Kirsten Hastrup
Biographic Data
| ID | 3581003 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kirsten Hastrup |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kirsten |
| FAMILY NAME | Hastrup |
| SIGNATURE | HASTRUP K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 93 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 771 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 85 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 8 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The End of Nature? Inughuit Life on the Edge of Time
The Inughuit of Northwest Greenland are hunters of marine mammals and other animal species of the High Arctic ecological system. Their life is rapidly changing along with the warming Arctic, and they experience massive changes in the environment that always sustained them. This fuels a question of the end of nature, to be addressed through three different natural materialities: ice, water, and land-all of them deeply infiltrating social life. The…
Postscript 1 – The Prophetic Condition
Introduction: Waterworlds At Large
The muskox world: Human-animal histories in the Arctic
This article follows the trail of muskoxen over many millennia and continents, focussing on their relations to humans – as their hunters and their protectors, itinerant partners and boundary makers. The human-animal histories referred to in the title began when the Pleistocene era was replaced by the Holocene and continued until the present. The article is not “historical” in the sense of being governed by a strict timeline, but the argument unfo…
Performing the World: Agency, Anticipation and Creativity
In this chapter, the author explores a set of theoretical issues related to the way in which social worlds are performed; by this she mean that social worlds have no existence outside of practice and performance - however much they seem to be systematic in some sense or other. Her argument will start in a discussion of the eventness of being, with a view to identifying social agency and its temporality. The author proceeds to a discussion of the …
Living (with) Ice: Geo-sociality in the High Arctic
The main tenet of this article is to show how the ice, so visually dominant in the High Arctic, is also a prominent life force. The ice is never still and as it moves, melts or freeze, it deeply affects human and animal life in the region; conversely the diverse life-forms affect the icy environment in their own way and tempo. This interplay exposes the geo-social relations at the centre of this article, taking off from the gradual retraction of …
Mindeord: Niels Fock (1927-2020)
Mindeord: Niels Fock (1927-2020
Emotional Topographies: The Sense of Place in the Far North
Thule as Frontier
Located in Northwest Greenland, the Thule region is a remarkable frontier zone. This article focusses on the undecided nature of the frontier in both time and space. The article explores the unstable ground upon which ‘resources’ emerge as such. The case is made in three analytical parts: The first discusses the notion of commons and the implicit issue of spatiality. The second shows how the region’s living resources were perceived and poses a qu…
Colonial Moments in Greenland: Mutable Tensions in the Contact Zone
In 2009, Greenland obtained self-government, terminating Danish supremacy, which had taken many forms over the centuries. This article analyses significant moments in Greenlandic-Danish relations by unpacking distinct contact zones that have emerged through the many encounters between locals and newcomers. Contact zones are always emplaced and create their own logic, which is not always easily readable as “colonialism” in the sense of appropriati…
The Historicity of Health: Environmental Hazards and Epidemics in Northwest Greenland
The Thule community (Northwest Greenland) sets the scene for this study of health and environmental hazards in a historical perspective. In the early 19th century, when European contact was first made, the region was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, and the tiny population was on the brink of extinction partly owing to epidemics. This was to change in the late 19th century when more regular contact was made and provisions became more secu…
Antropologiens landskaber. Fratrædelsesforelæsning, 23. februar 2018
Antropologiens landskaber. Fratrædelsesforelæsning, 23. februar 2018
D enmark, Anthropology in
In the opening years of the twenty‐first century, anthropology in Denmark has become a widely recognized field of scholarship both at home and internationally. While being increasingly internationalized in terms of research interests as well as of recruitment, it has remained distinct not least in terms of its public position in Danish society. This has deep roots in an earlier “preprofessional” anthropology that took off in the eighteenth centur…
Dogs among others
With the dogs in particular, their relation to other species is inherently unstable. They may be co-hunters, helping their masters to get meat, or they may themselves be meat, enabling people to survive a meagre period. For the Inughuit community as a whole the current waning of the bear-hunt is part of a larger vicious circle of dwindling ice, destabilization of the walrus hunt, famished dogs, and strict quotas on the bear. The hunt itself invol…
Introducing the North Water: Histories of exploration, ice dynamics, living resources, and human settlement in the Thule Region
The North Water is a recurrent polynya in the High Arctic situated between Northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island of Canada. The North Water makes a dynamic space, where various processes may enhance or obstruct each other, accelerating or halting particular modes of human-animal relations in the region, where life itself depends on the North Water. This will be discussed in four steps. The first step posits the North Water as a perceived oasis…
Life around the North Water ecosystem: Natural and social drivers of change over a millennium
