Vær: On Place, Weather, Being, and Agency

Abstract

This photo installation is a side‐product of ethnographic research in Troms⊘, a city of 75,000 tucked along the Norwegian coast above the Arctic Circle. The main research addressed longer timeframes—examining Sami ethnopolitics, institution‐building, and social change since the 1970s, a time that marked increased engagement of indigenous peoples with national powers in many countries around the world, including in Norway. That project entailed time on‐the‐ground in Norway's far north observing the social diacritics of ethnicity in daily life, public events, and local media. Once we arrived, we found that weather and the changing of the light played a dominant role in our daily experience of life above the Arctic Circle, leading us toward this photo exhibit and contemplation. We had to develop techniquess for paying attention to the backdrop—not the microsocial processes of the main research, but rather the steady, shifting hum of the natural world. As a supplement to fieldnotes, shooting quick digital photos and videos became a sensorially‐rich means to capture the moment.In this photo installation, we present images of the environment. We use the visual vocabulary of the changing of the light in the arctic to consider the ways in which the natural world's rhythms act as the original, powerful “automated” force, challenging humans' sense of agency, creating the context—and certain limits—for their ability to exert their desired outcomes in the world. How can new technologies of automation be built to suit human life where society is already tailored to rhythms of nature that defy assumptions held by many of us living at lower latitudes? Among these 52 tiles, one for each week of the year, we include black tiles representing the time periods that we have never spent in Troms⊘, the gaps in our witnessing of the flow of annual natural cycles and annualized events in the collective social calendar of the Norwegian north. These visual and sensorial “gaps” raise questions about the constraints of ethnographers' knowledge, the reach of technologists' innovations into the world's peripheries, and embodied realities of place. Intermittency isn't inherently a disadvantage in ethnographic work, but it must be accounted for. How do ethnographers admit, adjust for, and overcome the intermittency of their presence at a fieldwork site? This question is especially pressing for those working in industry environments that demand short timeframes for moving from fieldwork to findings. For technologists, there is a related challenge: how to anticipate the ambient and embodied feeling of life where it is lived when they design products that travel across geographies. We hope this photo display provides a fruitful space for EPIC attendees to consider the strengths and limitations of their own methods.