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.
When anthropologists look at cultural landscapes and the shaping of them, they are also interested in the ways people have traveled through them. In his book Lines, Tim Ingold (2007) beautifully emphasizes that drawing a line on a sketched map is like telling a story. As the storyline goes on, so does the line on the map. The themes that the story relates do not so much exist as occur, he argues; each is a moment of ongoing activity. Reflecting on Ingold’s philosophical annotation, “occur” does not describe a state of extendedness over a period of time but a transition, or rather a series of transitions; events partly occurring from time to time or partly being at a subsequent time.
To tell a story is to relate, in narrative, the occur-rence of the past, retracing a path through the world of others, recursively picking up the threads of past lives and continue the process by spinning their own. Similar to looping or knotting, the thread being spun now and the thread picked up from the past stem from the same yarn. There is no particular point where the story ends and life begins (Ingold 2007:90).
The topics of the stories are identified by their relations or series of transitions, paving the way for it, presently concurring with it and following it into the world. As Ingold (2007) notes, the meaning of “relation” has to be understood quite literally, as a path traced through the terrain of lived experience, and, far from being the connecting points in a network, every relation is one line in a meshwork of interwoven trails. Similarly, Turnbull points out that:
Paths, tracks and trails are inherently performative; the cognitive connections, the social interactions, and the relationships that they bring into existence, are themselves marked by trails and movement and action along them. For this reason they are deeply intertwined with songs, stories and narratives (Turnbull 2007:143).
Letting Ingold and Turnbull set the scene, in this article I wish to demonstrate comparatively how “relations” trace the lived experience of being in the world, learning about and understanding the world. How do place and identity, as well as relations, visualize the lived experience of two northern worlds: Greenland and Iceland? How do mobility, narratives, knowledge, and locality entwine? Furthermore, through this comparative study, I wish to apprehend how the importance of locality concurrently is expressed through stories and assemblages of knowledge, shaping the stories of lives. Not least inspired by Ingold’s (2007:170) encouragement, I pick up some of the loose ends he left to be followed, taking the way to prise an opening of a travel of two northern worlds.
Method
The ideas and questions set before me, and which are explored in this paper, have been shaped through travels I have made with hunters and locals in Godthåbsfjord in West Greenland as well as travels made during my time in Svartárkot and surrounding areas in Iceland (Fig. 1). These travels have not only been journeys through landscapes but also travels experienced in a multisensory manner following storylines, smells, and sights. They were experienced with the cold wind blushing one’s cheeks and the sun spreading its rays on incredible scenery.
Map of Greenland and Iceland marking the regions where the travels have been conducted.
The study presents knowledge based on research that draws on a variety of methods: I have traveled and moved around the landscapes of Greenland through my fieldwork conducted over the years 2012–2015 and Iceland in the summer of 2015, following the stories and knowledge embedded in these landscapes. I draw upon knowledgespheres obtained by participant observations, informal interviews, and a notion of conversational interviews, where elements relevant for this study were picked up and put together. In this paper, I focus on Iceland, where place-names, stories, and localities are shaped naturally and chosen from the travels made. The comparison of knowledgespheres naturally blends in, shaping the notion of comparison and the aim of this paper; a comparison, which accentuates the theories and ideas presented regarding mobility, narratives, knowledge, and local entwinement, through the lived experience of the people of two northern worlds.
One can say that in modifying Ingold’s approach, I am contributing to his development of a comparative anthropology of the line; the production and significance as well as the relations between lines and the surfaces on which they are drawn (Ingold 2007:1–2).
