Scales of attention in fieldwork: Global connections and local concerns in the Arctic

Concepts: The complexity of scale

Before proceeding, we have to briefly consider the notion of scale to clear further conceptual ground. Scale is not to be understood as a matter of measurement, or big versus small; it is not a ‘well-ordered zoom’ (Latour, 2005: 185). It does not hold that the more you zoom out, and the more the ground you cover, the more you know. It is not a matter of more or less, but of different points of perception. This implies that the local and the global are not endpoints on any absolute scale; empirically, they are enfolded in each other. Global climate change, to take this example, matters locally wherever it derives from – historically, planetary or atmospherically. In social worlds, scale cannot be identified as a matter of empirical size or distance; it is a function of knowledge interest and therefore of epistemology. In other words, it is more of a matter of perspective than of magnitude (Strathern, 2004). The complexity of empirical matters is potentially the same at any scale, however, as is the ethnographic perplexity: ‘each single element that appears to make up the plurality of elements seen from a distance on close inspection turns out to be composed of a similar plurality that demands as comprehensive a treatment’ (Strathern, 2004: xv).

Recently, Tim Ingold has discussed scale in a manner that corroborates Strathern’s point and which might be productively incorporated into the present discussion. If we consider a landscape, or a particular topography, it is infinitely variegated in terms of contour, substance and texture (Ingold, 2010). The variation is intrinsic to its constitution, and

it can be observed at different scales, from close-up to far away, and each will reveal different patterns, textures and grains. Whatever scale of observation we adopt, however, it is liable to appear just as puckered, mottled and polymorphic. In that sense the ground surface has a fractal quality. (Ingold, 2010: 125)

The point is that whatever the scale of observation, we may find something that has a distinct bearing upon the very life that we call ‘social’. Rather than providing the anthropologist with a fixed frame of reference, the act of scaling is a profound matter of putting a particular perspective to work, and of identifying the complexity of any detail or fragment.

This (once again) unsettles received ideas about the stationary anthropological object, and about the holism that Evans-Pritchard embraced so wholeheartedly and which remained the foundational concept in anthropology for the better part of the 20th century. Despite critiques and massive deliberations on the impossibility of holism in this day and age, it refuses to go away and is constantly experimented upon (Otto and Bubandt, 2010). The point I want to pursue here is that parts and wholes are of necessity co-constituted, because of the both partial and totalizing quality of the ethnographic moment, that is, a moment of insight connecting ‘the understood (what is analysed at the moment of observation) to the need to understand (what is observed at the moment of analysis)’ (Strathern, 1999: 6). Such moments transcend any fixed scale, as well as conventional separations of empirical and theoretical domains. These domains are closely interwoven both in the field and in its re-enactment in ethnographic narrative – in itself implicating a particular epistemology.

Scale in anthropology, I suggest, always points to a particular scale of attention; by privileging this notion in the present context I want to stress the epistemological character of scale as an accordion of possible perspectives, each of them equally total and equally partial. This directs us to a notion of the empirical that definitively breaks away from the idea of given entities that must be studied as such. Fieldwork today itself sustains this flexible and situational notion of scale, and of scale switching. While on the surface it seems possible to argue that in anthropology ‘scale is what actors achieve by scaling, spacing, and contextualizing each other’ (Latour, 2005: 183–184), this still seems to rely upon a rather problematic notion, an unmediated empirical reality. While certainly people do scale and contextualize their activities in ways that we must respect, once we commit ourselves to studying them they are already implicated in our wanting to understand and write about these activities in pursuit of our own knowledge interest.

In short, the scale of attention, as I use it here, is a concomitant effect of the ethnographic study of social actors whose concerns may outstretch the obviously local by far, as is certainly the case where people are facing dramatic effects of climate changes on the ground, so to speak. The emergent field is no less located, of course. In the ‘worlding’ process of any people, the near and the far intermingle and contribute to a particular figuring of the world (Tsing, 2010). In the process, apparently diverse scales may become part of the same picture, or narrative. Whatever knowledge enters into the narrative, it is not circumscribed by local boundaries, even if it is certainly located. This aligns the ethnographic narrative with any other ‘knowledge space’, in the sense suggested by David Turnbull as an ‘interactive, contingent assemblage of space and knowledge, sustained and created by social labour’ (Turnbull, 2003: 4).

