Place, Identity, and Relations: The Lived Experience of Two Northern Worlds

Abstract

Letting Ingold and Turnbull set the scene, in this paper I visualize how “relations” trace the lived experience of being, learning, and understanding the world. I do so comparatively by drawing upon my research and travels in Greenland and Iceland, exploring how place, identity, and social relations reflect lived relations, amplifying how mobility, narratives, knowledge, and locality are closely entwined and cannot be delineated alone. This entwinement symbolizes strikingly similar allusions of the perception and movement of two northern worlds—spatially distant, yet comparatively close. This comparative approach, while emphasizing diversity, highlights similarity in the ways in which people live in and tell stories about the world. Traveling through the cultural landscapes of these two settings, the narratives embedded within them, it is amplified that one’s world is never complete but continuously under construction, retracing a path through the world of others.