Minding the field: sensory and affective engagements with high Arctic fieldwork

Abstract

This introduction to this special issue considers various approaches to understanding ‘the field’ as an object of archaeological and anthropological research, and researchers’ own engagements with it. We draw out some theoretical and methodological approaches to the field as a way of interrogating the cognitive and physical engagements of the researcher with it, not only as a place and process of data gathering and knowledge production, but one of reflexivity and self-understanding. This seeks to appreciate the effects that the fieldwork experience has on the researcher and, thus, on the science they produce for their (disciplinary) field. Building on reflexive approaches to fieldwork and ethnographies of practice, we explore the implications of fieldworking in, particularly, the European Arctic. This paper further considers several entanglements in the past and present of the European Arctic as a field more generally as a way of framing the specific field site that we have focused this special issue around: the village of Kilpisjärvi (Gilbbesjávri) in Finnish Lapland.