Fieldwork is precisely an instance of such social labour, by which space and knowledge are assembled. This is also why anthropology still has a distinct part to play in understanding the world, where ‘the capacity for conceptualization . . . outruns the concepts it produces’ (Strathern, 2004: xv). We shall see how, by focusing on various forms of knowledge-making in the field, through encounters of apparently different ranges, yet all of them transcending the obvious. Through a discussion of conversations, connections and concerns that relate to my current field in northwest Greenland, we get a glimpse of the ways in which people with whom one works actually scale, space and contextualize their understanding in practice, and how these scalings are also functions of the larger themes addressed in the study. This in turn provides us with a renewed sense of the vitality of fieldwork as a particular kind of composite attention.

Conversations: Face-to-face encounters

In the early 20th century, when many of the people on the planet were still unknown (to Europeans, certainly not to themselves or to their neighbours), the fieldworker served as a telescope, a mechanism by which the far away could become visible to the home audience. In that sense, early ethnographic fieldwork was very much a continuation of the Enlightenment idea of science. From the door of his tent, the fieldworker could observe the natives at close range, to invoke Malinowski’s famous phrasing (Malinowski, 1922). Later, the focus on observation was replaced by an emphasis on participation, allowing the anthropologist to give flesh and body to observation (Hastrup, 1994). Whatever the emphasis, fieldwork always combined the two in practice; we find it in compressed form in the ethnographic moment, fusing observation and analysis.

Among the most direct sites of participant observation are the sites of conversation that emerge during fieldwork, whether staged as an interview or the result of a chance encounter that develops into a conversation. A famous landmark in anthropology was Marcel Griaule’s book on Conversations with Ogotemmêli from 1948. The wise man Ogotemmêli summoned Griaule to his house, ‘and on thirty-three successive days, in a series of unforgettable conversations, he laid bare the framework of a world system, the knowledge of which will revolutionize all accepted ideas about the mentality of Africans and of primitive peoples in general’ (Griaule, 1965: 2). Conversation was here seen as a means of eliciting the frame within which the conversation itself took place. Today we realize that whatever frame we are able to identify, it emerges with the event; the frame is a by-product of the conversation, not a pre-existing mental scheme.

Some 40 years later, Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera (1990) wrote a book on Conversations in Columbia that reminded us of the multiplicity of conversations and perspectives that are at play in fieldwork. Their conversations have no beginnings and no endings; they ‘are unbounded in topic, in history, and between communities’ (Gudeman and Rivera, 1990: 187). Fieldwork, in their case, was a way of getting a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which voices belonging to diverse times, places and registers fused with each other in an understanding of the local. In important ways, this still applies; fieldwork in the 21st century always contains a strong element of conversation, or a direct exchange of viewpoints. This is no straightforward way towards a pre-established social framework, however. The conversation is but a moment in somebody’s life, and not an expression of an entire world-view. It is still a valuable source of knowledge, of course – if not of a perfectly ordered world system, then at least of some significance in an individual point of view.

During recent fieldwork in northwest Greenland, I had the privilege of talking at length with an elderly woman. With her permission I recorded the conversation, which I framed as a kind of life-history interview. This well-known methodological device certainly did not elicit a one-stranded narrative, since at all the stations of her life (and of her narrative) she ventured into movements out into the landscape, dog-sledging with her father, bear-hunting with her husband, catching little auks first with her children and now with the grandchildren, being hospitalized in Denmark for a couple of years as a young woman diagnosed with tuberculosis, and above all moving around endlessly from one settlement to another within the entire district, always with a keen eye for local opportunities. Conversing with her was as if a whole world was rolled out in front of me, and I could not but feel immensely grateful for her time and her tale – and for being an anthropologist. However, one should not deceive oneself into another version of Ogotemmêli’s story. Truly, the woman’s life was a whole when seen from her perspective, and when told; but her story was prompted by my own presence and with a lot of hindsight. Thus, the substance of the conversation vastly transcended the time and space of our meeting and testified to the point that it was she who produced the relevant place, time and scale. This was not given beforehand, for me to elicit and generalize as an overall framework that she instantiated in person, and simply filled out with her words.