Setting the Scene
Julie Cruikshank (1990) has traveled the knowledge of female Inuit elders, setting the scene of stories embedded in the environments. She has explored lives lived like stories or through conflicting depictions of glaciers, environments, and knowledge (Cruikshank 2014). Collignon (2006) has moved through the geographical knowledge and the construction of the identity of Inuit of the central Canadian Arctic. Gunn (1994) has maneuvered through the packaged knowledge handed down from generation to generation: knowledge, movement, human agency, and global habitat, discovering how this could be used as a plausible link to global climate. Ingold has traveled through stories of Australian Aboriginal paintings, native Alaskan storytelling, Chinese calligraphy, and these cultures’ perceptions of their environments (Ingold 2000, 2007, 2011). Emily Lethbridge (2011) has wandered through the Saga-Landscapes of Iceland and the storyembedded features as well as land claims and identity, and Kirsten Hastrup (1982, 1990a, 1990b, 2007, 2008, 2009a, 2009b) has done extensive work through several studies of Greenland and Iceland. But never before has there been made a comparison of these two worlds and cultures—which seem so far apart spatially, yet, they are so close—following the anthropology of the line.
Traveling around Greenland with hunters, locals, and family has always been a unique experience. The remote areas of the Arctic share a wide visibility, enabling a life in open space, where lines of the land are vast, and no trees impede the vision. There are mountains and valleys, ridges and canyons, but one is always close to a grander view, where an infinite horizon expands (Hastrup 2008), and so do the notion of space everexpand. It is as if the only things that can give one toehold are elements making it ancillary unique: the framework of stories embedded in the areas one passes through. These stories followed a storyline when traveling. The way of travel shaped the use and understanding of traveling as well as the stories and elements of knowledge embedded within the traveled landscapes. When traveling, relations arose within the surroundings; these relations also being emotionally dependent on the stories and experiences related to the locality. But it was not only Inuit names, stories, and traces one met when traveling in the inner regions of the Godthåbsfjord; these were also the traces of the Norse. Traveling in the fjord, I found cairns, structures, and names (as if they were made by Inuit) where only the typology made a significant difference. It made me curious if these traces, being concurrent, might symbolize and reveal a similar mobility and sense of space when following cairns and structures as well as names embracing a similar relation to the landscapes built on narratives and knowledge, defining the scene of locality. This curiosity led me to Iceland to travel as I had done in Greenland and to perceive and understand the way people traveled through landscapes, shaped their own stories and knowledge, and built relations and a sense of locality in an environment as majestic as Greenland, sometimes unwelcoming but nevertheless beautiful and breathtaking.
In these two northern worlds, cairns indicate old paths in the wilderness (Fig. 2a,b) across vast and barren landscapes. Other traces left behind during the past thousands of years of history hardly approximate to more than a few tent rings (Fig. 3a), moss-grown ruins (Fig. 3b), and hunting beds hidden under boulders (Fig. 3c). Therefore, narratives and naming remain among the most significant remains of the past; they shape the landscapes redolent of memories, becoming a timeless reference point, of the two northern worlds (Hastrup 2008:53–63).
a) A cairn at the bottom of the Godthåbsfjord, West Greenland, marking a Norse farm at the down right corner (Photo: Christian Koch Madsen); b) a cairn overviewing Bárðardalur, Iceland (Photo: Ann Eileen Lennert).
a) Christian Koch Madsen registering a tentring in the inner region of the Godthåbsfjord (Photo: Ann Eileen Lennert); b) An overgrown remain at Svartárkot, Iceland (Photo: Ann Eileen Lennert); c) A hunting bed in the Nunartarssuaq area at the inner region of the Godthåbsfjord (Photo: Ann Eileen Lennert).
What I want to point out here is, when going to these northern worlds, which in the eyes of an outsider usually is experienced as; a pristine environment; being sparsely inhabited and with an indescribable wilderness, holds deep marks of history and meaning for both the Greenlanders and the Icelanders. In other words, amplifying Ingold (2007) and Turnbull (2007), history is a vital part for the local memory and therefore, for the sense of localness, or, as Hastrup (2008:53–63) defines it, the sense of “Icelandicness” and “Greenlandicness.” The landscapes are deeply historicized. It is not simply the surface setting the scene as a stage for how to play one’s social roles; it is part of social space; it infiltrates practice (mobility, movement, and knowledge) and makes history (Hastrup 2008:53), thereby laying the groundwork for building one’s identity and feeling of localness.