The formation of the North Water in Smith Sound about 4500 years ago, as evidenced by the establishment of bird colonies and human presence, also initiated a long-term anthropogenic agent as part of this High Arctic ecosystem. Different epochs have influenced the human occupation in the area: immigration pulses from Canada and Alaska, trade with meteorite iron throughout the Arctic, introduction of new technologies by whalers and explorers, explo…
Living in an oasis: Rapid transformations, resilience, and resistance in the North Water Area societies and ecosystems
Based on lake sediment data, archaeological findings, and historical records, we describe rapid transformations, resilience and resistance in societies and ecosystems, and their interactions in the past in the North Water area related to changes in climate and historical events. Examples are the formation of the polynya itself and the early arrival of people, ca. 4500 years ago, and later major human immigrations (different societies, cultural en…
Walrus history around the North Water: Human-animal relations in a long-term perspective
This article highlights the relationship between walruses and humans in and around the North Water polynya in a long-term perspective. The present study draws on a combination of biological, archaeological, archaeo-zoological, historical, and ethnographic sources covering the period from the 8th century ad to the late 20th century. The study demonstrates that the walrus was an important resource of meat, blubber, and other products throughout all…
Collaborative Moments. Expanding the Anthropological Field through Cross-Disciplinary Practice
This article explores some implications of cross-disciplinarity, as experienced in practice. Anthropologists are used to fuse different styles of reasoning by integrating the points of view and unspoken certainties of their partners in the field into their analysis. Fieldwork can be seen as an experiment in real time, where insights gained intersubjectively gradually shape up as knowledge through analysis. This line of thought is brought to bear …
The Viability of a High Arctic Hunting Community: A Historical Perspective
This chapter is based on recurrent fieldwork in North West Greenland over the past nine years and on historical sources. The region is currently subject to rapid warming and to decreasing possibilities for subsisting on the living resources, notably marine mammals that have been basic to social life since prehistoric times. I shall discuss the concept of sustainability in three moves, corresponding to three phases in the history of the Inughuit. …
Postscript 1: The Prophetic Condition
Świadomość mięśniowa. Wytwarzanie wiedzy w Arktyce
Hastrup omawia proces wytwarzania wiedzy w antropologii, wskazując, że choć opiera się ona na badaniach terenowych, to nie można jej do nich sprowadzać. Swój wywód konstruuje wokół pojęcia „umiejętności” (skills), zapożyczonego od Ingolda (2000), który kładzie nacisk na specyficzny charakter umiejętności, nie będących jedynie technikami ciała, lecz także zdolnością do działania i percepcji, rozwijaną przez czynne uczestnictwo w otoczeniu i relacj…
Moving facts in an Arctic field: The expedition as anthropological method
This article reflects on the merits of the expedition as an anthropological method on the basis of a recent cross-disciplinary experience, involving biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists working together in High Arctic Greenland. True to the term, the expedition had chartered a vessel from where the team could go ashore in places that would otherwise have been difficult to access, and where the individual perspectives could cross-fertili…
Waterworlds: Anthropology in Fluid Environments
Waterworlds
In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in mo…
Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object
Getting it right: Knowledge and evidence in anthropology
In this article the nature of anthropological knowledge is discussed with a view to a reassessment of the call for evidence. It will be argued that the traditional view of evidence as being somehow outside a particular argument is untenable, given the way in which anthropology accesses knowledge by engaging a particular field. This may be seen to lead to an uneasy question of authority in anthropology, yet at closer inspection, it is possible to …
Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
Anthropology poses an explicit challenge to standard notions of scientific knowledge. It claims to produce genuine insights into the workings of culture in general on the basis of individual social experience in the field. Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge traces the process from the ethnographic experience to the analytical results, showing how fieldwork enables the ethnographer to arrive at an understanding, not only of 'culture' …
Anthropological Advocacy: A Contradiction in Terms? [and Comments]
The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention
A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory
The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage to Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. I…
Hunger and the Hardness of Facts
Until recently, human suffering has received sparse attention in anthropology. It is argued that this is due to the theoretical legacy of anthropology, which favours studies of whole and largely well-functioninllg social systems. The aim ofthe article is to discuss the potential ofsocial anthropology in the study of human hardship, not as something extra-social, but as an integral part of human experience. The argument proceeds through a presenta…
Violence, Suffering and Human Rights: Anthropological Reflections
This article develops a trenchant critique of the rise of human rights as the main universal standard against which to judge violence and suffering. It begins with a case study of an act of mass atrocity in Surinam that was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and which demonstrates the ways in which rights-based conceptions of justice distort our understandings of suffering and pare down social and moral narratives. Legal lang…