The conversation thus illustrated the point made by Latour (2005) that no face-to-face interaction is isotopic or synchronic. The conversation drew substance from numerous places where she had lived or gone, and from diverse historical epochs and moments. A particularly significant instance surfaced when she told of her first experience of driving a dog-sledge alone. She was only 13 years old and lived with her widowed father in a small settlement where only one other family lived, but where the hunt was rich so that they were never wanting for anything. Her father asked her to take a sledge and drive to the larger settlement in the district to bring meat to the relatives living there. At first she refused, claiming that she could not do it, and that it was not for girls or women to do that anyway; her task was to attend to the blubber lamp and to keep the domestic space in order. The father argued his case by stating that people were starving up there, and asked whether she could live with knowing that she could have made a difference. Of course, she could not, and off she went on her two-day sledge journey on the ice. Anyone familiar with dog-sledging in the Arctic will know that it is a demanding exercise, but the point here is mainly to show how her elaborate and precise rendering of this episode showed it as a major feat that became a turning point also in her story, a moment from whence she saw herself as the main character in her story, and not simply her father’s child. Her newfound agency was very much a matter of her mastering the materiality of life in a particular epoch and a specific region.

While in some sense fragmented and uneven, the story communicated a strong sense of her being immersed in an “ocean” of materials:

Once we acknowledge our immersion, what this ocean reveals to us is not the bland homogeneity of different shades of matter but a flux in which materials of the most diverse kinds, through processes of admixture and distillation, of coagulation and dispersal, and of evaporation and precipitation, undergo continued generation and transformation. The forms of things, far from having been imposed from without upon an inert substrate, arise and are borne along – as indeed we are too – within this current of materials. (Ingold, 2011: 24)

By listening I had the vicarious experience of immersion, and we are back at the generative moments of fieldwork, the moments of immersion. During our conversation I saw mostly the woman’s weathered face, her smile and her sparkling eyes, while she herself revisited an almost complete life, unseen to me and obviously narrated only in fragments. Yet, I sensed the strong flow of life in a very demanding environment linking her agency closely to the materialities of weather and wind, frost and thaw, sledges and dogs, of hungry relatives, and of life in different places and at different points in time. This reminded me that the social is a composite field of people, actions and mediations. Within the conversation, blubber-lamps, little auks, faraway places and long-gone family and friends, immediate weather concerns and much more, all became vehicles of her story just as the recorder became a vehicle of my own later thoughts. The moment of immersion took me both into her story and towards my own ethnographic narrative.

If her story was not ‘a whole life’ but rather a whole story, it was also not ‘isobaric’ (Latour, 2005: 201). Not all of the human and non-human agents exerted an equal ‘pressure’ in the matters that surfaced; some themes received intense attention while others got more or less silenced, partly for a number of situational and socio-linguistic reasons; language itself has a material presence. In my conversation, the non-isobaric nature of the woman’s narrative was also obvious from the uneven rendering of the episodes related. Some were presented rather matter-of-factly, others were carried along by an unmistakable emotional intensity; surely, something was silenced, either because it did not present itself within her sense of the context of the conversation, or because it was deemed irrelevant in her apprehension of my interest. Among the most elaborate and intense sequences was her rendering of a bear-hunt in the northernmost part of the district, where she had gone with her husband and their three boys, then aged three, four and five years. That was a significant moment; her seeing the bear, the husband being a little away tracking another, and the three young and wide-eyed boys on the sledge. Her passionate voice, her bodily gestures and the sparkle in her eyes left me in no doubt about the hunt as another crucial moment in her life history, featuring her in the wilderness as a young mother. Certainly, here was a story that pressed to get out; and it was not about culture but about being in a world shared with polar bears and other animals.

Fieldwork, as we know and practise it, is to a large extent based on conversation, dialogue, life history and more piecemeal interaction and talking with informants, interlocutors, partners, interpreters, collaborators, field-assistants and others, whom one will inevitably categorize, and who contribute their own observations to the general conversation (Hastrup, 2011). For most of them, the anthropologist’s presence is but a fleeting moment in their life. That is a sobering thought, but also something of a challenge, because we no longer know where a conversation takes us, except in negative terms. It does not take us directly to culture or society, so much is certain. But it is a means of exploring the vast landscape of lived lives of shifting intensities, as well as the perplexities of time, space and scale in any narrative.

