higher degrees of independence, use national-liberalist Iceland rather than Northern Norway as the role model in restructuring their economies, since they share an ambition to shake off their colonial dependence on subsidies from Denmark. In both countries, across other differences, this means a decline in awareness of regional inequalities and the problems of the marginalised areas, since the aim of the project is to construct one economically and politically viable society. However, these projects are also ambivalent. There may be divergent interpretations of trends in the making and remaking of Nordic Atlantic societies. That presented here seeks to avoid two extremes. On the one hand, economistic understandings of the formation of societies have problems in analysing the colonial, national, local and entrepreneurial formation of the variety of societies in the Nordic Atlantic. I argue that this is true of both neoclassical economics associated with the liberalist policies and dogmatic Marxist political economies preoccupied with hegemonic regimes of accumulation and even world systems. Neither of these positions can account for the specificities of society making in the Nordic Atlantic. On the other hand, a culturalist essentialism that stresses more or less ‘inherent’ traces of nationhood and heritage does not contribute any more than economistic approaches. The history of Nordic Atlantic societies was not prescribed, any more than how their heritage should be used. This does not mean that everything can happen in time and space. On the contrary, the materialist constructivist attempt of this book acknowledges the possibility of both inertia and unforeseeable, irreversible turning points in time and space. Societies are produced through practices that are also material, where humans as well as non-humans are involved. These are ‘material politics’, which makes societies through, for example, infrastructural development, but politics also has materiality in the ways people perform in territorial and mobile networks. While ‘sustainable development’ has been an internationally important icon of Nordic politics, its main consequences might prove to be less in the material policies of reducing pollution and the like than in making other international relations materialise politically. New transnational relations have stabilised with reference to this icon, but it is a pertinent question to ask whether or not this has in fact made societies less fragile to environmental threats. Though people have always coped with distance, it seems that the challenges that people have to cope with now are not becoming any less.

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And people’s involvement in, for example, the flows of capital and quotas in fisheries hints at how coping practices may accelerate the quantities of challenges that must be coped with in the future. This is also the case regarding the Nordic penchant for nationalist demarcation from otherness. It is still an open question to what extent people in the Nordic Atlantic will be either able or willing to share their wealth and live together with others. Lasting weak relations beyond otherness can be imagined or even hoped for. But another open question is whether Nordic Atlantic policies will be based on the principles and ethics of inclusion, the acknowledgement of others and hospitality. There is the potential for a joint Nordic Atlantic experiment, sharing wealth and welcoming others. Nordic Atlantic societies have immense resources in terms of their natural environment, ways of life, social organisation, creative inspiration and, not least beauty, along with silence and contemplative atmospheres. Potentially these resources can be acknowledged as of global value, provided they are allowed to become a shared, common heritage.

Note 1. This chapter, apart from the two last sections, draws on my research in the Conditions for Sustainable Development in the Arctic Project, supported by the Danish Research Councils, 1995–98, including field work in Greenland 1996, and especially my report from 1999, Trans-regions, Nation-states and Trans-nationalism as Conditions for Sustainable Development in the Arctic, Working paper no. 143, Nors-papers no. 43, Roskilde University: Publications from Geography, Department of Geography and International Development Studies.

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INDEX


A acknowledgement, of the other, 56–58, 124–25, 228, 256, 260 Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 10, 38, 45, 128, 130 airfields/ports, 90, 96, 99, 100, 103, 110, 119–20, 155, 161–62 air transport. See transport Allen, John, 51–54 Althing, 73, 74, 75, 77, 182, 216–17 Amin, Ash, 21, 23, 45, 47–49, 125, 174 animal rights movement, 236 anthropology, 6, 8, 41, 61, 63, 119 economic, 38, 43–44 social, 38–42, 63, 202 Arctic Council, 252–53 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), 238, 252 association concept of, 9, 11, 16–17, 19, 23–33, 44–45, 55, 58, 131–33, 174, 175–80, 194, 237 local, 142 religious, 211 voluntary, 192, 195 women’s, 148, 151, 248 B Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR)/ Barents Region, 73, 238, 241, 248–54 Barth, Fredrik, 16, 39–42, 58–60, 145, 173, 202–4, 210, 229

