Becoming-icy: Scott and Amundsen’s South Polar voyages, 1910-1913

• Published in: cultural geographies
• Main Author: Wylie, John
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2002
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1474474002eu247oa; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1191/1474474002eu247oa

This paper presents a critical narration of the South Polar voyages of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. The argument which guides this narration is that it is through embodied, material practices - through relations of becoming anterior to a duality of discourse and world - that distinctive subjectivities and landscapes are produced. Within this conceptual frame, the paper focuses upon the differences between the expeditions led by Scott and Amundsen, and especially upon differences as regards styles of dwelling within and strategies for moving through the Antarctic landscape. Such differences, I argue, may be witnessed and narrated within the varying materialities, mobilities and corporealities enacted by the two expeditions. In analysing these via the format of a critical narrative, the aim is to foreground a sense of Scott and Amundsen’s voyages as concrete, sensuous contexts of practice and performance, and in this way the paper seeks to abet and inflect the interpretative strategies of current critical histories of European exploration.