Svalbard in and beyond European modernity

• Main Author: Ryall, Anka
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Dutch
• Published: University of Groningen Press 2018
• Subjects: Svalbard; High Arctic; emergent place; modernity; gendered values; homemaking; Arthur Oxaas; Liv Balstad; Arctic; North Pole; Norway; Arctic Archipelago
• Online Access: https://ugp.rug.nl/tvs/article/view/31568

What does European modernity look like from the extremely peripheral perspective of Svalbard, a Norwegian High-Arctic archipelago located approximately midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole? This is a questions that informs my reading of two personal narratives describing twentieth-century Svalbard as an emergent form of place, in Eric Prieto's term an entre-deux, that is no longer "outside time" as an uncharted Arctic wilderness, yet still not a location that has become thoroughly subsumed into European modernity. Both are memoirs published in 1955, Svalbard var min verden by the former trapper and hunter Arthur Oxaas (1888-1972), Nord for det øde hav by Liv Balstad (1915-1966), wife of the first post-war Norwegian governor of Svalbard. While Svalbard var min verden is a predominantly nostalgic retrospective of a historical era of hunting and trapping that had come to an with the Second World War, Nord for det øde hav looks forward to a future in which Svalbard has become fully integrated in the modern Norwegian welfare society. However, both narratives share an emphasis on the Heideggerian topic of place-making through building and dwelling, as well as a gendered vision of an Arctic modernity based on the feminine-coded values of family, homemaking and everyday life.