berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Figures

Preface: From Northern Lights to Fluorescent lights
Arthur Mason

Introduction: Arctic Late Industrialism: Extracting Value through Abstraction
Arthur Mason
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences

Chapter 1. To Melt Away: Abstractive Sensations in Ice
Cymene HoweThis chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences

Chapter 2. The Biggest, the Best, the Most, the Last: Creating Valuable and Vulnerable Resources in Coastal Alaska
Danielle DiNovelli-Lang and Karen Hébert

Chapter 3. Timescaping the Arctic with Real-Time Data: Challenges for Fishing and Oil Interests
Vidar Hepsø and Elena Parmiggiani

Chapter 4. Wild Lands, Remote Edges: Formations and Abstractions in Greenland’s Resource Zones
Mark Nuttall

Chapter 5. Forging Off-World Frontiers: Chinese Steel and Arctic Iron
Mia M. Bennett

Chapter 6. Constructing and Contesting Temporalities in the Mackenzie Gas Project
Carly Dokis

Chapter 7. Material Unconscious of the Earth: Extractive Ontology and the Invisible War in Siberia
Oxana Timofeeva

Chapter 8. Representation Without Resemblance: Graphical Expression in Hydrocarbon Industry
Arthur Mason

Afterword: Arctic Abstractions
Michael J. Watts
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences

Index

Arctic Abstractive Industry

Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North

Edited by Arthur Mason

Afterword by Michael J. Watts

192 pages, 15 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-468-5 Hb Published (April 2022)

eISBN 978-1-80539-447-1 eBook

Details

“This book is timely in bringing together scholars working on extractive industries and related themes in the Arctic, including fisheries, fossil fuels, and minerals development, climate change and the like in the US, Canada, Russia, and Greenland.” • Thomas F. Thornton, University of Alaska Southeast

Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.

Arthur Mason is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His previous edited volume is Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, with co-editors Hannah Appel and Michael Watts (Cornell, 2015).

Related Link: Open Access content

Introduction: Arctic Late Industrialism: Extracting Value through Abstraction
Arthur Mason
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences

Chapter 1. To Melt Away: Abstractive Sensations in Ice
Cymene Howe
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences

Afterword: Arctic Abstractions
Michael J. Watts
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences

Series: Volume 5, Studies in the Circumpolar North

Subject: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies

Area: Circumpolar

LC: HC733.5 .A737 2022

BISAC: BUS070150 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Industries/Natural Resource Extraction; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; NAT010000 NATURE/Ecology