Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

This article outlines the thematic section's main anthropological interventions and introduces the inherently ambiguous notion of welfare frontiers, implying allegedly benign practices of resource development. Through ethnographic analyses from Iceland, Norway, and Greenland, it shows that Nordic Arctic landscapes become resourceful through careful crafting, entangled with practices and ideals of nation-building, egalitarianism, sustainability, good governance, and a concern for liveability for legitimate citizens. Further, the authors suggest that seeing natural resource development as linked to specific welfare state projects, with attention to the sometimes colonizing aspects of such practices, specifies and captures the current era, bringing the Anthropocene back home.

Located in Northwest Greenland, the Thule region is a remarkable frontier zone. This article focusses on the undecided nature of the frontier in both time and space. The article explores the unstable ground upon which ‘resources’ emerge as such. The case is made in three analytical parts: The first discusses the notion of commons and the implicit issue of spatiality. The second shows how the region's living resources were perceived and poses a question of sustainability. The third centres on the Arctic as a ‘contact zone’; a place for colonial encounters and a meeting ground between human and non-human agents.

: This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between resource landscapes and the state in Iceland during a period of financial experimentation. In particular, it analyses a shift from the production of thermal water for local use to the production of electricity for the global aluminium market. This shift, the paper argues, is not merely a technocratic exercise in further resource extraction, it also indexes some of the tenuous connections between resource making and state making. The paper ends by offering a perspective on the recursive relationship between resource instabilities and instabilities within the state.

An old tractor serves as an ethnographic entry point to shifting articulations of resources in coastal Finnmark, North Norway. Idle since the 1970s, the tractor is a relic of agricultural dreams, turned to rubble as novel layers of the Varanger landscape are conjured as resourceful. Farming in Finnmark was a geopolitical strategy to secure national borders and to expand a post-war welfare state, it was also a colonial effort to cultivate farmers in the far north. This article details the back-breaking practices required to make thin Arctic topsoil collaborate in realizing modernist dreams of agricultural growth, while state interventions sought to ensure national borders and national identity. The author highlights dialectic relations between mapping and forgetting, crucial in the making of resources and colonizing practices.

Dating back to medieval times, fruit cultivation in Hardanger in western Norway is rooted in what is portrayed as a perfect microclimate naturally yielding the best apples in the world. However, the viability of the comparatively minute Norwegian fruit trade is continuously threatened by competition from outside, spurring all kinds of initiatives and policies to make it sustainable. The Norwegian fruit landscape, in other words, is both the natural and perfect home of world-class fruit and a site for continuous, often state-driven interventions to make it so; indeed, the perfection of the place accentuates the need to do what it takes to make it thrive. The necessary means to accomplish such viability, however, make up a complex terrain, as the resourcefulness of the Norwegian fruit landscape is ‘measured’ according to very different units.

This article explores the emergence of a Greenlandic mineral resource landscape against the background of the current establishment of an industrial ruby mine in Greenland. Anthropological fieldwork combined with a close reading of scientific reports, articles, and geological assessments about Greenlandic gemstones show a recurrent feature, namely that Greenlandic minerals get scaled and valued in ambiguous ways. This ambiguity is telling of a type of Danish (post-)colonial activity, even if such geological mapping was and is motivated by a dream of welfare, development, and economic sustainability shared by Danish experts and Greenlandic politicians alike. An overall point is to argue that the very practice of describing mineral resources also configures their perceived value and posits a yardstick by which to measure their potential.