Careful attention to the moments piling up while we speak and listen may lead us towards a sense of those associations that (presently) are seen to make up the social in a continuous process of orientation, reflection and world-making. We get access to a particular ‘figuration work’ that will eventually infiltrate the ethnographic writing (Tsing, 2010). These figures are the ones we have to trace in the conversation if we want to sort out the relevant scaling of the social situation and get a glimpse of the forces that drive people. Conversation is a means to establish this, while also reminding us that the ethnographer him- or herself is part of the conversation and thus contributes to the framing.

Connections: Following the leads in the field

One of the prominent associations voiced in the conversation just related was the connection between people and environment. The history of the people in northwest Greenland is a history of moving about in search of the most promising places to hunt. The result is a nomadic landscape, which I have described elsewhere with reference to the distinction between sedentary and nomadic trajectories suggested by Deleuze and Guattari (Hastrup, 2009c; see Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). Seen through this conceptual grid, the topography of life in northwest Greenland is rather like a network of nodal points, where people have once lived, or still live, or which may be known as sites of walrus or other game, or of particular events of life and death. What connects people in the Far North is not an abstract sense of society but actual movements in the landscape, undertaken, remembered, told or envisaged.

The notion of network, and the idea that we must follow the concrete links between people rather than give in to a premature conclusion about an entire society, is not new. Partly in opposition to the idea of social structures pre-empting the social as pre-figures of the whole, the Manchester school took their point of (methodological) departure in an idea of social situations or critical events, from where one could study the changing social relations in the field (e.g. Gluckman, 1958), ‘unravelling the relevant structural principles in doing so’ (Parkin, 2000: 263). While the key events were originally seen as windows to the social structure, a door was opened to seeing the social as always in the making. This has resurfaced with the actor network theory, also sharing another point with the Manchester school, namely that it is more of a method than a theory in itself. In both cases, the position of the fieldworker is called into question; in no way does this position present an objective point of view, yet fieldwork becomes even more important for the same reason. It is for the fieldworker to sort out the connections and follow the leads as they emerge in moments of immersion.

The unbounded nature of my High Arctic field is a fact of life for the hunters but also somewhat of an analytical challenge. If the ethnographic moment is a moment of insight that ‘denotes a relation between immersement and movement’ (Strathern, 1999: 6), this has a strong echo in the Arctic landscape, where people always made the social happen as they moved about and congregated on the ice or elsewhere. To immerse, one must move along with the hunters. Evidently, one can also listen to stories about movement, but listening will not do by itself. To immerse in the flow of the story, having participated in comparable flows, also adds a dimension to the perceived intensities in narration. The very flexibility of the social makes the idea of scale as relative magnitude dissolve completely; the local social space in many ways turns out to be as global as anything, as we trace the connections between agents. This again has important implications for our understanding of scale; once again I shall turn to Latour for an apt way of phrasing this:

As soon as the local sites that manufacture global structures are underlined, it is the entire topography of the social world that is being modified. Macro no longer describes a wider or a larger site in which the micro would be embedded like some Russian Matryoshka doll, but another equally local, equally micro place, which is connected to many others through some medium transporting specific types of traces. No place can be said to be bigger than any other place, but some can be said to benefit from far safer connections with many more places than others. (Latour, 2005: 176)

This has a strong resonance in the nomadic landscape of northwest Greenland. I shall show how by relating a trip to a tiny island settlement in the district, where a total of 17 people lived (at that particular point in time), including seven children. It was not a matter simply of seeing the place, although it is a spectacular site. Nor was it to establish its significance for the hunt, owing to its position in the bottom of the fjord where the narwhals congregated during summer. Two years previously I had actually visited the place in the hunting season, where passage from the main village could be made by motorboat in less than three hours.

In the spring of 2010, I made the trip again, but this time on dog-sledge on the sea-ice. I had hired a sledge and a driver to be able to tack along with a family, going back from a birthday visit to the wife’s mother who is a friend of mine. This meant that we could distribute their provisions on two sledges, and that their son could sit on our sledge, since we had more dogs to work for us. All in all, it was a nice set-up, and once arrived I could stay with the family. When coming into the main village for the birthday, the family had spent 10 hours in transit, but with our arrangement we made it back to the settlement in a good eight hours. I enjoyed myself tremendously, as always on a sledge when the weather is fine. The sense of being transported within a particular topography by animal power and human ingenuity never ceases to capture me. There is no counting of hours, just a unified time of travel, including nice coffee breaks, small encumbrances of rugged surfaces and the occasional dealing with a stubborn dog or an unexpected crack in the ice. The sense of being transported gradually gave way to becoming part of a landscape that I attempted to read along with the sledge driver. This tempers Ingold’s suggestion that transport, following a line across a terrain from one point to another, contrasts with wayfaring, always instantiating a line along tracks of unknown potentiality (Ingold, 2007). In my experience, these lines conflated in the actual movement.

