A tour into untouched land: Enacting wilderness through relational engagements

Abstract

Drawing upon an ethnographic study of guided tours in Svalbard, in this article I explore how is the wilderness enacted as a situational and contextual outcome of more-then-human relations, emerging from engagements with the environment. As the engagements during the guided tours contest the often expected ‘purity’ of wilderness, I further investigate in detail when and how nature-culture dichotomy is both contested and re-produced in the enactment of wilderness. I argue that the nature-culture dichotomy constituting wilderness on Svalbard shifts from the idea of human-less nature to life in harmony with nature in which some human traces are present. This dichotomy then emerges from more-than-human relations. Further, I show that the character of wilderness is also emerging from different situations and contexts, where temporality, knowledge and dependency on self or others influence the engagements and more-than-human relations.