Moving facts in an Arctic field: The expedition as anthropological method

• Published in: Ethnography
• Main Authors: Hastrup, Kirsten, Flora, Janne, Andersen, Astrid O.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2016
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); Anthropology; Cultural Studies; Arctic; Greenland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138116636900; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1466138116636900; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/1466138116636900

This article reflects on the merits of the expedition as an anthropological method on the basis of a recent cross-disciplinary experience, involving biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists working together in High Arctic Greenland. True to the term, the expedition had chartered a vessel from where the team could go ashore in places that would otherwise have been difficult to access, and where the individual perspectives could cross-fertilize each other in actual practice. It is argued that anthropology itself is a mode of experimentation in practice, which enables new trains of thought, and an engagement with other disciplinary practices. The gain of our cross-disciplinary experiment was therefore not only to know more about the makings of a particular landscape in a multi-disciplinary perspective, but also to understand how anthropology makes sense of inherently moving facts.