The result was a strong sense of the making of connections between people through emplacement; this was the more important because this particular connection could not be made electronically, or virtually. There was neither general electricity (only some small fuel-driven generators for the school and the shop) nor phones; yet there were family bonds that materialized in the occasional journey between places. That was what my trip to the island settlement brought home, not as a simple matter of fact but as a qualitative implication of topography. I ascertained the cumbersome connection in person, so to speak, and sensed what it meant in practice for the young family who had moved out there only a year ago, in order to settle on what was the husband’s native island and try their hunting luck there. Moving along implies a degree of tuning in with the situation; ‘to participate is not to walk into but to walk with – where ‘‘with’’ implies not a face-to-face confrontation, but heading the same way, sharing the same vistas, and perhaps retreating from the same threats behind’ (Lee and Ingold, 2006: 67). This kind of walking along facilitates the ‘topographic turn’ in analysis, propelling anthropology towards a pragmatic definition of the field (Hastrup, 2005).

As it happened, my return journey was to become rather hazardous. There was only one sledge this time, with my driver and myself, and although we made up a pleasant enough company, there was no longer a sense of an outing. Somehow, this made it more real for both of us. This was underscored by the fact that this journey was to take much more time, leaving me with endless hours to ponder my own question of why it had been a good idea to go there in the first place. The main reason why it was so cumbersome to return along the same path was a shift in the weather and ice conditions. A crack in the ice that had been easily passable on the way out now required a long detour until we found a place where the crack was sufficiently narrow to allow the sledge to form a bridge, allowing us to walk over and most of the dogs to jump. Those landing in the water could be pulled in afterwards, since all of them were still connected to the sledge by their braces. Later on, the ice became so much like broken glass that the dogs’ feet started to bleed, which made some of them refuse to move. We could take the first two dissenters on board the sledge, but as three more subsequently laid down and refused to budge even at the prospect of being overrun by the sledge, they had to be left on the ice (from where they would eventually be able to find their way back home). This left us with five working dogs instead of 10 – a sizable reduction. The non-human agents certainly affected our journey.

As if this were not enough, we had to circumvent yet another crack that in a matter of days had opened up and become impassable. This forced us to seek towards land, implying the circumvention of very rough surfaces (owing to a storm in early winter, which had broken up the first sea-ice, and slammed the floes towards land), and finally to navigate the ice foot, which was cut through by rifts, cracks and open waters. The hunter knew what to do, but for the anthropologist, having already spent roughly 12 hours of cold night on the sledge, to jump from ice-floes to ice-floes that were far from even and smooth was admittedly a challenge. When the hunter realized this, he was extremely helpful in lending me a hand in between his skilful manoeuvring of unwilling and exhausted dogs and a heavy sledge from ridge to ridge. I was as impressed as I was cold and worried. When safely on land, both of us were high on delight and exhaustion and our merriment carried us over the final, and very demanding, stretch to the village on rough coastal ice. Our shifting moods testified to the emotional topography of life in the Far North (Hastrup, 2010).

The point of this tale is not (only) to tell yet another perilous adventure from the field, sporting the conventional image of the anthropologist as hero (Sontag, 1970), but (also) to emphasize the expediency of going along the same paths as the people, whose concerns one wants to understand better. Their connections are circumscribed by forces of nature that are becoming increasingly unpredictable with the unprecedented changes in the icescape; going along presents us with a keen sense of the materiality of connectivity, supplementing the conversations in vital ways. Even time is experienced as a topographical issue; what on the map looked like the same distance was covered in eight and 14 hours respectively – and in three hours, when the sea was open. In fact, with the new realities of the sea-ice, the small settlement had become almost disconnected in a matter of days; as this is now happening at unexpected moments, the meltdown seriously affects the resilience of the disconnected because their mobility and flexibility are increasingly circumscribed (Hastrup, 2009b). As the environment shifts, so do also the political and economic realities in Greenland, affecting life in the Far North in multiple other ways (Nuttall, 2009).