Social anthropology. Towards a pragmatic enlightenment
Apres une vingtaine d'annees de debat post-moderniste, le temps est venu de reexaminer l'unite de l'anthropologie en tant que champ de connaissance distinct. De nombreuses disciplines etudient la culture, et un certain nombre ont adopte 'l'ethnographie' et le travail de terrain. La distinction de l'anthropologie ne decoule donc pas d'un objet d'etude particulier (la societe ou la culture) ou d'une methode particuliere (le travail de terrain). Je …
Culture and History in Medieval Iceland: An Anthropological Analysis of Structure and Change
In 930, Iceland first established a common law for the island and became an autonomous republic, which lasted until it came under the sovereignty of the Norwegian king nearly three and a half centuries later. This volume is a two-part analysis of that society, known as the Icelandic commonwealth or Freestate. The first section examines how medieval Icelanders classified and perceived such domains as time, space, kinship, political organization, a…
Communicating Climate Knowledge: Proxies, Processes, Politics
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Ultima Thule: Anthropology and the Call of the Unknown
This article discusses the way in which the constitutive condition of anthropology, often dismissed as 'colonial', is still inherent in anthropological practice. It is argued that anthropologists are still answering a 'call of the unknown' by which to expand the horizon of the modern social imaginary. The vehicle of this discussion is found in early Arctic ethnography, not least in the works of (Danish) Knud Rasmussen. It is shown how ancient ima…
Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times
Collaborative Moments. Expanding the Anthropological Field through Cross-Disciplinary Practice
This article explores some implications of cross-disciplinarity, as experienced in practice. Anthropologists are used to fuse different styles of reasoning by integrating the points of view and unspoken certainties of their partners in the field into their analysis. Fieldwork can be seen as an experiment in real time, where insights gained intersubjectively gradually shape up as knowledge through analysis. This line of thought is brought to bear …
The nomadic landscape: People in a changing Arctic environment
Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography 109(2):181-189, 2009 The paper will explore the sense of place in the Thule district, Northern Greenland, including the emotional topography by which people live. The analytical framework is the notion of a nomadic landscape, drawing from the essay on nomadology by Deleuze & Guattari (2004). The nomadic landscape is constituted by a network of spatial centres-or points of reference-from each of wh…
Anthropological contributions to the study of climate: Past, present, future
In the world of climate science there is an increasing demand for contributions from the social sciences, given that the current processes of climate change deeply affect societies. This article is a response to this call, with specific focus on past and potential contributions from anthropology, as we have known it from the 19th century onwards. It is shown how through the ages, different anthropological interests have shaped distinct perspectiv…
Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840
Out of Anthropology: The Anthropologist as an Object of Dramatic Representation
Scales of attention in fieldwork: Global connections and local concerns in the Arctic
The social sciences face a set of complex challenges in an era of intensifying global connections that seem to undermine their constitutive object. Cultures, nations and even societies are not what they used to be, and the 'methodological nationalism' that once qualified the social sciences is no longer self-evident. One of the manifest perforations of local communities comes with the experience of dramatic climate change. Based on fieldwork in n…
Life around the North Water ecosystem: Natural and social drivers of change over a millennium
The formation of the North Water in Smith Sound about 4500 years ago, as evidenced by the establishment of bird colonies and human presence, also initiated a long-term anthropogenic agent as part of this High Arctic ecosystem. Different epochs have influenced the human occupation in the area: immigration pulses from Canada and Alaska, trade with meteorite iron throughout the Arctic, introduction of new technologies by whalers and explorers, explo…
All the World's a Stage: The Imaginative Texture of Social Spaces
In this article, Shakespeare’s theatre provides the point of departure for a discussion of social spaces in general. “The social” itself is a performed space, where notions of place, performance time, and coactors play a crucial role in the shaping of individual actions. Most important, it is argued that meaningful action is always partly based on a sense of the plot in which one participates, and thus in anticipation of what will happen next. Th…
Introducing the North Water: Histories of exploration, ice dynamics, living resources, and human settlement in the Thule Region
The North Water is a recurrent polynya in the High Arctic situated between Northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island of Canada. The North Water makes a dynamic space, where various processes may enhance or obstruct each other, accelerating or halting particular modes of human-animal relations in the region, where life itself depends on the North Water. This will be discussed in four steps. The first step posits the North Water as a perceived oasis…
Walrus history around the North Water: Human-animal relations in a long-term perspective
This article highlights the relationship between walruses and humans in and around the North Water polynya in a long-term perspective. The present study draws on a combination of biological, archaeological, archaeo-zoological, historical, and ethnographic sources covering the period from the 8th century ad to the late 20th century. The study demonstrates that the walrus was an important resource of meat, blubber, and other products throughout all…