Båtsfjord, 149–50 Bauman, Zygmunt, 24–25, 30–31, 98–100, 124, 195, 202–3, 228 beauty, 260 Bergen, 69, 70, 76, 80, 105, 208 bond, 2, 24, 56, 146, 200 bonding, 2, 3, 15, 24–32, 145–46, 179, 194, 199–200, 253. See also mobile bonding, territorial bonding border, 105, 108, 149, 150, 191, 202, 254 boundary, 31, 99, 180, 195, 202–3, 210 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15–17, 21, 24, 53, 58–59, 95, 125, 151, 177 bridging, 2, 3, 15–16, 23–30, 111, 115, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 177–80, 195, 228, 242, 255. See also mobile bridging, territorial bridging Brox, Ottar, 8, 39–43, 72–73, 106–7, 122, 184 Brundtland Report, 231–32, 237, 239, 253. See also Our Common Future, and World Commission on Environment and Development Bygdamenning, 83, 115 C Callon, Michel, 10, 17, 43, 45, 63 capital, economic, 42, 52, 71, 78, 127, 129, 136, 138, 140–41, 144, 146, 152, 188, 190, 192, 200, 211, 235.

288

See also social capital Castells, Manual, 98–100, 124–25, 215 catechist, 119, 182, 209 CCPP. See UNESCO MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Project Christianity, 68, 69, 79, 88, 92, 160, 206–10, 250 church, 16, 30, 70–71, 76, 80, 182–83, 226 and state, merger between, 186, 200, 206–10, 226 Circle Road (of Iceland), 111–12 citizen(ship), 3, 9, 16, 22, 29–32, 44, 101, 174, 206, 208–9, 255 global, 234 local, 27, 170–71, 175–78, 194–95 national/state, 25, 29, 220–29, 247 civicness, 15–19 colonial administration, 120, 137, 181, 182, 213, 215, 257 heritage, 5, 91, 92, 160, 167, 172, 209, 212, 257 knowledge, 86, 137, 153, 160, 222 legacy, 48, 185 power, 81, 102, 173, 184, 200, 209, 216–17, 248 present (The Colonial Present), 5, 33, 100, 161, 186, 196, 214 situation, 41 space, 84, 119, 137 status, 70, 90, 221 system, 136 colonialism, 33, 67, 77, 85, 101–102, 150, 156, 168, 173–74, 184, 214, 222, 238, 256–58 Danish, 90, 92, 134–37, 156–57, 182, 199 commodification, 135, 167–68, 236 communal identities/identification, 18, 29–31, 99, 176–77, 195, 202 community, 3, 8, 19, 26, 28, 48, 66, 80, 85, 98, 107, 121, 129–30, 176–79, 200, 204, 211, 214, 224 global, 233–37 hall/house, 89, 148, 193 ‘of practice’, 144 studies, 38–42, 128–29, 151, 203, 239 See also Gemeinschaft commuting, 106, 108–9, 123, 149–50, 190, 192

Coping with Distances

compression, of time and space, 234 connection, 57, 97–102, 121, 145, 255 air/flight, 120 Internet, 121 road, 105, 108 steamer 105, 113, 117 constructivism/constructivist approach/ constructedness, 8, 18–19, 21, 27, 56, 59, 63, 75, 100, 102, 131, 151, 156, 160, 180, 202, 214–15, 232, 240–41, 250, 255, 256, 259 coping, coping practices 1–3, 9, 13–17, 20, 22–31, 37, 48–53, 58–59, 95, 128, 134–36, 178–81, 228, 240, 260 strategy, 13, 22, 60, 181, 233, 242 with distances, 1, 4, 6, 11, 55, 63, 65, 99, 104, 107, 109, 113, 121–22, 150, 173, 175, 195, 199, 201–2, 232, 256–58 cross-border human mobility, 150, 255 pollution, 254 cross-border cooperation, 231–32, 237, 255 Nordic, 243–46, 250, 252, 254. See also INTERREG culture, concept of, 40, 47–48, 68, 85, 98, 150, 202, 240 cultural economy/industry, 78, 168, 171–74, 256, 259 D Daneborg, 158 devolution, 213 distance, 2, 46–47, 56, 99–100, 108, 112, 132, 134, 151, 154, 161, 170, 195, 201, 255 cultural, 195, 201, 205, 227 physical/material, 161, 204, 258 social, 201, 227 distanciation, 227, 234 E ecclesiastical administration, 30, 181–83 economic geography, 21, 26, 32, 38, 43, 45–47, 144, 211 egalitarian ethos, 208, 211 individualism, 204–6, 209, 228 Elias, Norbert, 8, 12, 55, 100, 256 empowerment, 7, 30, 42, 48, 51, 53–54, 186, 239