The story may thus help us further understand the nature of scale-making. The journey between the two sites within the district showed that they differ not in scale understood as size, but in the one having safer connections with more places than the other – connections by weekly airplanes or helicopters (weather permitting), and telecommunication, as well as sledges and boats. If one follows the actual, realized connection, ‘a new topographical relationship becomes visible between the former micro and the former macro. The macro is neither “above” nor “below” the interactions, but added to them as another of their connections, feeding them and feeding off them’ (Latour, 2005: 177). Fieldwork borne by a topographical awareness and following the local leads will reveal the actual connections and relative scale – understood in terms of a sense of connectedness – of different sites. This, once again, is a very good reason for stressing the value of fieldwork, even while relinquishing the urge to start out by defining the context and scope of the social on the one hand, and abandoning the idea of the primacy of direct social interaction on the other. There are multiple ways and vehicles through which connections are made – including sea-ice and dog-sledges and other non-human agents that are part of the social fabric.

In the High Arctic, it would be impossible to call our investigation empirical if we disregarded everything that was not explicitly social or could be packaged as social explanations. Walruses, narwhals, hunting quotas, natural scientists projecting future climate change, sea-ice, dog-sledges, emerging tourism as the North-West Passage opens up, new political realities in Greenland – all of this and much more must be taken into account if we want to maintain the label empirical. These are matters of fact that connect directly to life in northwest Greenland, even if originating elsewhere. These matters of fact are not simply material and practical; they are certainly also intellectual and emotional (Hastrup, 2010).

The field is constituted through people’s connections to each other within the region, and they go by way of all sorts of non-human actors. In that sense the social is enfolded into connections and mediators that form a complex web of places, past experiences, faraway family, seals, dogs, and new knowledge about the climate – as such, not just as an experience of weather variability. The social world is performed into being, and this presupposes that both time and space, and not least the presence of other people, is taken into account (Hastrup, 2007). It also includes an endless number of variegated props that clutter the space, which people make manifest in action. The general lesson is that for fieldwork to live up to its own empirical ambition it should prove an exercise in following the connections that are traceable prior to any attempt at summing up the ingredients of the whole. This is where multi-sited fieldwork dissolves. Either there is a traceable connection, and therefore a field, or there is not, and then no single field but several fields.

Making this point I am reminded of Ulf Hannerz’s discussion of multi-site ethnography, which (in his study of foreign correspondents all over the world) certainly did not imply a simple multi-locality, because the ‘sites are connected with one another in such ways that the relationships between them are as important . . . as the relationships within them’ (Hannerz, 2003: 206). The larger point is that for a field to emerge, we must establish connections between its constituents. This challenges the idea of place inherent in the notion of the field and recasts it as an event of configuration that may take multiple forms – whether constituted by international correspondents or Arctic hunters.

This echoes Doreen Massey’s view of places as intrinsically elusive. Place is ‘the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place as open and multiple. Not capturable as a slice through time in the sense of an essential section. Not intrinsically coherent’ (Massey, 2005: 141). This certainly resonates with the idea of the ‘field’ that I have wanted to propagate here, focusing on connection. Fieldwork itself is a work that selects and follows particular connections between people, places and other agents.

Concerns: Identifying gaps of interpretation

While we can see the value of conversation and of the making of connections as a way of figuring out the field in the first place, the practice of fieldwork as a whole is still baffling, once we have abandoned the idea a pre-set object of culture or society. With the disappearance of this frame, the idea of ‘traditional knowledge’ also dissolves. All kinds of knowledge, deriving from a variety of sources, are brought to bear on pressing concerns, such as the concern about the rapidly changing environment in the High Arctic. A multiplicity of scales seems to intermingle in even the most located perspective.

