Readings
Lien, M. E. (2020). Dreams of Prosperity – Enactments of Growth: The Rise and Fall of Farming in Varanger. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 29(1), 42-62. Retrieved Apr 28, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2020.290104
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.
Hugøy, I. (2024). Unearthing care: Rooting alternative agricultural practices in Norway and Costa Rica. Environment and Planning E, 7(4), 1711-1734. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241245012
This article contributes to the growing literature on human-soil relations by exploring how care for agricultural soils unfolds among farmers who engage with alternative agricultural practices across different productions and sites in Norway and Costa Rica. These farmers approach soil as a living being and seek to approach care with macro- and microorganisms in response to soil challenges and economic instabilities. The article follows recent literature on soil care in showing how agricultural practices challenge the dominant approach to soils as passive. However, the article argues the necessity of expanding on existing notions of care. This, I argue, involves ethnographically “unearthing” care: unpacking and situating a diversity of soil care practices, their human and other-than-human entanglements, and how these relations are conditioned by environmental, genealogical, sociocultural, temporal, epistemic, economic, and political mechanisms within and beyond the farm. Considering these variables is essential to keep soil care in the emerging literature from following a romanticizing path toward abstract individualism.