Index

Enlightenment, 84, 205, 207, 210, 217, 233 entrepreneurship, 7, 27, 30, 45, 151, 189–90, 195, 254, 256, 258 environmental attraction, 2, 161, 187, 190, 192, 260 human-environmental relation, 10, 17, 133, 137, 176 problems, 153, 231–37, 251, 259 protection, 221, 234, 237–40, 242, 252 equality, meaning of, 204, 206, 208, 225 equity, 20, 48, 213, 233, 243 essentialism, 18–19, 41, 137, 150, 167, 202–3, 208, 240, 256, 259 EU (European Union), 20, 72, 90, 127, 199, 201, 210, 232, 241, 242, 244–45, 248–52, 253–56 Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), 77, 83, 127–28, 141, 152 expeditions, 89, 155, 157–59 exploration, 67, 88, 127, 155–58 F festival, 73, 128, 148, 151, 170, 193–94 Finnmark, 4, 69–73, 102, 106, 107, 149, 168, 258 fisheries, 26–28, 71–73, 76–77, 80–83, 89–90, 102–4, 127–52, 168–69, 171–72, 245, 257 fish processing, 83, 116–19, 128, 139–40, 147–49, 183, 187, 212 flow, 1, 8, 10, 11, 12, 20, 26, 31, 41, 46–7, 57, 98–101, 127–29, 134–36, 140–44, 151–54, 171–72, 213, 257 fluid, 8, 19, 31, 51, 126, 129, 133–34, 151, 171 Foucault, Michel, 2, 10, 12, 21, 38, 49–55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 203, 206 Freestate, 69, 73–76 G Gemeinschaft, 2, 26, 31, 98, 99, 130, 176, 190, 200, 205, 209, 210, 222, 240, 256 gender/gendered relations, 109, 145–48, 150, 174, 185 geography, 6, 32–33, 51, 53, 56, 95–96, 100, 158, 236. See also economic geography, historical geography, political geography

289

geopolitics, 100, 156–58, 216, 224, 232, 237, 239 Gesellschaft, 2, 3, 31, 37, 98, 99, 130, 178, 205, 209, 210, 256 Giddens, Anthony, 9–11, 20, 32, 44, 98, 178, 214, 232, 234 globalisation, 1, 14, 47, 168, 169, 196, 199, 212, 215, 223, 226, 232–34, 239, 255, 256 governmentality, 2, 53, 54, 57, 63, 92, 196, 206–8, 213, 227 Grabher, Gernot, 44, 129, 144, 173 Greenlandisation, 90, 222 Greenland Tourism, 155, 162, 164, 165 Gregory, Derek, 14, 56, 100, 214, 223 Grundtvig, N.F.S., 81, 219, 224–25 Grundtvigianism, 208, 219, 222, 227 H Harvey, David, 232–34, 236 heritage, 65–68, 84, 87, 91–92, 147, 161, 167, 169, 171–72, 209, 212, 217, 219, 224, 226, 257–60 Herrnhut (Brødremenigheden), 88 historical geography approach, 6 Faroes, 3–6, 67–68, 78–85, 113–17, 183, 218–20, 223–24 Greenland, 3–6, 67–68, 85–92, 117–22, 135–36, 156–61, 182, 220–24 Iceland, 3–6, 67–68, 73–78, 109–13, 136–37, 182, 216–18 Northern Norway, 3–6, 67–73, 104–9, 183–84, 216–18 history (approach, discipline, use of, writing), 6, 51–52, 66–69, 71, 73, 74–75, 78–79, 85–88, 93, 100, 216–17, 225 Höfn, 111 Home Rule/home-rule, 3, 72, 73, 78, 85–87, 91, 201, 216, 219, 254–55, 257 arrangement, 90, 182, 218 government, 5, 122, 159, 167, 185, 212, 220–21, 237, 257 Law, 82–83, 90, 219–20 Hornafjördur (municipality of), 111–12 hospitality, 57, 260 hosts and guests, 153–54, 156, 168, 170–71, 173, 174 Hósvík, 115