Once the ordinary weather variability is perceived as climate change, it implies an unknown agency in the social, and what is more, it means that the (global) natural scientific scenarios enter into the local sense of place, testifying even further to the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place, suggested by Massey (2005: 140). In northwest Greenland there is no way to forget about these scenarios, given the strong presence of natural scientists. Science has become an important actor in the network of connections by which people live in the district. Thus, in the spring of 2010, the hunters acted as harpooners for whale-researchers who wanted the whales chipped with electronic devices. Instead of killing the whales for meat, blubber and tusk, they were to use their harpoons to fasten the chip in the thick skin of the animal. In both cases, the net result was cash. In the same period, geo-physicists employed hunters to test an ultra-sound device that could be mounted on a dog-sledge and measure the thickness of the ice, while the hunters went for seals. The hunters are paid well for their work, and the income from scientists is an important supplement to (or even replacement of) the income from the increasingly uncertain hunt.

However, the hunters’ deeper concerns about the changing icescape are not mitigated by science, but rather intensified by its metrology so alien to local counting, and not least by the obvious lack of predictive power when it is most needed. The hunters may carry out the experiments because they know how to connect to the non-humans of the environment, but their understanding of the scientific perspective on climate as signposted within natural science itself is limited. This is not simply a local lack of understanding; it is a shared gap of interpretation, which is very much the outcome of different scaling practices. While the hunters know about the thickness of ice and the ways of whales, the universalizing perspective embedded in natural science may be somewhat alienating in relation to the located concerns. For the hunters, animals, sea-ice and weather variability are all part of a social ontology (Bravo, 2010).

One pressing concern relates to the new quota systems on game, which derive from biological measurements. As for narwhal, the hunters in the district have a shared quota of about 70 narwhals a year; but it is far from transparent why this number has been pulled out of the hat. The biologists’ estimate gives about 4000 narwhals in the fjord in a given season (Heide-Jørgensen, 2002). This is well known by the hunters; the riddle is how this number becomes transformed into a quota of some 70 narwhals per year. Both parties are certainly concerned with the survival of the species, the hunters possibly more than anybody, but the metrology makes sense only at one scale – or from one perspective, which fails to connect to the local sense of the resources. There is a gap of interpretation between seeing an individual catch as part of an (innumerable) whole or as one out of many, the numbers of which are thereby diminished (see Verran, 2010). The harpooned narwhal is configured differently in the two cases, instantiating different epistemologies – that is perspectives or, indeed, scales.

Such gaps of interpretation may not only emerge between natural scientists and hunters, but also between anthropologists and hunters even when equally concerned about the effect of environmental change upon hunting life. During a conversation on these issues with a seasoned hunter, he referred me to a pending report to which he had contributed, and where I might eventually read everything about the changes in the ice conditions over the past generation. In this case anthropologists had been the ones to assemble data (through surveys and interviews), and one would have liked to think that they had somehow come nearer to the hunters’ sense of concern. I was excited by the prospect of reading the report, and told him so – after all, he had recommended it to me. He answered: ‘It is not exciting for me. They do not know our reality. They just want to become professors. Why would we want more professors with no clue about reality?’ His complaint, as I heard it, was that all the anthropologists had done was to collect words, without really sharing the concerns. The hunters did not need to have their observations repeated as data in some publication or other; they wanted to know what they implied. In other words, they wanted a wider theoretical discussion of the pending changes instead of being relegated to mere witnesses.

During our conversation the hunter actually voiced one of his own theories about the speed of climate change. He suggested rather vociferously that the ice-core drillings carried out by scientists on the icecap were at the root of all the changes. ‘They [the glaciologists] are destroying the icecap. Clearly, they have now drilled in four different places, and obviously the meltdown starts there. A lot of water comes out from under the ice and makes the rest slide.’ He has a (scientifically established) point about water running under the ice and speeding up the velocity of the glaciers (which is not an outcome of the ice-core drillings, however), but no one seemed interested to scale the scientific understanding in a way that might close the gap of interpretation. The glaciers are as ‘multiple’ as are the narwhals (see Mol, 2002).

There is a lesson for both natural and social scientists here, I believe, about the failure to connect to the human agents already in place, so to speak; this is what immersion in the sense discussed above potentially amends. There is also an implicit misconstrual of the difference between matters of fact and matters of concern (Latour, 2005). Scientists claim to elicit information in the principal interest of fact, and claim that it is not for science to produce political answers to pressing concerns. But in an important sense ‘matters of fact are a poor proxy of experience and of experimentation’ (Latour, 2004: 245); this implies that facts always build upon a confusing bundle of epistemology, politics and polemics, Latour adds. ‘Facts’ are but cleaned-up versions of concerns, not givens in the world, both among hunters and among scientists. The hunters questioning scientific practices are right in assuming that scientific facts are uncertain at the best of times, and that the concreteness of numbers (of walrus, narwhal and polar bear, for instance) does not pre-empt all possible concerns and perspectives; they may even come in the way of other facts or proxies of experience, established within other knowledge spaces. Anthropologists should take note of the complex relationship between matters of fact and matters of concern, and be wary of only attributing observations to the locals, who are indeed also theorizing about their world and concerned about it. In the field, one of the most significant effects of ethnographic moments is precisely to offer a view in two different directions at the same time, observation and analysis – or figure and perspective.