Mobility: The Traveling of Knowledge
Following Ingold’s (2007) thoughts, as well as Turnbull’s (2007:142), making knowledge is simultaneously the making of space, and space is made by traveling. Knowing is a form of traveling, or moving through space, and traveling, like knowledge, is also a form of narrative. The connection between these creates meaning, a relation through marking and linking (Turnbull 2007:143); a connectivity, which I experienced on my travels in Greenland and Iceland. These two worlds of the Arctic showed me how landscapes uniquely symbolize both an unwritten and a written history. The landscapes are traces of life stories. They tell stories about the interaction between humans and nature, not only being the core of culture but also revealing the way of perceiving one’s surroundings, coherent with the ways of movement and travel. When unfolded, landscapes are attached to and relate to a wealth of memories, which for most of us outsiders are invisible. These areas create a meaning and a linkage through which people shared their experiences and memories that were practiced through a multisensory palette of senses, sight, and smell, as they moved through the landscapes. To move, to know, and to describe are not separate operations that follow one another in a series but parallel facets of the same process that is life itself. It is by moving we know, through movement we describe, and through movement, we shape the cultural landscapes (Strauss 2003).
Furthermore, lines of travel also establish linkages, relationships, and associations among people, communities, and political units, created by the precedent settings and actions in the past, which might imply possibilities as well as obligations (Parmentier 1987:108), if one wishes to retrace the path recursively, pick up the threads of past lives and continue the process by spinning one’s own (Ingold 2007:90). The knowledge picked up through one’s travels and movement are inherently local. It provides localness, a basis for making comparisons of cultures, traditions, and knowledgeproduction systems (Ingold 2000, 2007; Turnbull 2007, 2012). But what defines the place of locality?
Locality
Appadurai (1995) argues that locality is primarily relational and contextual. It is through “rites of passage,” in this case being stories, narratives, myths, sagas, and naming that the fundament of locality is shaped. These rites are complex social techniques for inscribing locality onto body and mind. Furthermore, the organization of travels, routes, making and remaking fields, mapping, cartographying knowledge, and huntergatherer’s terrains are all techniques for the production of locality. All of these techniques, as well as the rites of passage, shape the properties of social life as a valuation of property and establishment of localization (Appadurai 1995:208–225). They document the socialization in space and time. Without reliable local subjects to continue these practices, the construction of a local terrain of habitation, production, and moral security would have no interest attached to it.
Similarly, local knowledge and stories are knowledge of how to produce and reproduce locality; local knowledge is not only local in itself but even more important for itself (Appadurai 1995). Jørgensen (2008) quotes MacAdams stating that the human identity is a narrative construction, a story made up of different knowledgespheres, themes, and key events in the particular life—themes and events that for various reasons are significant and valuable for a group or an individual. A narrative of local knowledge of the past, the present, and a conception of the future, all these integrated, molds a complete base for an understanding of humans as selfreflective and selfinterpretative creatures (Jørgensen 2008:33). It is important to use local knowledge to reproduce locality; it is important to preserve the knowledgespheres to be able to define oneself. Local knowledge and stories are parallel media acting as a framework for learning and understanding the world (Lethbridge 2011). A production of locality through these is a social power over places (Appadurai 1995:208–225), and one of the ways to define these places, knots, or localities is through naming.
