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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.
“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
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).
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 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
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