The figure of the guide: arctic nature guiding as productive behaviour on Svalbard

Abstract Drawing from ethnographic participation in a ski excursion among a group of Arctic Nature Guide students on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, this paper explores guiding as a model of practice embedded in relations – material encounters, discursive frictions and collaborative efforts. The...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Polar Record
Main Author: la Cour, Eva
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0032247423000104
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0032247423000104
Description
Summary:Abstract Drawing from ethnographic participation in a ski excursion among a group of Arctic Nature Guide students on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, this paper explores guiding as a model of practice embedded in relations – material encounters, discursive frictions and collaborative efforts. The article pays attention to practical negotiations and navigations of these relations while making use of historical scholarship on the role of the guide as a basis for theoretical reflections on the role’s mediation activities. More precisely, the paper advocates a “creation-model of mediation” that challenges modernist representational discourse (and conceptualisations of nature) through a recognition of guiding as productive behaviour. Displaying agency in meaning-making and embodying Svalbard’s transient cosmopolitan population, the guide emerges as a figure on ground far from fixed and settled, and as a tool with which to appraise Svalbard as more geo-aesthetical condition than bounded place.