Place-Names: A Trace of Knowledge and Movement
A travel along a path can be claimed to be a paradigmatic cultural act, since it follows the traces and lines inscribed by others whose travels and movement identify the correct or best way to go; they know as they go (Hastup 2008:53–63; Ingold 2011:154; Tilley 1994:31), serving as “role models.” The lines create relationships; the knots create localities (Hastrup 2008:53–63; Ingold 2011:148). The movement through time, the past and history, was evident in the placenaming practice of these two worlds. Through the travels, it was reiterated how the knowledge of the landscapes lies in two main spheres: first, the knowledge gained through practices, movement, and practical experience; second, the knowledge learned by the transmission of the oral tradition and narratives. The experience includes the practical skills and techniques they used in their daily life—particularly when traveling on land, ice, and sea. The narrative comprises the words they used to talk about the land—particularly through storytelling and placenaming (Collignon 2006:149– 183). These practices and stories combined did not only lay out the understanding of place and space but geographical knowledge, as interpreted by Collignon, or topographical knowledge, as defined by Hastrup (2008), as well as local knowledge that I lean on, as this understanding of place and space encompasses many spheres built on locality. They all represent a timeless point of reference. These two cultures’ local knowledge was stored in three main types of knowledge: Some were technical, a set of know-how; others were intellectual and involved the building of a global understanding of environmental dynamics; and others were emotional.
Recitation of narratives enables people to assert unity both in time and space. In time, they anchor people in history, from the great myths and sagas to the tales known only within the family circle. The variation of content shows a complex set of layers on which one’s identity is built: the ethnic layer, the group, the family, the rules, the supernatural, and the surroundings (Collignon 2006:1–9). As Emily Lethbridge (2011) expresses in her film: “Landscapes and Sagas represent a thematic approach: Legal, political, land-claims, supernatural landscapes, landscapes of the dead.”
The same applies to the stories in the Greenlandic settings. Furthermore, these grand historical narratives are vehicles of national identity, shared, and firmly rooted in nature (Brydon 1196:25–45). The naming practices of particular topographical features, such as mountains, rocks, bays, and beaches, are crucial for the establishment and maintenance of their identity (Hastrup 2008:72; Tilley 1994:18).
However, one can, as Collignon (2006), conduct a geographical analysis of these narratives, stories, and placenames shaping them. From a geographical perspective (as well as topographical or local perspective), stories can be classified according to the level on which they operate: local and regional. The regional level would, as sagas, encompass legendary and historical tales set in the particular territory of the particular cultural group. On this level, the land is analogous to a history book: Memories are embedded in the history, and the land is their guardian. Regional tales comprise legends, as related by Inuit hunters, the Icelandic farmers, and the Icelandic Sagas, often recounting the origin of certain conspicuous land features associating with places visible on land, as for example Gisli Sursson’s Saga in the Sagas of the Icelanders, where his fight and death recount and associate with the well-known, distinctive land feature in Geirþjófsfjörður in the Westfjords. The story was told by Lethbridge (2011) when hiking the dramatic environments, one of many shaping the saga landscapes of Iceland (Fig. 4):
a) Viðar Hreinsson hiking along a gully known as Saxhólagil telling a story about another outlaw, Grettir the Strong (Photo: Ann Eileen Lennert); b) a crag in Saxhólagil where Grettir the Strong is supposed to have left his “sax,” a one-edged sword. (Photo: Ann Eileen Lennert).
Then, when it was least expected, Gisli turned around and ran from the ridge up onto the crag known as Einhamar. The battle was fierce, and they succeeded in wounding Gisli several places with their spears, but he defended himself with great courage and strength, and they faced such a onslaught of rocks and powerful blows that none escaped being wounded. When Gisli struck, he never missed. Now Eyjolf and his kinsmen saw that their honor was at stake, and they attacked harder than ever, thrusting at him with their spears until his guts spilled out. Gisli gathered them up together in his shirt and bound them underneath with the cord. Then he told them to hold off a while. “The end you wanted will come,” he said and spoke a verse:
Goddess of golden rain,
who gives me great joy,
may boldly hear report
of her friend’s brave stand.
I greet the sword’s honed edge
that bites into my flesh
knowing that this courage
was given by my father.
This was Gisli’s last verse. As soon as he had spoken it, he jumped off the crag and drove his sword into the head of Eyjolf’s kinsman, Thord, and split him down to the waist. In doing so, Gisli fell down on top of him and breathed his last (Smiley and Kellogg 2000: Gisli Sursson’s Saga).