290

Hurtigruten (coastal steamer of Norway), 105–6, 154, 168, 172 Hvannasund, 115–16, 147 I ICC, See Inuit Circumpolar Conference identification, 1, 2, 7, 12, 14, 24, 25, 29–31, 56, 91, 99, 127, 160, 167, 177, 195, 222, 228, 236, 240, 245, 246, 247, 252, 253, 254, 258 identity, formation of, 9, 13, 14, 16, 18, 23, 26, 29–31, 57, 68, 75, 86, 107, 121, 130, 145, 148, 160, 187–88, 194, 196, 201–3, 214–15, 219, 226–28, 232, 238, 241–43, 247–48, 251–56 Ikerasak, 117, 126n, 159, 211, 245 Ilulissat, 34, 89, 91, 117, 119, 133, 144, 156, 157, 161–68, 174, 211, 245 imagination, 12, 20, 42, 73, 96, 97, 102, 113, 125, 137, 155, 160, 161, 173, 202, 216, 226, 258 immobility, 100, 109 independence, 5, 20, 30, 67, 68, 73, 79, 81, 82, 84, 91, 93, 122, 182, 184, 185, 200, 205, 213, 216–23, 227, 256, 258, 259 indigenous culture, 128, 154, 156, 183, 208 people, 5, 13, 67, 91, 97, 136, 156, 182, 193, 222–23, 238, 247, 257 Individually Transferable Quota (ITQ), 78, 128, 138–41, 236 Ingold, Tim, 8, 10, 98, 100, 135, 136, 176 innovation, 1, 2, 13, 14, 16, 20, 23, 26–28, 30, 45, 48, 61, 62, 115, 147, 181, 186–93, 200, 201, 211, 227, 242, 244, 254, 256 international regime, 232, 237–38, 241 relations (theory), 6, 221, 232, 240–41, 255, 257, 259 politics, 91, 160, 216, 232 Internet, 96, 103, 108, 112, 119, 121–25, 164 INTERREG, 20, 244, 245, 246, 250, 255 Inuit, 13, 67, 247–48, 257 in Alaska, 247 in Canada, 214, 247 in Chuchotka, Russia, 247

Coping with Distances

Circumpolar Conference (ICC), 246–48, 252 in Greenland, 5, 68, 86, 88, 90, 92, 135–36, 156–60, 165, 167, 247, 254 mobility, 7, 99, 101, 103, 121, 166, 247 Ísafjördur, 112, 140 isolation, 71, 90, 96, 97–101, 107, 112, 117, 125, 205, 254, 256 IT-based communication (ICT), 105, 107–8, 112, 121, 192 K Kangerlussuaq, 119, 120, 123 Keflavík, 103, 110, 120 Klaksvík, 34, 115, 116, 144, 177, 187–91, 195, 211 Kola Peninsula, 102–3, 149, 150 Kven, 71, 107, 191 Kvívík, 115 L Labour Party, 71–72, 199. See also Social Democrats land claims, 97, 247, 248 Lastaedian congregation, 207–8, 211 Latour, Bruno, 10–11, 55–56, 58–59, 63, 134, 178, 180–81 lay church/priest, 119, 182, 208, 225, 227, 257 ‘localised learning’, 21, 45–46, 144, 161 localities, 21, 22, 26, 30, 33, 61–62, 95, 99, 107, 108, 109, 117, 148, 151, 176, 188–94 local state, See municipalities Lofoten, 146, 154, 168–70 Løgting, 81, 82 M Magerøya, 105 Making of a Nation, 75–78, 93 Marx, Karl, 8, 50, 259 Massey, Doreen, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56 materialist constructivism, 59, 256, 259 materiality, 12, 19, 55, 96, 259 ‘material politics’, 259 ‘materials’, 10–11, 40, 96, 99, 180 memory, 56, 65–66, 130, 144, 202, 215, 217 methodological individualism, 40, 42, 58, 240

