Lake Duortnus, Royal Science, and Nomadic Practices
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Faculty of Social and Life Sciences Environmental Studies Katarina Schough Lake Duortnus, Royal Science, and Nomadic Practices Karlstad University Studies 2007:11 Katarina Schough Lake Duortnus, Royal Science, and Nomadic Practices Karlstad University Studies 2007:11 Katarina Schough. Lake Duortnus, Royal Science, and Nomadic Practices Research Report Karlstad University Studies 2007:11 ISSN 1403-8099 ISBN 978-91-7063-114-6 © The author Illustrations by Johan Thuri and Britta Marakatt-Labba Distribution: Faculty of Social and Life Sciences Environmental Studies SE-651 87 Karlstad SWEDEN [email protected] +46 54-700 10 00 www.kau.se Printed at: Universitetstryckeriet, Karlstad 2007 Contents 1. Lake Duortnos: Geotomy versus Giella giella ............................................... 3 2. Research spatiotemporalities: going there and back again ........................ 7 3. Stronger and weaker maps of Lake Duortnos .......................................... 41 4. Planning projects and projecting plans: traces on the shores of Lake Duortnos .......................................................................................................... 83 1. Lake Duortnos: Geotomy versus Giella Giella Whatever is known has always seemed systematic, proven, applicable, and evident to the knower. Every alien system of knowledge has likewise seemed contradictory, unproven, inapplicable, fanciful, or mystical. May not the time have come to assume a less egocentric, more general point of view and speak of comparative epistemology? (Fleck 1979:22). Science and technology studies suggest that contemporary Western techno- sciences, rather than being treated as definitional of knowledge, rationality and objectivity, should be treated as one of many systems of knowledge.1 Science has always been resisted and contested, not least by its supposed “objects”. Questions of geography, space and worlding have been at the centre of such resistances and contestations. This book is an illustration of the encounters between different ways of knowing and relating to the world, namely Royal Science and Nomadic Practices. It is a register of the interplays of power, knowledge, and space as manifested in the multiple constructions of Lake Duortnos in northern Sweden. Naming is act of power and Lake Duortnos is an apt example of this. The lake has been called “Duortnos” or “Duortnosjávri” by some, while others prefer to call it “Torne träsk”. Others still, designate it as “Lake Torne”. Cartography has been a key instrument in the battle over place names. In official Swedish maps, parts of the lake and its surroundings Swedish, Sami and Finnish names. In this book, I have chosen to use the name “Lake Duortnos”. 3 Royal Science can be seen as an apparatus of capture – one that musters technologies, bodies, resources (earth, water, air) as well as outer space, and overcodes these in the service of capital, the state and colonisation. Scientific practices and mappings draw on, what I call, technologies of geotomy, i.e. operations that dissect and cut-up the earth. Technologies of geotomy integrate territory and life in the calculus of surveillance, control, and disciplination. Nomadic practises too involve territorializations, overcodings, and snaring devises. However, these are rooted in another set of axioms than those of Royal Science. The core rational of nomadic practices (as presented in this book) is pro-terra, i.e., has intimacy, symbiosis, and reciprocal nurture as its foundational axiom. Nomadic time-space follows rhythms, movements, and flows, that are situational, mutable, and open, in contrast to the rigid, absolute, and imposed colonial time-spaces. Relationships between states and nomads have been uncomfortable since early history. “For the urban Greeks nomadism was the indelible mark of the Scythians’ distance from civility, the sign and substance of an alien existence, the quintessence of otherness”.2 In this book, the term “nomadic” thus refers both to concrete practices and such a relational position. Colonization and disciplination of time and space is a primary objective of Royal Science. As such, it imposes a spatio-temporal matrix that transforms alternative rhythms, flows, and schedules. This matrix is central to projects of domination, conversion, and incorporation of societies, spaces, and economies. The commodification and abstract valuation of territory and life are central in the disciplination organisation of space. Thus, the pro-terra axioms of intimacy, symbiosis, and mutual nurture are sup- planted by the reductive and anti-terra axioms of abstract equivalence, viz., detachment, parasitism, profit, and plunder. At stake in the projects of colonisation are the erasure of nomadic worlds and lives. In the face of this expansionist agenda, “Giella giella” – giella (capture) and giella (language) – emerged as a clarion call to decolonization and the reclaiming of language, culture, and self. “Giella giella” is an expression that attends both to the fact that language capture worlds, and thus all the more reason to hold-on to your mother tongue to decolonize yourself, and recover your world. 