Summary: | In this chapter, Johanne Haaber Ihle and Eva La Cour discuss how historical assumptions of visual anthropology, present in many earlier films of the Arctic, are both upheld and challenged by modes of participant-observer in contemporary nomadic life in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. In La Cour’s film The Tour (2012), the nomads are taxi drivers, tourists, scientists, and miners, whose stories are offset against a partially obscured and dramatic Svalbard landscape, to challenge precisely the notion that the landscape and location bear intrinsic meaning separate from cultural and aesthetic traditions of representing it.
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