The tale achieves three goals: It accounts for how certain natural phenomenon came to be; it provides evidence that the event actually happened; and it reinforces the sense of shared identity of the local group: “This is our story, about this landform, in our territory.” Gisli’s Saga is part of the Icelanders’ inheritance, and people are proud that they have this (our story). They can point to the place (this landform) and say, this is the place where the event of the saga happened (our territory) (Collignon 2006; Lethbridge 2011). The same applies to the story that one of the old hunters of Greenland told relating to Nuugaasuk as well as to many other Greenlandic myths (Rasmussen 1921).
Nuugaasuk, the pointed peninsula, was the place where food for the winter was produced. Tent rings and hunting cottages were placed here, where one still can see the fundaments and “fridges.” It was used to catch narwhals, seals and capelin. The area has a long history and stories related to the area: There had been a gathering in the area, where drum dancing and games were held. The people from Qornoq won a drum competition, and as they were sailing back with their victory, there suddenly came a very strong wind, which tumbled over the boat, so that everyone capsized and drowned. One says that it was the angakok, or soul of Nuugaasuk, who had gotten angry that they had won and revenged itself this way. Every time we passed by this area, I would remember the name and not least the frightening story (An old hunter from Kapisillit).
The local level, then, comprises the remembered experiences of the family or a group of people closely linked to a given hunting area or specific areas traveled, revealing a geography of the “lived” space of territory, a place of localness and relations. All the stories I was told and the knowledge that was shared when traveling were woven into one storyline; a line that shaped their lives and still continues to do so. Traveling made it clear to me how their movement in and travels through landscapes have been an important element for their perception, values, their “story of life,” place-names and relations to the localities which the names embed. One thing is certain: That stories bring the world into being, which is beautifully visualized through Julie Cruikshank’s (1990, 2015) works.
Summing up, mobility, narratives, knowledge, and locality are closely entwined and in many ways inseparable and difficult to delineate alone. Now, it is time to travel to the cultural landscapes of these two northern worlds and comparatively visualize these hypothetical ideas and the theories presented.
A Travel through Cultural Landscapes
Traveling around Iceland has always been a sui generis experience. One of the elements making it unique is the framework of stories embedded in the areas one passes through on one’s route. Usually, the stories relate to the Norse and their sagas, physical features, elves, and trolls. Trolls of rocks serve the role as a reminder that nature is always on the edge of the social world and infringe upon it (Hastrup 2008:65). And as the Inuas of the Inuit and Greenlanders, the spirits or souls of rocks a.o. indicate that they are engaged in a neverending conversation with nature, that nature speaks to them as well as sets the rules and regulations of an area; they build a relation.
But the cultural landscapes also hide other stories: a remembrance and a virtual map of people of the coasts reaching up to the highlands surrounding Svartárkot from where my Icelandic observations and experiences arise. They are stories that shape landscapes similar to those that I know from my own home region, the region I am familiar with, and knowledge similar to that I have with me from family, locals, and hunters of the Godthåbsfjord.
It is from traveling through these landscapes with my father, who loved nature and the surroundings, that I have my knowledge of the stories. We traveled with him when he went hunting. As children, we would follow him, and while traveling the landscapes, stories were shared with us as a virtual storybook (Farmer from the Svartárkot area).
A similar story was told by a hunter whose father would take him out of school, so they could hunt and fish for the winter.
My father would share his knowledge as we traveled along. It is because of him I know how to move, it is because of the place-names I remember. It is because of him I know, where I belong (Hunter from Kapisillit).
Kiðagil is named after a narrow canyon southwest of Bárðardalur Valley. In the old days, this valley was a place that travelers from the south were glad to reach, because there they would be safe from all the elves, outlaws, and other foul creatures roaming in the highlands (www.kidagil. is). My own fieldwork was centered at Kiðagil, where I got to know locals and farmers who had grown up in the surroundings or had relation to the farm of Svartárkot. I was taken on a trip through virtual maps that were visualized through knowledge, stories, and place-names surrounding us—a trip resembling my other travels made in the region as well as my journey through time, landscapes, and stories with the hunters in Greenland.
