Abstract
The High Arctic landscape at the centre of this presentation is a prime example of landscape as a provocation (Massey 2006), always defying attempts at fixing it in time and space. Further, this particular landscape is currently subject to rapid environmental change and new political interest. This deeply affects social life in the region, which seems ever more out of bounds. As social communities become increasingly volatile, if not directly indefinable, well-established anthropological vocabularies are challenged. In this presentation, it will be argued that these challenges are neither really new, nor do they undermine the uniqueness of the discipline, so singularly well attuned to details of social life and to theorizing it in many directions. This will be shown with reference matters of materiality, vitality, and affect in what could be called a movable anthropology, itself a provocation – defying any facile classification of historical agents and social facts.