Killing Reindeer: A Spatial Analysis of Nordic States and Nomadic Forms of Life in the Arctic

Abstract

To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than casting the spatial relationships between states and reindeer herders as “land use conflicts,” the article shifts the focus from competing activities to violence toward one form of life perpetrated by another. Tracing state efforts of bordering, rationalization of reindeer herding as an industry, infrastructure developments, and cultivation of selected predatory lines of flight, the article illuminates an indirect violence that is slowly eliminating nomadic forms of life. This loss highlights that in the sixth great extinction, the world is losing not only distinct biological species but also different forms of life within species. Ultimately, the striation activities of the biopolitical Nordic states, in their narrow focus on Western knowledge regimes, security, profit, and geopolitical positioning for an impending Arctic resource boom, enact a violent and destructive homogenization of what constitutes life.

The Shrinking Resource Base of Pastoralism: Saami Reindeer Husbandry in a Climate of Change

“…All these in their separate ways influence the pastoral system and may therefore reasonably be assumed to reduce the proportional influence of climate variation on the dynamics of reindeer husbandry. The influence of non-climate anthropogenic factors on reindeer pastoralism has recently received considerable attention (e.g., Brännlund and Axelsson, 2011;Vuojala-Magga, 2012;Löf, 2013;Turi and Keskitalo, 2014;Strøm Bull, 2015;Riseth et al, 2016;Tolvanen et al, 2019;du Plessis, 2020;Hausner et al, 2020;Kirchner, 2020, this study;see also López-i-Gelats et al, 2015. There is increasing recognition that the effects of human intervention may on occasion far exceed those of climate variation on reindeer pastoralism (Vitebsky, 2005;Anderson, 2006;Povoroznyuk, 2007;Tyler et al, 2007;Rees et al, 2008;Konstantinov, 2015;Uboni et al, 2016) particularly, but not exclusively, in the near-term (Kelman and Naess, 2019).…”

“Time is our worst enemy:” Lived experiences and intercultural relations in the making of green aluminum

“…Copper mining and wind energy development on herding lands reduce the herd's ability to adapt and threatens reindeer herding. This triggered political and legal struggles shedding critical light on the Nordic countries’ will to guarantee Saami cultural survival (du Plessis, 2020). Two wind power projects are relevant in this article.…”

Digital technologies and ILK in the Arctic: In search of epistemological pluralism

“…The issues raised by the diffusion of digital technologies in the Arctic context are closely related to shared central concerns of anthropology and contemporary environmental philosophy (Zimmermann, 2005). Beyond the dualisms that characterize Western thinking about the relationship between humans and nature (Descola, 2013), environmental philosophy is working towards the emergence of theoretical frameworks in which non-human beings are not reduced to passive recipients of human intentionality, but rather seen as active agents of social life within the diversity of communities that inhabit the Earth. As one of the authors of this paper has explored, this de-anthropocentrization of thought radically changes the thinking about the quality of everyday relationships between humans, animals, plants and other living things, and their environment (Beau, 2015).…”