An Emphatic Geography: Notes on the Ethical Itinerary of Landscape

Abstract

The year 2007 marked the beginning of the fourth International Polar Year, another frenzy of big science and circumpolar interest in questions of sovereignty, climate change, resources, and so on. At the same time, in the domain of the humanities, there are a host of re-elaborations of the very discourses of nordicity that seek to bring to light a North that is no longer merely an empty space and passage to elsewhere; rather, it is a North that has become a site and a figure, and a caution and a limit—a problem, in other words. My text proceeds from the unstable ground of this refigured nordicity. In the summer of 2005, I went North to the Mackenzie River basin with the typewritten field journals of Harold Innis. The young Innis had made the same trip in the summer of 1924, and my initial interest was an attempt to retrace his steps and to reflect on the place of North (as margin) in the development of his ideas at that time. Where his abiding concern had been production, innovation, and social relations, my own interest concerned method, writing, and landscape. Nonetheless, as I travelled up the length of the “River of Disappointment,” as Mackenzie called it, a methodological dialogue emerged.