Index

methodologies, 3, 12, 38, 59–64, 202 migration, migrants, 44, 66, 88, 108, 146, 151, 174, 179 international, emigration and immigration, 71, 75–77, 82, 85, 101, 112, 148–51, 204–6, 227, 255 labour, 127–28, 148–51, 152, 166, 251, 258 mission/missionaries, 71, 88–89, 156, 182, 192, 207, 209, 225–27, 257 mobile bonding, 24–25, 27, 32, 178–77, 194, 248, 253–54, 256–58 mobile bridging, 25, 27–28, 32, 112, 117, 148, 152, 178, 189, 253 mobility, mobilities, 1, 2, 8, 20, 23–26, 28, 38, 50, 57, 111, 156 of capital, 48, 129, 234. 256 of information, 121–22, 234 of people, 24, 26, 31–32, 57, 75, 83, 88, 92, 100, 106, 109, 112, 146, 149–50, 173, 190, 255, 256, 258 of objects/goods, 92 systems, 56, 58 monopoly, 7, 70, 77, 80, 89, 102, 121, 127, 135, 136, 142, 143, 212, 217, 257 MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Project See UNESCO MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Project municipalities, municipal authorities, 30, 115, 175–97 as organisations, 175, 190 as places, 176, 190 as territories, 176, 180, 190 Murmansk Region (Russia), 103, 149, 250, 251 N nation, 98, 121, 150, 180, 214, 239 as shared experiences/social movement, 215, 228 building, 30, 97, 122, 128, 181–82, 199, 209, 210, 214, 219, 250, 257 without state, 5, 218 nationalism, 67, 92, 98, 199–204, 214, 256 Danish, 156, 223, 225, 243–44 Faroese, 78–85, 218–20 Greenlandic, 85, 220–22 Icelandic, 73–78, 137, 216–18

291

Norwegian, 71, 208, 216, 218 national question Faroes, 79, 81–83, 218–19, 223 Iceland, 83 National Museum of Iceland, 75, 258 NATO, 8, 90, 221, 249 network(ing), 1–2, 10–17, 19–22, 24, 27–32, 37–38, 44–47, 51–52, 58, 61, 98–103, 115–16, 124–25, 127–35, 140–57, 160–74, 181, 184, 188–89, 192, 201, 224, 228, 232, 241–42, 254 NORA, See Nordic Atlantic Cooperation Norddepil, 115–16 Nordic (countries/heritage/societies), definition of, 1, 28, 30–31, 62, 66–68, 84, 150, 160, 175–76, 183, 185, 194, 197n, 199–200, 206–10, 218–19, 224–29, 231–32, 240 Nordic Association (Foreningen Norden), 201, 224, 226, 244, 248 Nordic Atlantic, definition, 1, 3–5, 65 Nordic Atlantic Cooperation (NORA), 3–4, 232, 244–46 Nordic Model/project, 199, 204–5, 211, 219, 224–29, 232, 243, 252–55, 257 Nordicity, 199–201, 223, 226, 228–29, 253 Nordism, 84, 199–201, 224–27 Nordland, 4, 5, 70, 73, 106, 108, 186, 258 Nordnorsk Kulturhistorie, 68 Nordoyar, 113–15, 187 NORDREGIO, xiv, 35n, 60–62 Norse, 7, 8, 67–69, 79, 84, 87–88, 101, 157, 217, 247, 257 North Calotte, 69, 70, 193, 244, 248, 249 North Cape, 105, 148, 154, 172 Nunavut, 97, 103, 214, 246 Nuuk, 87, 88, 91, 119, 121, 185, 209, 211, 245, 258 O Öræfi, 111–12 Østerberg, Dag, 96 otherness, 56, 153, 154, 158, 257, 260 Our Common Future, 232–33, 235. See also Brundtland Report, and World Commision on Environment and Development