Like many other farms on Iceland, Svartárkot is an isolated farmstead in a dramatic landscape. The oldest remains of the Svartárkot farm are from AD 940 when it was located further south (Fig. 1). There the mound can still be seen, which we did while visiting the farm. Daniel Bruun had traveled through this area thinking that there would not be any farm here any longer because of the amount of erosion. The erosion had, indeed, been problematic for the old farmers, who then, in 1880, moved the farm to its current location.
People have been coming here and been able to live here because of the fish in the lakes, birds, and eggs supplementing their harvest (Farmer from Svartárkot).
This quote indicates that the resources available in the environment surrounding the farm had a great importance for the farm being able to survive despite being located in a remote and, at times, in terms of farming, unmanageable environment. Furthermore, the quote indicates how important resources that supplemented farming were and how people relied on them. They were what archaeologists would call collectors (Bettinger et al. 2015). Families occupied the same general area for most of the year, but, even though they maintained a permanent residential base, hunting and gathering were still conducted. They relied at least as much on the resources in their surroundings as the huntergatherers did. Resources, hunted or gathered, either from the farm or by moving out in shorter periods to harvest the resources, were collected as needed as supplies for winter.
Many associate Iceland with farming being the main pillar of sustainable economy; that humans have shaped the environments for farming, settled to farm, and identified themselves as farmers. However, the Icelandic economy was founded on two gifts of nature: farming and wild resources (Hastrup 1990) and, looking at the place-names of the first settlers, it is evident that, besides farming, hunting and gathering were of great value:
Skallagrim took the land from the mountain to the shore of the Myrar marshland out to Selalon (Seal Lagoon) (Smiley and Kellog 2000: Egil’s Saga).
To Grim the Halogalander he gave a plot of land south of Borgafjord called Hvanneyri (Angelica spit). Nearby is a small bay jutting into the land and because they found many ducks there, they named it Andakil (Ducks’ inlet) (Smiley and Kellog 2000: Egil’s Saga).
He had a farmstead built on Alftanes and ran another farm there and rowed out from it to catch fish, cull seals and gather eggs, all of which were of great abundance. There was plenty of driftwood to take back to his farm. Whales beached, too, in great numbers, and there was wildlife for the taking at this hunting post; the animals were not used to men and would never flee. He owned a third farm by the sea on the west part of Myrar. This was an even better place to gather driftwood, and he planted crops there and named it Akrar (Fields). The islands offshore were called Hvalseyjar (Whale islands), because whales congregated there. Skalagrim also sent people up river to catch salmon (Smiley and Kellog 2000: Egil’s Saga).
Besides farming and domestic labor, it is evident that a broad spectrum of animals was gathered and hunted. In addition to farming, hunting and gathering were highly efficient ways to generate surplus in case a harvest went wrong, or the other domain would fail. Looking at the cultural landscapes, upland fishing and hunting shelters, seasonal marine resourcerelated structures (Smith 1995), an archaeofauna manifest of harvesting a large diversity of wild resources, among others, were of great importance. Here place-names, as traditional knowledge, tell a story about the interaction between humans and nature. In Greenland, one would meet names such as Kapisillit—the salmon; Mannissuaq—the large eggs; or Taateraat—black legged kittiwake. In the same way, as in Greenland, this knowledge was also an important contributor to sustainable, adaptive resource management in Iceland. And here the cultural landscapes and place-names act as a virtual map linking the highlands with the coasts, visualizing a broader community of economic interaction and, not least, nature playing a dominant role, just as it is seen in Greenland.
The place-names in the Sagas and embedded in the Greenlandic landscapes show how good resource areas were mapped out and, along with toponyms, a name of a geographical place or feature known (Crate and Nuttall 2009), shaped a virtual memory of traditional knowledge; place-namesalso given by the Norse when arriving to Greenland (Fig. 5).