What I am arguing here in fact is the opposite of the point made by Heather Smith, who on the strength of her work in the Canadian North suggests that ‘indigenous voices provide a counterhegemonic discourse to the “global” Western construction of climate change’ (Smith, 2007: 198). It is always worth listening to people’s voices, but from my own experience this implies a serious conversation across and beyond established categories of indigenous people and Westerners. To truly share a particular concern implies engaging in post-colonial moments, being ‘occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways’ (Verran, 2003: 729). From her collaborative experience in Australia, Helen Verran further qualifies the post-colonial moment as a moment that will ‘enable participants to recognize and credit a sameness that nevertheless allows the sorts of differences that are important for Aborigines on the one hand, and scientists on the other’ (Verran, 2003: 731). From within such a new, symmetrically constituted knowledge space, anthropological theorizing may rise from the ashes of culture, without resort to a universal nature. In the present context this implies that the parties in the conversation about climate concerns should be marked as equal also on this score. As scientists descend upon the Arctic peoples the known facts become vehicles for new theories on both sides of the equation. In the process, any figure, or any ‘part of one thing may also be part of something else’ (Strathern, 2004: xxix, 67). The more general point is what the figurations that emerge as significant inevitably depend on. One would like to think that scientists, scrutinizing their own epistemic practices, could find a bridgehead for symmetrical thinking about ‘parts’ that are not exclusively figured within one single perspective.

The larger promise of sharing concerns and seeking out a new vocabulary for addressing them is to finally dissolve the futile opposition between absolutist natural science and relativist anthropology. It is not that there is one reality and many representations; there is a multitude of connections that present themselves as empirical because they are traceable once you have set out in pursuit of your object through a series of ethnographic moments. Different pursuits and different mediators of agency lead in different directions, but the interest in getting somewhere is shared.

Confluences: Closing the argument

In this article I have wanted to show how scale is an implication of a particular knowledge interest, and that one major value of fieldwork lies in its power to substantiate how people all over the world are constantly engaged in a process of scaling, spacing and contextualizing their world. In that process, ‘worlds’ are made that are neither local, because they are unbounded, nor non-local, because they are mediated by mutable topographical realities. The worlding process is far from uniform or finite. There is a constant moving about and bending and stretching particular perspectives, which it is for the anthropologist to ‘write forth’ from immersement in conversations, connections and concerns in the field.

In fieldwork we cannot establish a unified whole called a culture or even a world-view, but with due attention to the scale inherent in located deliberations it is still possible to claim a kind of coherence to the multiplicity of worlding processes as they unfold and are inferred. What we have to realize is that the social world is not an entity of substance but a set (see Putnam, 2004). The narratives, movements and metaphysical queries made by people are not part of a whole in the same manner as a hand is part of the body; the latter would be a relation of substance. By contrast, the social makes up a set, to which things human and non-human, local and global, equally belong.

Until recently, anthropologists have implicitly considered societies and cultures as entities of substance that consisted of identifiable parts. Yet, these entities have no location, as such, nor are they identical with the sums of all those people, perspectives, predicaments and presumptions that can be said to belong to the world in question. To acknowledge this means to revise the idea of participation in the field. It means exposing oneself to the forces at play and paying attention to the diversity of scales inherent in local life. Doing so actually enables the fieldworker to ‘get it right’ (Hastrup, 2004).

The anthropological knowledge interest is neither simply local nor relative; understanding how humans inhabit the world and build their own theories about it in environments of vastly varied scales is as much of a grand theory as anything. Fieldwork is still an unsurpassed way to achieve an understanding of the confluence of people, place and perspective, because only by literally sensing out the working connections can you get at that kind of world we might want to call ‘social’ by afterthought.