Fielding the mind in the high North

Abstract

The specialist remit of this journal invites papers exploring the sensory and affective aspects of lives and places from the investigation and interpretation of diverse objects, sites and landscapes, across periods from prehistory to the present. This Special Issue follows in this tradition, except the lens is shifted from interpreting the lives of people in the past, or etic approaches to culture in the present, to the fieldworkers themselves. Guest Edited by Roger Norum and Vesa-Pekka Herva, the papers of this Special Issue are authored by researchers from the University of Oulu who collectively undertook a week-long field trip to Kilpisjärvi, Finland, in August 2020. These papers give insights into the individual and personal senses, emotions and thoughts of these fieldworkers in a particular place and time, which in turn prompt the reader to consider the nature of knowledge production, of fieldwork, and of the field – particularly in a hugely evocative and affecting region: the European Arctic. As such, the experiential nature of these papers is rather more casual, and even sometimes experimental, than ‘conventional’ research articles, because they offer us a glimpse into the many worlds of the researcher when in the field, and in the Arctic, and thus require a more open approach to expressing and communicating their engagements with place, and with the humans and nonhumans they encounter. Many of the papers are image-heavy, not only capturing some of the sensorial aspects of being in the field, but also, potentially, its ineffability, which is often lost in the quest for conveying findings, analyses and interpretations. It often takes a long time to see field reports published, and, although these ‘reports’ (or, more properly, reflections) are of a slightly different nature to typical archaeological and anthropological reports from ‘the field’, there is gratification here in seeing some of the results of and reflections on a field project so quickly. From August 2020, when this project took place, to the publication of this Special Issue in September 2021, the authors’ critical reflections and write-ups of their experiences within the space of a year means we can capture some of that immediacy of sensory and affective engagements of fieldworkers in time, place and mind. The book reviews that feature in this Special Issue have also been curated to include two books that tackle the particular nature of the European North, of its encounters, investigations and significances. We explore a relational approach to Northern Fennoscandian archaeology and cosmology, and interrogate ecology and cosmology in Old Norse myth and literature. TIME AND MIND 2021, VOL. 14, NO. 3, 343–344 https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2021.1951562