Map of Western Settlement, West Greenland, and the Norse place-names known at that time. Map is retrieved from the National Archives of Greenland (Meddelelser om Grønland XX).
Traveling down the valley of Bárðardalur towards the coast, the landscapes are embedded with place-names representing typonyms, such as Lundarbrekka—a clearing of the woods by a slope, which is the name of the farm area of the first settler; Rauðafell—the red hill; Myri—wet-lands; Engi—meaning a field, as in Engidalur, where “dalur” refers to a valley; Vellir, referring to a grassy area; Storuvellir—a larger grassy area; Litluvellir—a small grassy area; Lækjavellir—grass area with small springs running through it.
Bólstaður means a place to stay or a place to live. We have a song where one sings “upon the heath, I found my place to stay” (Farmer from Bárðardalur).
I was told stories how Bárðardalur was named after the settler Bárður. The areas of Kálf-borg, Kálfborgaráfell, and Kálfborgarárvatn were named after a slave of his, who escaped from the farm and was caught and killed in the area. Kálf-borg can be split into two words: Kálf meaning calf and borg meaning a small hill. One could discuss if Kálfborg is the name of the feature where the slave was killed, if the story of the place-name is made to remember the name as a link to a virtual map, or if he really was called Kálfborg. In any case, many of the people I traveled with emphasized, what a farmer had told me while hiking in the great valleys of Bárðardalur:
I love how people will explain geological features with stories of elves or stories from the Sagas (Farmer from Svartárkot).
The journeys I had taken in the Godthåbsfjord had, in return, taken me on a travel through time and space. Stories of journeys with family, brothers, and friends were told; they were detailed descriptions with examples of place-names indicating both resources and features, or rather typonyms, in the landscapes they had traveled through. They would travel by Angmagssivip—the small peninsula where one dries ammassat, capelin—indicating both a resource and a typonym; Tasersualukasiit—the bad small lakes; Qerqertannguaq—little island; Isorsiutigdlit—where it steems from the water; or Ivisât—the brown, red rocks. These place-names—together with the names presented in Iceland—set a comparative foundation for understanding the mobility, the narratives, and the relations, and as we now travel onwards, they will connect to a broader understanding of their entwinedness.
Life as a Lifetime Story
“Well, I tried to live my life right, just like a story” (Angela Sidney, Cruikshank 1990:1).
As Ingold (2007) implies, relations are a key element to trace the lived experience. When one relates, one usually relates to an area or rather a locality, and, as Emily Lethbridge (2011) emphasized, these relations act as a framework for learning and understanding the world, a framework of knowledge within we live. Knowledge is assemblages of many layers of inherently local knowledge, and localness provides the basis for making comparisons of cultures, traditions, and knowledge production. Knowledge is created by movement through natural and intellectual environments (Turnbull 2007); it is regional, cultivated by moving: We know as we go (Ingold 2000). The stories, narratives, and place-names map these knowledgespheres of locality. The important differences between how cultures assemble these knowledges lie in the ways in which they develop social strategies and technical devices, thereby creating their own knowledgespace by linking people, practices and places. Nevertheless, the stories, place-names, and knowledge are mapped by moving. Traveling itself is mapping, and it was by moving and traveling that both Inuit hunters and Icelandic farmers obtained their knowledge of different localities.
If one paraphrases Ingold (2007) a little: Knowing is a form of traveling, of moving through time and space, and traveling, like knowledge, is a form of narrative, where some of the complex interweavings can simply be perceived as a set of related “etymologies” of many terms closely associated with making, meaning, and knowledge (Turnbull 2007, 2012). Trails, along with string and stories, were among Homo sapiens’ first artifacts and may have been the foundational practices on which human cognition and knowledge are based (Carruthers 2002; Liebenberg 2002). The act of tracking, moving through the environments, following prey and reading signs, creates a complex of intellectual and cognitive connections and, at the same time, a physical trail, a topokinetic knowledge (Turnbull 2007).