4 To an outsider like me, Sami worlds appear to be (paradoxically) fragile and robust at the same time. Fragile, since as Paulus Utsi put it, “in these modern times the thoughts of people of nature are like dust – if something touches them they turn to nothing – lift and disappear”.3 Yet robust, since there are aspects of Sami life worlds that have never been totally subdued by colonisation – such as the spaces created and sustained by the joik. Joik is much more than a way of singing, it is a performance that recollects, brings forth, celebrates, and actualizes people, events, things, and landscapes. In the last two decades, the values of diverse, “local”, and “traditional” knowledges have been “upgraded” by the Treaties and Conventions of the United Nations, as well as by regional, national and transnational policy and planning documents. Yet, for each passing year the number of languages in the world continues to dwindle, the prospect of sustaining alternative livelihoods is waning,4 and humanity is successively creating a uni-verse under the sway of what Vandana Shiva called the “monocultures of the mind”.5 The big issues that current research is grappling with – climate change and global warming, resource depletion, sustainable development etc., are problems (in)directly related to hegemonic anti-terra practices and worldviews of modernity. It is high time that one recognizes the planetary crisis facing humanity, and we cannot afford to put all our eggs in the basket of Science, Capital, and the State. As Ludwik Fleck recognized almost a century ago; codified, monocultural science has outlived itself, and the task to find alternatives to Royal Science is perhaps more acute than ever. Embracing nurturing, non-doctrinaire, and non-condescending modes of knowledge is not primarily an epistemological and academic question, but a fundamentally about liveable worlds. The decolonization of territory and life from anti-terra philosophy and its apparatus of capture is not simply a Sami issue, but rather one that concerns us all. Neither earth nor lives willingly submit and completely avail themselves to the geotomical operations of anti-terra philosophy. We therefore have every reason to embrace theories of hope, and to insist on the fact that maps are too important to be left to cartographers alone.6 5 To the Reader I have chosen narrative montage as my main textual strategy to tell the story of the encounters between the nomadic practices and Royal Science. The truth claims of Royal Science and the consequences of colonialism and anti- terra practices are contrasted with the embodied experiences, commentaries, and ripostes by the Sami. I provide an historical account of the establishment and gradual expansion of Royal Science in the area around Lake Duortnos during the twentieth century. The relations between “researched” territory and “centres of calculation” are used to map the incorporation of Lake Duortnos by Royal Science as part of the wider matrix of colonization. Chapter three present narratives of professionals as well as laypeople and their descriptions of how Royal Science affects their lives. The final chapter is a montage of voices and lays out the different ways that three development projects have left traces on the shores of Lake Duortnos. 1 Watson-Verran & Turnbull 1995 in Jasanoff et al (eds.) 1995. More general arguments are presented in Fleck 1997, Kuhn 1992, Said 2003, Latour 1986, Knorr Cetina 2001, Harding 1991, and Haraway 1991. 2 Greenblatt 1991, p. 124. 3 Utsi in Gaski 1996, p.112 4 See the tremendous works of Skutnabb-Kangas 2000. 5 Shiva 1993. 6 Harley in Barnes & Duncan (eds.) 1992, p.231. 6 2. The Time-Space Matrix of Royal Science France bore us; we have seen Africa And drunk from the Ganges, We have wandered through all of Europe And engaged in countless exploits on land and sea. Now, here at last we stand, Having reached the farthest limits of the earth.1 Finally reaching what they perceived to be the farthest limits of the earth, Jean-Francis Regnard and his fellow travellers from France arrived at Lake Duortnos, in the year of 1681. Many have followed them since – settlers, explorers, industrialists, scientists and tourists. The relative “remoteness” of the Lake Duortnos area – but paradoxically also its relative accessibility – has since long been an important enticement for researchers to perform studies there.