This open access book investigates human-environment relations in the context of the anthropocenic Arctic. Through an archaeological and anthropological study of landscape, it wields “weirding” – a creative mode of engagement with the world – as a means of coming to terms with the stranger, experiential dimensions of a planet populated by diverse non-human entities often bearing monstrous characteristics. Such entities are exemplified by climate change itself, at once human-induced and a force of its own volition that maintains an elusive “presence” as a co-inhabitant of the Anthropocene. The book focuses on the landscape of Ritničohkka, a fjell in Sápmi, Finnish Lapland. Ritničohkka is erstwhile home to a diminutive “glacier”, whose “weird”, anomalous characteristics crowned the fjell until it several years ago melted into history. Taking a broadly autoethnographic approach, it considers perceptions of, and affective experiences in, this rough and relatively remote, “otherworldly” environment, discussing diverse ways of encountering and relating to the Arctic in the context of scientific fieldwork.

Open Access
Arctic
Landscape
glaciers
phenomenology
human-environment relations
weirding
Anthropocene Arctic
Anthropocene
Ritničohkka

• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Weirding and Fielding the World: Hows and Whys
• The “Glacier”
• Mountain Beings
• At the Basecamp
• The Fjell in the Cloud
• Gear Shift: Hiking and Being in the North
• Conclusion: Monstrous Worlds
• Correction to: Weirding Landscapes
• Back Matter

Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
Vesa-Pekka Herva, Aki Hakonen, Oula Seitsonen

Cultural Anthropology, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
Roger Norum

Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Markus Fjellström

Book Title
Weirding Landscapes

Book Subtitle
Arctic Glacier Extinction and Monsters of the Anthropocene

Authors
Vesa-Pekka Herva, Aki Hakonen, Roger Norum, Oula Seitsonen, Markus Fjellström

Series Title
Arctic Encounters

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85016-5

Hardcover ISBN
978-3-031-85015-8
Published: 29 March 2025

Softcover ISBN
978-3-031-85018-9
Due: 12 April 2026

eBook ISBN
978-3-031-85016-5
Published: 28 March 2025

Series ISSN
2730-6488

Series E-ISSN
2730-6496

Edition Number
1

Number of Pages
XXVIII, 200

Number of Illustrations
2 b/w illustrations, 44 illustrations in colour

Topics
Environmental Policy, Sociology, general, Anthropology, Human Geography