292

‘outfitter system’ (Greenland), 165–66 P parish, 30, 177, 182–84, 186, 196 council, 30, 194 paternalism (Danish), 86, 87, 135, 136, 257 Pietist, Pietism, 28, 156, 200, 206–10, 227 place (making of), 14, 62, 66, 73, 112, 115, 116, 121, 130, 146–48, 153, 159, 173, 192, 205 concept of, 47–48, 57, 95, 98–100, 125, 129, 147, 150–51, 172, 175–76 as meeting, 23, 120, 122, 125, 146–47, 151, 208 inhabited, 176, 190, 195, 205 tourist, See tourist places Plymouth Brethren community (the ‘Baptists’), 187, 207, 211 Polanyi, Karl, 38, 43–45, 47, 48, 55, 130, 131, 132 political correctness, 160, 240 geography, 232, 239, 240, 241 pollution, 144, 235–37, 259 trans-border, 231, 248 Pomor, 69, 250 trade, 70–71, 150, 250, 257 post-colonial approach/perspective (postcolonialism), 60, 86, 137, 160 ideology, 201, 226 relations/situation, 158, 181, 185, 211, 213, 226, 227, 237–39, 247 power, concept of, 9, 10–11, 21, 38, 49–55, 180, 203 relations, 19, 38, 49–55, 57, 102, 113, 131, 141, 145, 203 and geography/space, 21–22, 53, 102, 119, 121 prawn (fishery), 142, 212 Protestantism, 30, 68, 88, 92, 200–1, 206–11, 257 proximity, 23, 25, 28, 45–6, 49, 56, 132, 204, 208, 227 Putnam, Robert D., 15–19, 22, 23, 24, 25 Q Qaanaq, 158–60 Qaarsut, 119–20

Coping with Distances

R Rasmussen, Knud, 157–60, 167 reciprocity, 19, 25, 39, 43–44, 48–49, 57, 124–25, 129–33, 145, 151, 179, 201, 228 recognition, concept/politics of,16, 24, 53, 57, 124, 145, 181, 200–1, 215, 221, 228, 253 of the Faroes and Greenland (the Faroese and Greenlanders), 218, 219, 221–23, 226–27, 229n, 257 redistribution, 13, 43–44, 48–49, 56, 124, 132, 178–80, 195, 199–201, 213, 221–22, 227–28, 233, 253, 257–59 Reformation (Protestant), 68, 70, 76, 80, 88, 92, 186, 200, 206–7, 209–10, 217, 226 regionalisation, 12, 18, 20, 213, 239, 242 regionalism, 68, 73, 99, 105, 242 regional development, 21, 28, 32, 38, 45–49, 73, 138, 245, 252, 254, 258 government, 16, 18, 180, 182, 184, 191, 253 identification/identity, 78, 107–8, 171, 236, 243 labour market, 83, 106, 116, 123 policy, 20, 43, 48–49, 60–63, 72, 78, 83, 91, 108, 113, 122, 130, 243–44, 246, 252–54, 258 region, concept of, 19, 23, 129, 243. See also trans-region building, 232, 235–36, 240–41, 248–52 religious authorities/communities/formations, 30, 70, 92, 185, 188, 192, 206–11 congregation/revivalism, 24, 29, 187, 193, 207–8 responsibility, 48, 54, 56–57, 124, 176, 197n, 224, 226, 228 Reykjavík, 5, 102, 110, 120, 123, 155, 224, 258 Rink, H.J., 87–89, 135–36, 160 road construction, 96, 100–2, 105–17 ‘release’, 106 Royal Greenland, 87, 89, 135–36, 142–44, 211–13, 257 route, routes (concept of), 125–26, 167, 179 society as, 125, 172

Index

S sameness, 25, 31–32, 56, 178, 201–6, 208, 223, 226–27, 253–57 imagined, 205–6, 209–10, 213, 226 proximity, translated into, 204 Sami, 5, 8, 67–72, 92, 97, 101, 103, 107, 150, 191, 193, 214, 250, 251, 252, 257 ‘Scandinavia’, notion of, 66, 101, 199, 204, 221, 224 self-governance (Greenland), 85, 91, 92 service provision, 72, 115, 194, 197n settlement (period of), 73, 76, 79, 87, 101 pattern/structure, 5, 72, 78, 95, 106, 108 shrimp (fishery). See prawn (fishery) Simmel, Georg, 2, 38, 40 Sirius patrol/expedition, 97, 158–59 Skjervøy, 107 Smilla’s Sense of Snow, 159–61, 166 social capital, 12, 15–25, 52–53, 60–61, 151, 211 distinction, 2, 42, 172, 200, 237 interaction, 38, 202 position, 235, 237 Social Democrats, 72, 78, 90, 151, 186, 199–200, 212, 222 society definition, 1–3, 8–12, 17, 19, 22, 31–32, 37–55, 59, 74, 96, 98–100, 122–26, 129, 131–32, 174, 214, 255–56 making, 1–2, 7–13, 16, 22, 39, 42, 59, 72, 92–93, 96, 100–1, 127, 138, 167–68, 172, 211, 258–59 socio-economic development, 72, 201, 210, 217, 233, 234, 237, 247 sociology, 6, 9, 12, 38, 96, 130, 214 economic, 24, 43, 44, 47, 129–31 space/spatiality (concept/term of), 1, 9, 14, 17, 20–23, 38, 42, 47–49, 51, 55, 65, 98, 147, 175–76, 178–80, 231, 234 Stokkseyri, 147 Storfjord, 34, 108–9, 116, 123, 149, 152n, 177, 187, 191–95 subsidies (Danish to the Faroes and Greenland), 122, 212–13, 221–23, 237, 259 ‘survival group’, 12, 17, 100, 233, 256 sustainable development, 130, 133,

