Introduction: human-muskox pathways through millennia

Abstract

The muskox (Ovibos moschatus) is a fascinating animal. It transgresses barriers of taxonomy, geological epochs and expectations of survival. Its Latin name reflects a bygone belief that it is a cross between sheep and oxen, while genetically the muskox’s closest relative is the goral, an Asian goat. It is one of the few Pleistocene megafauna to survive the Holocene Extinction Event in North America, and natural scientists today have shown that the genetic diversity of muskoxen in Greenland is so low it is a wonder it is not extinct already (Hansen et al. 2018). However, one of the other most remarkable things about the muskox, to us at least, is its relationship with humans, which despite their long history of co-existence in Greenland, is marked by bouts of intense and mutual engagement and transformation rather than by slow continuity. It is with this the present issue is concerned. The articles that follow grow out of the research project “Muskox Pathways: Resource and Ecologies in Greenland.” This anthropological and archaeological project explores the trajectories and transformations of humans-and-muskoxen through time. Thinking about pathways we are inspired partly by the “Muskox Way” theory (Steensby 1910), which placed muskoxen at the centre of prehistoric human migrations into Greenland, and partly by the biosciences, which see pathways as a series of actions or chains of reactions that cause an entity to change or to move (Macdonald et al. 2003; McKinney et al. 2015). In each their own way, the articles here examine the pathways along which the muskox migrates, emerges and transforms as a relational being, and demonstrate how the muskox is located in contexts and ecologies that are at once both natural and cultural, and neither wholly one or the other. Muskoxen, humans, and other species make up the shared world in which they all act upon and shape one another. This process affords the muskox to come into being – or become – in a multitude of ways. The relations that come out of such pathways, we suggest, are deeply transformative in a variety of ways. In the four articles that make up this issue, such transformative relations and engagements – muskox-human, cultural-natural – are examined and conceptualized in different ways, while together blurring categories and emphasizing that muskox pathways are constituted by muskox-human encounters. Emerging in different ways and at different times as a new potential resource in Greenland, the muskox has brought about different aspirations for conservation in distinct