Olivia Hebblewhite- Elegies in the Arctic

This transcription discusses the painting of Sadius reading from a Bible in front of indigenous Laplanders, and explores the concept of the contact zone in relation to the painting. It also discusses the association of the Arctic with death and how European beliefs about the Arctic influenced ideas about the region. It then delves into Nansen's approach to mortality in his writing and his questioning of science as salvation. The transcription also touches on the Inuit perspective on death and the role of shamanism. Lastly, it mentions a film that explores the lives of the Inuit during an encounter with Knud Rasmussen. Sadius, standing in his traditional European garb, reading from a Bible, while we see indigenous Laplanders huddled together across room, listening with suspicion. In the background are the goatees, the traditional tents. The brushstrokes show movement, perhaps to imply that an uncivilized people being brought toward civilization, moving forward in that tense. Bayard would likely have held the cultural ideal that the indigenous should be enlightened. What does the contact zone have to do with this painting? Well, the contact zone was a term invented by Mary Louise Pratt. It nevertheless helpfully describes the space of imperial encounters, the space in which people's geographical and historical separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coherence, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. The dominant culture would enable cultural exchange, but it would be for the purpose of their imperial mission. Here we can see that, with the passive stature of the Sami and the placement of Laestadius in the foreground, Laestadius represents the dominant culture. I'm curious about this idea of the contact zone in relation to another aspect of this painting, religious salvation. Here we get two contact zones, that between two different ethnic groups, and that between life and death. Death is a kind of dominant power. When it moves in, it takes over. There's no fighting back. You have to assimilate. It's like a colonial power. Yet, Laestadius was trying to fight death of the soul on behalf of the Sami people, according to him. He was perpetuating the assumption that the Arctic and all its constituents were death, a form of domination through the syntheticism of imagination. And from this, he was creating of himself a savior to rescue these people, which he associated with death, from what he viewed as their inherent doom, their inherent self-destruction in their pagan ways, as a part of their locale, the Arctic. Maybe this was the way he thought to control death itself. Well, it does seem like Laestadius is using the previous overarching authority that came outside of these groups of people, death, to contribute to his own authority. Yes. Your theory makes sense. Defining a particular people as lifeless, or in need of life, implicitly establishes the definition-maker as full of life. Otherwise, they couldn't form that assumption. And we see that, at this time, Europeans viewed such indigenous people as so different to be lifeless. As Gullickson points out, Bayard's subjects are dead in the figurative sense. Bayard spent hours amongst them, but their actual being, their actual personalities, the actual mark of life on them, is all but non-existent in his work. I couldn't have said it better myself. Your colleague Gullickson backs that up. As she states, the Sami individuals became suitable figures Bayard could move around to make his paintings cohere to then-current genre requirements, aesthetic tastes, and the cultural perceptions of his audience, like aesthetic props. They were silenced and nameless objects of study, like bodies in a lab. The painting has many different elements, the light on Laestadius's figure, the symbolism and footprints leading the people down the path to enlightenment, the moving, sleeping snow to represent change, and the primitivism of the huts in the background. I think this conveys Bayard's belief that Laestadius believed that those people were just breathing objects unless they found Jesus. Yeah, that's a very plausible statement. Laestadius also uses their human remains to further scientific race research, but again, his focus was on using death to advance his intellectual authority. Like Bayard, he treated the Sami remains as movable pieces, not only dead but beyond dead, beyond spiritual significance, like animal bones. Hmm, yes. Altogether then, Laestadius and Bayard used the Arctic because it was a place they believed was devoid of life, creating a vacuum which they could then fill with art or religion. In making his people lifeless, Bayard could dress them up as he wanted in his paintings, and free of a dedication to the present that actual people and bodies demand, play with unrealistic cultural anachronisms. Yeah, these European beliefs about the Arctic being a place to touch death and either use change or conquer would influence ideas about the Arctic for years to come. So in a sense, you're saying that the association of the Arctic with death is learned, it's cultural. It's completely cultural. You brought up Brunner earlier. Brunner called the North a space between real and imaginary, but it depends on the significance attached to it and the types of yearning it provokes. Hmm, essentially every culture then over the years has created of the North various political, religious, biological, climatological, and psychological expectations. Yeah, as these first concepts would coalesce, the boundaries of the spaces which contain these concepts would harden in part because of the nature of the association itself. But the boundaries weren't really there. People would imagine the North starting wherever the evidence for the belief about the North started. Hmm, so true. All right, well, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Bloom, Aaron. We're so glad you could join us, and we look forward to having you on our podcast again. Of course, my pleasure. Arctic explorer Friedrich Nansen, who, like Biard and Lysadius, viewed contact with the Arctic as contact with death, wrote this view into his account of the 1893 Fram expedition, Farthest North. We invite Norwegian historian and Nansen expert Anna Hilsman to her show to talk about Farthest North. Welcome, Anna. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. You're an expert. What do you notice about Nansen's approach to mortality in his piece? First, we have to understand Nansen's context. He was writing when Gothic romanticism was having its heyday, and once people got bored with dark corridors, shadowed mazes, haunted castles, and stormy cliffs, the Arctic became the next best locale. Ironically, in his first work, he very much described the Arctic as full of life. He wrote Eskimo Life a few years before writing Farthest North. In the conclusion, he states that, left to themselves and freed from subversive foreign influences, a new might regain their old customs, and the race might yet be saved. If anything, he pushes back against Lysadius's foundational belief. Christian conversion and European industrialization don't provide the native peoples the means to find God. They lead to death. Right. He states, I've never been able to grasp the fact that this earth will someday be spent and desolate and empty. To an end, in that case, all this beauty was not a creature to rejoice in it. Now I begin to divine it. This is the coming earth. Here are beauty and death. But to what purpose? You can't get more existentialist than this, Anna. As an artist of sorts, like Biard, to Nansen, beauty makes death just as death makes beauty. One turns the other into sharper light. That's true, Olivia, yet there's more complexity. Nansen states, why should we always make so much of truth? Life is more than cold truth, and we live but once. Days later, he repeats this question in a different form. We are drifting south again. What does it matter? His questioning itself is a way to kill the common understanding at the time of science as the end-all, be-all solution. This is different from Lysadius and Biard's effects. Yes, in this different kind of questioning, Nansen is the executioner. He's the manager of death, of a cultural belief. He stops the heart of the notion that science will bear salvation. He takes air from the lungs of progress. You almost wonder if he couldn't have reached this kind of rebellious questioning if he hadn't gone to the Arctic. Yes. Nevertheless, he uses the Arctic in a deeper way than Biard and Lysadius. The Arctic is a place not only to throw onto others as a form of control a preconceived notion of death and salvation, but to question, to kill preconceived notions themselves. It's kind of ground for reversal. Not a blank canvas, but a place where oneself can be remade. Now we can turn to how the Inuit people see death as related or not related to the Arctic conditions. Of course, no one makes it as experts now. Nor does it enable us to make claims as though we fully understand these people or can speak for them. These are postulations. These are literary interpretations meant to do the opposite of the colonial scientific approach. We would like to make that clear. Right. Right. Anyway, from what we've gathered, which is, as we said, insufficient, the regulars of the Inuit world were shaman men who mediated between the human world and the spirit world and were themselves assisted by turn gates or spirit animals. There is not such a strong dichotomy between life and post-life. Yes. In fact, scholar Dorothy Harley Eber's piece reveals how it was commonplace in their culture to have a kind of eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth mentality that meant that one had to be somewhat close to death. Eber quotes Inuit Bob Konana as affirming, in those days, if a relative was killed by someone or even if a distant relative killed a closer relative, the Inuit would take revenge and kill the person who killed. That was the way to control mass murders, to keep the area safe. Interesting. If someone was murdered, the murderer must be killed as well. Whereas in American culture today, for example, there's a kind of disgust at touching death itself, so we would prefer criminals to be kept far from our eyes in a prison. Hmm. Hmm. Indeed. We looked at the film The Journal of Luke Knud Rasmussen, directed by Zacharias Knuk and Norman Cohn, which focused on the lives of the Inuit during the encounter of Knud Rasmussen. Set in Iglo-Lik in 1922, it particularly centers on Abba, the last shaman of his Canadian group and his daughter Abba. In the movie, we see the Inuit character stating, we were not afraid of death. We were afraid of suffering. In the Arctic, death would come when it came. It was present. Right. I see what you're saying. You had to befriend it. But suffering, yes, suffering could take on a variety of different meanings and forms. It could be social isolation or shame. It could be painful childbirth. It could be sickness, death, due to the rituals involved, meant a coming together of community. This social isolation, this sickness, this shame, those were the kinds of soul death that literal death wasn't necessarily related to. And in some ways, death, like retributive killing, upheld order. Death didn't mean disorder. Suffering, again, the soul death, meant loneliness and disorder. At the movie's end, the shaman seems to undergo a kind of spiritual suicide. He tells what we now know to be spirit figures to go away, crying, they begin to stumble off into the Arctic. As the spirits are human-like, the audience gets the uneasy feeling that these people are being sent to imminent doom in exposure to the Arctic tundra. The shaman has had to send them away in order to convert and get food, and possibly not to lose his connection with his daughter. We see him suffering as he watches his daughter question their native religion, and we see him suffering as he watches the spirit figures leave him. Again, suffering here involves