Weirding Landscapes

This open access book investigates human-environment relations in the context of the anthropocenic Arctic. Through an archaeological and anthropological study of landscape, it wields “weirding” – a creative mode of engagement with the world – as a means of coming to terms with the stranger, experiential dimensions of a planet populated by diverse non-human entities often bearing monstrous characteristics. Such entities are exemplified by climate change itself, at once human-induced and a force of its own volition that maintains an elusive “presence” as a co-inhabitant of the Anthropocene. The book focuses on the landscape of Ritnicohkka, a fjell in Sápmi, Finnish Lapland. Ritnicohkka is erstwhile home to a diminutive “glacier”, whose “weird”, anomalous characteristics crowned the fjell until it several years ago melted into history. Taking a broadly autoethnographic approach, it considers perceptions of, and affective experiences in, this rough and relatively remote, “otherworldly” environment, discussing diverse ways of encountering and relating to the Arctic in the context of scientific fieldwork. Vesa-Pekka Herva is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research focuses on the perceptions and experiences of the European High North. Aki Hakonen, PhD, is an archaeologist and a fledgling science writer. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu. Roger Norum is Academy Fellow and Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oulu. His research across the Arctic and South/Southeast Asia focuses on mobility, infrastructure, and sociality in human-environment relations. Oula Seitsonen, Sakarin-Pentin Ilarin Oula, PhD, is Academy Fellow at the University of Oulu. Geographer and archaeologist by training, his research ranges from Stone Age East Africa to Arctic conflict heritage. Markus Fjellström is a postdoctoral researcher in Archaeology at Lund University where he studies Late Paleolithic and Early Mesolithic reindeer mobility in southern Scandinavia using stable isotope and aDNA analysis.