293

231–46, 249, 251–55, 259 Sørvær, 148 T Teriberka, 149–50 territorial bonding, 25–28, 32, 112, 115, 117, 152, 178, 187–90, 199, 242 territorial bridging, 25–27, 32, 75, 112, 127, 152, 175, 177–79, 190–94, 211, 253–54, 256, 258 territoriality, 11, 12, 15, 19–26, 28–30, 45, 53–54, 98–99, 101, 125, 130, 133, 150, 178, 180, 200, 203, 228, 238–39, 256 Thrift, Nigel, 21, 23, 45–46 Thule, 88–92, 158–60, 229n Air Base, 91, 221–22, 229 Tórshavn, 79, 113, 185, 187, 190 tourism (in general, the phenomenon), 107, 153–56, 171–74, 257 development, 26–28, 46, 78, 111–12, 160, 164, 166, 168–70, 174, 245–46 fish, 170, 171 industry, 68, 155, 161, 164–66, 192, 256 networking, 160–67, 170–73 rorbu, 146, 168–69 tourist, 26 attraction, 112, 167, 169, 172 heritage, 174 performances, 153–56, 167–68 places, 153 practices, 100, 159, 161, 169–70, 172–4, 256 Trade Monopoly. See monopoly transformation, 11, 13, 19, 26, 50–52, 58, 60, 62–63, 72, 83, 128, 137–38, 144, 148–49, 161, 168, 181, 210, 236 translation (social, material, ANT wording), 11, 19, 58, 130, 138, 146, 151, 161, 165, 174, 176–80, 194–96, 204, 210 transnational associations/societies, 167, 176, 234 connection, 123, 149, 213 corporation, 21, 32, 167, 173, 231, 237, 242, 254–57 identity, 121, 250–52 migration, 150. See also migration projects, 66, 246, 257

294

relations, 21, 167, 259 transnationalism, 150, 200, 229, 231, 244, 248, 253, 255 transport(ation), 8, 22, 27, 78, 95–126 air, 13, 107, 110, 119, 123, 155 boat/ferry, 113, 155 road, 96, 105, 123 trans-region, 196, 231, 241–42, 245–46, 248, 251–55 Troms, 4, 5, 69, 70, 71, 73, 106–8, 116, 123, 168, 193, 258 Tromsø, 5, 6, 60, 73, 106–8, 178, 193, 258 U UNESCO MOST Circumpolar Coping Processes Project, xiii–xv, 13, 60–62, 108, 130, 152n, 192 UNESCO World Heritage List, 161, 167 Urry, John, 8–10, 24–26, 31, 57–58, 97, 98, 100, 124, 129, 133–34, 168, 173, 176, 232–33, 234–35, 240 Uummannaq, 33, 117–20, 142–44, 159, 166, 211, 212, 245

Coping with Distances

V Viking, 69, 87, 101–2 heritage, 67–68, 156, 160, 170–71, 224, 257 W welfare, 175–77 municipality, 72–73, 106, 176–77, 183–87, 190, 195–96, 197n, 210 nationalism, 199–200, 215, 225 policy/state/system, 34, 43, 54, 56, 72, 78, 108–9, 122, 152, 175–77, 181, 184–87, 194–95, 197n, 199–200, 205, 207, 225, 227, 244, 259 Westfjords, 112 West Nordic organisations/cooperation, 66, 68, 155, 173, 199, 244, 245 wilderness, 43, 154–56, 174 World Commission on Environment and Development, 231–34. See also Brundtland Report, and Our Common Future