Introduction: Experience and Emotion in Northern Mobilities

Abstract

This introduction opens a special section on emotional and experiential aspects of travel in Northern and Siberian landscapes. Conventional representations of the Arctic as a frontier have foregrounded the difficulties and risks of travel. The collection of articles presented here serves to complement this perspective, exploring both negative and positive connotations of travel. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Greenland and Siberia, authors discuss the joy of movement along with moments of frustration and tension. Time and seasonality, companionship and imagination, and anticipated and unexpected encounters all bear particular significance in the Far North; simultaneously, they are key to a more nuanced understanding of the emotional qualities of travel in general.

KEY WORDS:

• Arctic
• Circumpolar North
• Anticipation
• Co-absence
• Companionship
• Encounter
• Imagination
• Means of transport

Notes

1. See Röttger-Rössler and Stodulka (2014) with reference to anthropological scholarship on emotion.

Additional information

Funding

Ludek Broz’s work on this article and the editorial work on the special section was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [grant number 13-06860P]. Joachim Otto Habeck expresses his thanks for many years of fruitful work at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which facilitated much of his research in the Far North and Siberia.