TY - JOUR

T1 - The figure of the guide

T2 - Arctic nature guiding as productive behaviour on Svalbard

AU - la Cour, Eva

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Drawing from ethnographic participation in a ski excursion among a group of Arctic Nature Guide students on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, this paper explores guiding as a model of practice embedded in relations – material encounters, discursive frictions and collaborative efforts. The article pays attention to practical negotiations and navigations of these relations while making use of historical scholarship on the role of the guide as a basis for theoretical reflections on the role’s mediation activities. More precisely, the paper advocates a “creation-model of mediation” that challenges modernist representational discourse (and conceptualisations of nature) through a recognition of guiding as productive behaviour. Displaying agency in meaning-making and embodying Svalbard’s transient cosmopolitan population, the guide emerges as a figure on ground far from fixed and settled, and as a tool with which to appraise Svalbard as more geo-aesthetical condition than bounded place.

AB - Drawing from ethnographic participation in a ski excursion among a group of Arctic Nature Guide students on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, this paper explores guiding as a model of practice embedded in relations – material encounters, discursive frictions and collaborative efforts. The article pays attention to practical negotiations and navigations of these relations while making use of historical scholarship on the role of the guide as a basis for theoretical reflections on the role’s mediation activities. More precisely, the paper advocates a “creation-model of mediation” that challenges modernist representational discourse (and conceptualisations of nature) through a recognition of guiding as productive behaviour. Displaying agency in meaning-making and embodying Svalbard’s transient cosmopolitan population, the guide emerges as a figure on ground far from fixed and settled, and as a tool with which to appraise Svalbard as more geo-aesthetical condition than bounded place.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Geo-aesthetics

KW - mediation

KW - the figure the guide

KW - Svalbard

KW - processes of knowing

U2 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247423000104

DO - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247423000104

M3 - Journal article

VL - 59

JO - Polar Record

JF - Polar Record

SN - 0032-2474

IS - e18

ER -