The Dynamics of Anthropological Theory
This article is a general discussion of the nature and implications of anthropological theorizing in the contact zone, that is the space where cultures meet and horizons fuse. In so far as we can no longer see anthropology as simply the study of other cultures, the theoretical language of anthropology must be a language of contrast, which may challenge the self-understanding on both sides of the contact zone at the same time. A distinction betwee…
The reality of anthropology
The article concerns the continuity between anthropology and the reality it studies. Discovery and definition merge. This is substantiated by a discussion of 'events' and 'worlds'. While the anthropologist becomes her own informant in the field, in the sense that her experience informs her ethnography, anthropology simultaneously shapes her discoveries. This simultaneity ultimately dissolves the distinction between subject and object, and from th…
Den ny Antropologi
Classification and demography in medieval Iceland
Anthropology and the exaggeration of culture: A review article
Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed
The World of Play
Kitchen-Table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway
Culture and History in Medieval Iceland: An Anthropological Analysis of Structure and Change
In 930, Iceland first established a common law for the island and became an autonomous republic, which lasted until it came under the sovereignty of the Norwegian king nearly three and a half centuries later. This volume is a two-part analysis of that society, known as the Icelandic commonwealth or Freestate. The first section examines how medieval Icelanders classified and perceived such domains as time, space, kinship, political organization, a…
Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times
The War of the Gods: The Social Code in Indo-European Mythology
1. The Structural Analysis of Myth 1.1. The Nature of Myths 1.2. Time and History 1.3. Understanding Myths 1.4. Myth and the Cultural Order 1.5. Problems of Method 2. Indo-European Cultures as a Field of Ethnological Study 2.1. The Social Organization of Indo-European Society 2.2. Social Stratification and the Political Order 2.3. The Indo-European Pantheon 3. The Wars of the Gods in Scandinavian Mythology 3.1. The Scandinavian Pantheon in Icelan…
Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840
The reality of anthropology
The article concerns the continuity between anthropology and the reality it studies. Discovery and definition merge. This is substantiated by a discussion of 'events' and 'worlds'. While the anthropologist becomes her own informant in the field, in the sense that her experience informs her ethnography, anthropology simultaneously shapes her discoveries. This simultaneity ultimately dissolves the distinction between subject and object, and from th…
Saeters in Iceland 900–1600: An anthropological analysis of economy and cosmology
Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400–1800: An Anthropological Analysis of History and Mentality
The Icelandic Free State which flourished from 930 to the middle of the thirteenth century gave rise to a sophisticated political system and had a rich literary culture. However, by 1400 the structure of this society had begun to crumble. The following period, from 1400 to 1800, has been largely overlooked by scholars. In this book Kirsten Hastrup offers an analysis of Icelandic society during a period of remarkable social disintegration and tech…
Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism
lCELAND is situated on the geographical margins of Europe, and the links of communication across the North Atlantic were not always intensive. Yet historically Iceland was always embedded in the wider Nordic and European context, a fact which is reflected also in the seventeenth-century witch-trials. The present paper is concerned with these trials under the double perspective of the witch-craze in Early Modern Europe, in relation to which Icelan…
Anthropological Advocacy: A Contradiction in Terms? [and Comments]
Worlds apart: Comprehending each other across time and space
The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention
On Anthropological Advocacy
Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800: An Anthropological Analysis of History and Mentality
Part 1 Perspectives: conceptual framework empirical background. Part 2 The social experience: modes of livelihood landownership foreign relations. Part 3 The human condition: morals and letters ideas of influence the environment. Part 4 Implications: analytical results theoretical reflections
Island of Anthropology: Studies in Past and Present Iceland
Out of Anthropology: The Anthropologist as an Object of Dramatic Representation
Hunger and the Hardness of Facts
Until recently, human suffering has received sparse attention in anthropology. It is argued that this is due to the theoretical legacy of anthropology, which favours studies of whole and largely well-functioninllg social systems. The aim ofthe article is to discuss the potential ofsocial anthropology in the study of human hardship, not as something extra-social, but as an integral part of human experience. The argument proceeds through a presenta…
Other Histories
Other Histories
Anthropological theory as practice
L'A. repond aux remarques de chercheurs, notamment par Sigriour Duna Kristmundsdottir, par quelques observations sur sa conception du projet theorique, du travail de theorisation en anthropologie, de la pratique anthropologique, et plus particulierement sur sa conception epistemologique de l'«anthropologie indigene» et de la «culture» afin de rectifier la mauvaise interpretation de son travail, selon laquelle l'anthropologie indigene serait une i…
Sociology (52 works) · History (35 works) · Anthropology (32 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Indigenous Studies and Ecology (30 works) · Geography (24 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · History (18 works)