Marianne Lien: Dreams of prosperity – Enactments of growth: The rise and fall of farming in Varanger

An old tractor, a Massey Ferguson from the late 1950’s, serves as an ethnographic point of entry to shifting articulations of resources in coastal Finnmark, North Norway.  Idle since the 1970’s, the tractor is a relic of agricultural dreams in a landscape that has always resisted such practices of domestication. The landscape is now reclassified as the ‘absolute northern limit’ for vegetation in need of environmental protection.  But what happened in the meantime?  And what made the tractor an attractive item in the first place?

This paper approaches the promotion of farming as a geopolitical strategy to secure national borders as well as a colonial effort to cultivate Norwegian farmers in the far North. It addresses the work it took to articulate agricultural farming as a viable option at 70 degrees North, as well as technologies of state-making in what we may think of as 'welfare frontiers'.. This involves back-breaking practices required to make thin Arctic topsoil collaborate in realizing postwar-modernist dreams of agricultural growth. Through the lens of the tractor and its owners, the article traces the dialectic relations between mapping and forgetting, crucial in the making of resources, and shows how farming technology becomes rubble as novel layers of the Varanger landscape are conjured as resourceful.

Bio
Marianne Lien is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.  She has conducted in fieldwork in Varanger, Finnmark since the mid-1980s, when she began her career with a focus on food reciprocity and changing food habits. Since then she has done research on food marketing, globalization, domestication, salmon aquaculture, landscape engagements and colonizing practices in the Scandinavian North. Her current NFR project is called 'Materialising Kinship; Lifecycles at the Norwegian Hytte', with Simone Abram.  Her most recent books are Becoming Salmon; Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish (California Univ Press 2015), Domestication Gone Wild; Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations (co-edited with H. Swanson and G. Ween, Duke 2015), and 'Hytta - Fire vegger rundt en drøm', coauthored with Simone Abram (Kagge 2019)

The event is organized by The Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the talk.