Abstract
ABSTRACT This introduction to this special issue considers various approaches to understanding ‘the field’ as an object of archaeological and anthropological research, and researchers’ own engagements with it. We draw out some theoretical and methodological approaches to the field as a way of interrogating the cognitive and physical engagements of the researcher with it, not only as a place and process of data gathering and knowledge production, but one of reflexivity and self-understanding. This seeks to appreciate the effects that the fieldwork experience has on the researcher and, thus, on the science they produce for their (disciplinary) field. Building on reflexive approaches to fieldwork and ethnographies of practice, we explore the implications of fieldworking in, particularly, the European Arctic. This paper further considers several entanglements in the past and present of the European Arctic as a field more generally as a way of framing the specific field site that we have focused this special issue around: the village of Kilpisjärvi (Gilbbesjávri) in Finnish Lapland.
Highlights
Archeology and anthropology have long had a complex relationship to field work
Fieldwork is core to the identity of archaeology and anthropology, both as they are conceived by those disciplines’ academic practitioners and in the public perception of them. These common associations are pronounced in the case of archaeology, whose digs and excavations regularly feature in popular culture and news, but anthropol ogy figures into the cultural imaginary as a journey to some place, often seen to beremote’, in order to study some people, often seen to be ‘primitive’
This article has presented a number of questions pertaining to the nature of ‘being in the field’, how this has an effect on ‘doing’ archaeology and anthro pology, as well as what it means to be in a Arctic field, with all its cultural, ideological, political and environ mental connotations
Summary
Archeology and anthropology have long had a complex relationship to field work. Fieldwork, though considered a foundational practice to the two disci plines, remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, a proceess during which. Reindeer herding is con stantly under pressure, and has been changing and adapting to the more general changes in land use (as related to, for example, mining and tourism), and its relationship to the local (regional) landscape has changed over time This conflict and its ubiquity in much of life in and around Kilpisjärvi is a main reason we wanted to undertake fieldwork there in the first place, exploring it in relation to other pressing issues, in particular tourism and the protection (or lack thereof) of natural and cultural heritage
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