Turnbull (2007:143) notes that
What nearly every culture seems to share, in one form or another, is the recognition and celebration of the hodological or topokinetic in their mythologies, ontologies or epistemologies, and especially in their stories, songs and maps. This commonality is based on the connectivity of trails, the creation of meaning through marking and linking.
This commonality became highly recognizable through my travels in Greenland and Iceland. The Icelandic farmers “lived their maps” through the mythologized landscapes, as well did the Inuit hunters through the passed-on stories of Inuas.
If all knowledge is inherently local, it provides localness as the basis for making comparisons of cultures and traditions as well as knowledge production systems. Ingold (2000, 2007), Turnbull (2007, 2012), Crate and Nuttall (2009), Collignon (2006), and Lethbridge (2011) all define knowledge as being local, regional, or set in a geographical space. Nevertheless, people do not only move within localities; they move within wider networks which help shape this localness. If knowledge is local, or shaped within wider networks, traces, knots, and lines of movement, the hunters and farmers certainly defined it. As shown throughout this paper, the place-names serve as a good example of local, embedded knowledge. The locality building through assemblages of knowledge makes these two northern worlds so close. However, as a collective body of knowledge, significant differences appear between the knowledgeproduction systems. Some of them appear through the work involved in creating the assemblages from different practices and in different cultural, social, and political settings. The Sagas, being in a dramatic and harsh world compared to stories told in Greenland, strongly define paths that establish linkages, relationships, and associations and legal, political, and land claims, among persons and groups.
The localness of knowledge production provides a condition for a fully comprehensive comparison of the ways in which understandings have been produced by different cultures and at different time and space. The importance of locality was expressed through the stories, always being related to a place-name or a place of locality. Together these stories created the assemblages of knowledge—knots from where lines would travel, the story of lives—contributing to development of the anthropology of the line.
Tim Ingold beautifully draws on ethnology and philosophy when visualizing the nature of the human being, sketching out what it actually means to live in the world; how do we apprehend it; how do we think about it; how do we live within it; how do we inhabit it; and how do we think about the sky, the atmosphere, the luminosity, the ground on which we tread; emphasizing that there is something distinctively human about all these things, wherever we are in the world.
Interestingly, when combining these theoretical approaches with Turnbull’s to illuminate the comparison of Greenland and Iceland, it was demonstrated that, in a sense, wherever we go, we tell stories, and what is distinctively human about us are the stories, the lines, the worlds we inhabit. One can tell a similar kind of story in an urban environment too. People living in a big city, like Nuuk, Reykjavik, or London, will also have their lines, their knots and meshwork. They will also have their own abilities to move and trace through the city and urban environment; having their own memoryscape about that place.
To sum up, locality, mobility, and knowledge are closely entwined, in many ways inseparable and difficult to delineate isolated. Combined they provide a path along which voices of the past can be retrieved and brought back into the immediacy of present experience (Ingold 2007:15), regardless of moving in the cultural environments, harsh landscapes, or urban environments and cities.
The past can feel extraordinarily near to the present. The stories live beyond the printed page in the Icelandic landscapes and in the imagination of the people who live there (Lethbridge 2011).
The two northern worlds both relate to their localness, in narrative, and the occurrences of the past, retracing a path through the world of others, recursively picking up the threads and lines of past lives, and continuing the process. The two case studies illuminate the nature of being human and being in the world as well as one’s world never being complete but continually under construction.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the hunters of the Godthåbsfjord for once more letting me use and share their knowledge as well as for taking me with them on their journey of life. I wish to thank Guðrun Tryggvadóttir for inspiring me to do this study through my travels with her through the cultural landscapes of Svartárkot and other helpful and knowledgeable people I met on my way. I want to thank Viðar Hreinsson for taking the time to talk, message, translate, and discuss, and I thank Mark Nuttall for leading me on the right track when I got lost. Last, but not least, I wish to thank Dudo og Povl Brandts Fond that supported my travels and work on Iceland.
