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Minding Arctic Fields

This Special Issue of Time & Mind takes the unique frame of a single week of fieldwork in a particular corner of the planet. During early August 2020, a small group of researchers and students in archaeology and anthropology working on different matters of research and using varying methodological approaches, travelled together to the village of Kilpisjärvi in northwest Finland. The field course that was organized around this trip aimed to offer training to students in field-based ethnographic and visual anthropological research methods. In the mornings, the students received instruction in particular topics related to the doing of field research; in the afternoons, they accompanied the course leaders on their own data-gathering endeavours in the landscapes around Kilpisjärvi. Across the week, the researchers carried out their own fieldwork, some of them on their own and some in groups. Yet the Kilpisjärvi week did not comprise a ‘standard’ run of fieldwork in that not all of the researchers necessarily had specific aims or questions in mind; rather, we came with interests in a set of broader themes that we wanted to engage with: reindeer herding, land use conflicts, tourism, nature preservation, ecoacoustics, and the well-preserved military presence of WW2 German troops in the region, to name a few. We had long entertained the idea of carrying out both collaborative and individuals research in the region, and the 2020 summer – which constituted a small gap between Coronavirus waves – seemed an opportune time to survey and ponder the possibilities and the intersections between our different research interests. We were drawn to an ‘open-ended’ approach for two reasons. First, we wanted to put on an intensive field school for advanced students in our faculty, most of whose own work had by then already been disrupted by the Coronavirus for half a year. We hoped in this to expose the students to a range of practice-based approaches and issues related to fieldwork in a landscape unfamiliar to most of them. Second, we wanted to see what new opportunities might exist in the area for new research pursuits of our own. The leaders of this endeavour comprised two professors, a lecturer, and a post-doctoral researcher, as well as a doctoral student who led much of the course's organisation and logistics. They were joined by five students across BA, MA and PhD levels in archaeology, cultural anthropology and Sámi studies. A group of ten people in total, we each had varying relationships to the region. One had conducted anthropological fieldwork with reindeer herders in the region some two decades earlier, another was involved in archaeological and geographical research on reindeer herding practices, yet another had long TIME AND MIND 2021, VOL. 14, NO. 3, 345–347 https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2021.1953881