Barry Lopez’s relational Arctic

Sumario: «Arctic dreams: imagination and desire in a Northern landscape»(1986) can be read as American nature writer Barry Lopez’s attempt to evoke a more profound and ecologically sound understanding of the North American Arctic. This article investigates how Arctic Dreams uses insights from Jacob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, in combination with what Tim Ingold describes as a particular form of animism associated with circumpolar indigenous hunter cultures, to portray the Arctic natural environment as a living and lively space. Doreen Massey has described such spaces as recognizing plurality and allowing encounters. By highlighting networks of relationship and trajectories both human (historical) and animal (evolutionary), Arctic Dreams recognizes human and animal cultures that not only exist upon and can lay claim to this land, but that in a fundamental way is the land. In this way the text dismisses previous conceptions of the North-American Arctic as an empty space awaiting colonization and modernization, while on a deeper level it also questions the modern nature/culture dichotomy that allows nature to be perceived as the mere substratum of culture.