Abstract
<p align="LEFT">What is the discursive genealogy of an ecological approach to the Arctic? Building on distinctions suggested by Francis Spufford and Gísli Pálsson, this article examines a specific juncture in the history of European–Arctic interaction – the reception of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition in 1874 – and traces the potential for ecological and relational understandings in what seems to be an orientalist and exploitative material. Examining the medial reception in Austria and in Norway, along with certain key texts in which Arctic wildlife is described, we find that the Norwegian reception of the expedition emphasizes practical issues connected with resource exploitation in the Arctic, while the Austrian reception mostly sees the Arctic as a symbolic resource with which to negotiate issues of identity and modernity. The Austrian discourse revolves around a set of paradoxical contradictions, the most central being those between materialism and idealism and emptiness and fullness; we argue it is the instability of such ambiguities which produces the possibility of a future ecological discourse.</p>
Highlights
We suggest that the horrors of the Arctic helped underline this argument: An environment as fiendish, challenging and little known as the Arctic was a necessary precondition for this discourse, as only in such an extreme situation could a “true” Austrian self emerge and be tested (Schimanski and Spring 2015, 451)
It is here we suggest that by treating attitudes to nature as discourses in Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, and examining the nodal points in these discourses for their ambiguities, we may sketch out openings and disjunctions in the system which can account for the introduction of communalist viewpoints
We have attempted to show in our analysis how at a certain historical juncture (1874), material exploitation is subject to the contingencies of geography (Austria-Hungary and Norway), bringing about a shift to symbolic exploitation, which in turn opens up to a potentially more relational discourse
Summary
Part of a series of texts on the Second German Polar Expedition to Eastern Greenland (1869–1870), in which Payer had participated, this description of nature in the Arctic was deemed to be of interest to a Northern Norwegian public – perhaps because of its practical usefulness as a guide to Arctic animals – with a Norwegian version being published in the local newspaper Tromsø Stiftstidende in April 1872.22 In Payer’s text, animals are seen mainly as things to be described or to be hunted, killed, eaten and used for their fur, making them nodal points within an exploitation discourse.
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