Communitification and emotional capital: Producing, shaping and re-shaping communities before and after mining in Norbotten and Disko Bay

Abstract

Abstract Mining activities in the Arctic often have a strong impact on people living here and the sustainability of their communities. The article takes as its point of departure two widely different cases relating to Arctic communities: the former mining city of Qullissat in the Greenlandic Disko Bay area and the rural village of Sakajärvi, which is threatened by expansions of the Aitik copper mine in the Norbotten County, Sweden. The cases differ in terms of time span, the number of people affected and the intensity of the affective economies, but they go through comparable processes of giving rise to emotional communities as a result of the termination or expansion of mining activities. Based on field observations and social and web-based media, the author argues that various actors with diverging purposes here compete to install their respective temporalities and narratives in the processes of communitification, i.e., by articulating borders or performing as community. In both cases, the communities employ narrative strategies of uchronotopia: aiming towards better futures by narratively breaking with the past. The agency of these communities depends to a high extent on the intensity of their affective economies, a symbolic capital that may hold considerable potential for creating desirable futures.