loneliness, despair, and this suffering only comes in this way because a Christian, well, we don't want to romanticize too much. What we do know is that the Inuit did not see their home as death itself. You can pull these kinds of questions at least into the conversation with films, like the journals Hucknett and Rasmussen. Thank you, Anna. Thank you for having me. Now, how can we compare these documents and their messages to views of death in the Arctic today, especially with the ever-increasing scientific and international claims there? One writer who went on a scientific expedition to the Arctic offers a clue, Signe Borgen. Although Borgen is unfortunately away right now, we asked her colleague from the trip, artist Claire Johnson, to fill us in on her interpretations of Borgen's interpretations. Welcome, Claire. Hi, thank you for having me. So, I'm going to start with saying that Signe Borgen entered that contact zone, as you and I use it, between life and death. However, her response was different than those which we've seen thus far. Right, for one, she was already familiar with death. Tell us more about that. Well, Olivia, she called her Osler's disease a weed that keeps growing back. Another, she saw the Arctic's reminder of death as something to welcome, not something to brush aside, lament over, or dominate through art or religion. Interesting. Not to question death, the Inuit were more or less not afraid of death. Signe Borgen finds a middle ground between those two? Yes, if anything, she does so by first admitting her fear of death. She acknowledges it with a tone of acceptance and agency, claiming she can't remember not being afraid of dying, so she's always lived life in a hurry, experiencing as many new things as possible. In this sense, like Nansen, she remains open, vigilant, and passionate in living life to the fullest. But she also has to be, by necessity, more cautious than he was. She sees surveillance as a way to control death. With diagnosis came the ability to read her body signals as she reads the Arctic landscape in her piece. Both have given her something to write about, to share, to draw people in towards and enable those connections. Interestingly enough, she anticipates decay. She craves it here in the Arctic. She hopes to see a spectacle of devastation, to which the glacier responds with silence. She wants to see something break. This is in direct contradiction to the way she constructed a fairly good system for evading death by reading obituaries, which she explains, if I was always thinking about death, I figured it couldn't creep up and surprise me. Right. Along the psychological lines of someone wanting to see their enemy, perhaps that they can't control it? Maybe. Perhaps this is a meta-level emphasis on our psychological relationship to death? Perhaps. In any case, waffling like this, making her own views of death as murky as death itself, like Biard, she uses death to create art. She knows death has shock values. Her audience will like it. Now, Borgen doesn't co-opt death. She cooperates with it to create a sensational piece of fiction. When Knudsen and Biard created, death remains death in their art. Borgen asks us to, in fact, do the opposite. Look at why we're so afraid of and obsessed with death as it is. Biard exalted life, Knudsen questioned life. Borgen studies life where it decays due to creation. She says, traces of our civilization disappear between pebbles. I've read that all that will remain of humanity is a thin layer of plastic between the strata. I think she's looking at death not from the inside, but from the outside. She draws attention to the human as harbinger of death in our creative production. Plastic is the noose we tie around the rest of the biosphere and ourselves. Plastic is one of the most influential inventions of human history. Think how much depends on plastic in medicine, business, food culture, global transport. To her, we need to know how much we don't know our own connection to death. All the while, she explains what the cold temperatures force plants to treasure any food they can find. She says that moss often covers these bones, living off the calcium in their remains. Small purple flowers grow on them too, feeding off past lives. And she ends with a Knudsen-esque question, who knows what we might turn into. She seems to be saying that, like us, the Arctic tries to fight death through using whatever it can. Yes. She seems biocentric in her glaciological passion, and this biocentricism is in direct juxtaposition with the severe self-attention she must give her Osler's disease. While death leads her to look for life and to redefine the Arctic in terms of life, death is not hers. And she doesn't want it to be hers. That's a great point. That makes me think, as science has advanced, as we've been able to dive deep into history and make far-off predictions about the future, thinking about the death of humanity perhaps makes one feel less alone in the face of impending individual doom. Hmm. You're right. And that perhaps is the grounds and the cause for taking on life, for not being afraid to risk it, to see it as part of a natural process, as Signe Borgen does. I want to end with another quote by Borgen that's related to what you're saying. She states, the only safe glacier is a dead glacier. In other words, if you always hold back from fear of destruction, you'll be safe, but you'll never change, grow, and flourish. You'll never move and be moved. The only safe glacier is a dead glacier. If life is really living, and living is placing oneself at risk of death, then risking one's death is how to make a life. To live so well and so safe that you don't make the most of what the world offers you is to die. You're only engaging the world with the materiality, the significance of your existence. Imagine that if you were dead. Exactly. Well, thank you for the conversation. Thank you. I'm honored to be here. I want to thank our viewers as well for supporting our show. This is the Ellipses. See you next week.