The ANG ski excursion

After two long days of introduction, packing, planning and logistics, I found myself eating dinner with students on the annual six-day ski trip and exam excursion, part of the one-year practice-based ANG programme focused on “value-based guiding and teaching in Arctic Nature” at UiT (the Arctic University of Norway). We were a party of seven, composed of many different nationalities.

Having travelled by boat across the Ice Fjord from Longyearbyen to Trygghamna, we skied for a couple of hours before setting up camp for the night. Once our tents were pitched and our equipment organised, we ate our first joint dinner, sheltered by a circular wall of snow carved out by hand by the guides. Afterwards, warm and less hungry, we were encouraged to share our expectations of the days to come. It turned out that we would create such a shelter each night, eat dinner and, one by one, talk about our impressions and experiences of the day. By encouraging us, the participants, to contribute with observations, to share perspectives and to tell stories, the guides prompted us to actively engage in moments of narrative framing instead of otherwise remaining passive listeners to their explanations or arguments.

Having been to Svalbard several times before, I could personally share anecdotes from earlier encounters. In terms of mountaineering, however, I had nothing to offer in comparison to the two trained mountaineers from Spain. Similarly, the kind of perspectives that an elderly Norwegian couple contributed, in terms of how the Svalbard–Norway relation had been subject to changing narrative framings throughout their lives, re-embodied a particular kind of historical knowledge. As our conversations deepened throughout the tour, our guides also communicated the various individual ambitions and life stories that had led them to begin their training as guides on Svalbard. One came from a research background but wanted official recognition of her leadership competencies; another was driven by his personal desire to cross Svalbard from south to north. A third was trained as an artist like me and involved in socially engaged outdoor projects. But in all cases, the guides expressed an appetite for being in nature rather than for looking at nature, as scenery from a distance.

Statements like these evidence that the guides were talking about something more and other than a contemplative experience and their ambition to convey this “something more” to other people.

Thinking through encounters of an open-ended journey

I have myself embodied the role of guide on Svalbard. After my first encounter with Longyearbyen in 2010, which I then experienced only as a kind of temporary base camp for a boat journey and artist residency, I was left with a puzzling and contradictory impression. I therefore decided to return in 2011 to conduct two-and-a-half months of fieldwork with a focus on a group of taxi drivers and the place-making dimension (Margaryan et al., Reference Margaryan, Fredman and Stensland2020) of their narratives and interactions with laypeople in Longyearbyen – tourists, temporary locals and long-term residents alike. This research utilised mixed methods, with an emphasis on semi-structured, wide-ranging interviews, visual annotation and participatory observation; as part of my fieldwork among taxi drivers, I worked as a taxi driver myself employed in one of Longyearbyen’s two taxi companies. Without ever hiding my research agenda but often perceived as a “local,” I was confronted with the assumed binary relation between “tourist” and “local,” and between “seasonal service worker” and “long-term resident.”

Since then, I have returned several times, increasingly interested in the figure of the guide. Between 2011 and 2018, I have added to my initial fieldwork experience both through ethnographic tourism experiences (2013 and 2014) and training excursions (2015 and 2016) not unlike the ANG ski excursion in 2018. This has resulted in a bank of material composed (apart from fieldnotes, visual annotations and policy documents, institutional travel descriptions and promotional material from tourist companies) of video recordings and audio files. But embedded within my created data rests, also, a proliferation of memories and lingering anecdotes of a place I have come to care about. In the still-ongoing process of twisting and turning my data for presentations, papers and artistic works, I have come to understand it as a process of “long dwelling on things remembered and retold, forgotten and imagined” (Stewart, Reference Stewart, Basso and Feld1996, p. 7). Methodologically, to think through encounters is to pay attention to the ways in which Svalbard is constituted through narratives and images as much as by geological layers, permafrost and polar bears; I recognise how narratives and images may continuously afford changes in the relationship to that which we think we recognise and understand (Dalsgaard & Frederiksen, Reference Dalsgaard and Frederiksen2013).

Twisting and turning my fieldnotes from the ANG excursion, then, the ANG stands out as a figure that connects with an approach to tourism as an assemblage of actors and materials that interacts with other assemblages to (re-)produce Svalbard (Saville, Reference Samantha2019). While living off the tourism industry’s capitalisation of experiences and stories about Svalbard, the ANG guides are situated in and working upon an assembled materiality that includes different social backgrounds, affects, attitudes and memories; as a transient constellation of affective relations and historical knowledges, the ANG excursion enacts an open-ended process of affects, attitudes and memories to potentially shape future geopolitical actions (Mostafanezhad & Norum, Reference Mostafanezhad and Norum2016).

The value of tying a knot

Before setting off on the ANG ski excursion, I attended a full-day introduction seminar at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), during which the ANG guides students held a presentation and reflected upon the training they had received during the one-year ANG programme. For one, a student from Romania:

Confirming the ANG programme to be part of a trend in sustainable tourism focused on active bodily participation and experience-based knowledge in nature, the guide students affectively conveyed the programme’s emphasis on nature as something living: something one must seek to be a part of, rather than to master. Contrasting to modernist notions of the human species in the Western history of ideas in which humanity, despite its biological origin, is perceived to be above – or at least categorically different from – nature, as noted, among others, by the French philosopher Bruno Latour (Reference Latour1993), the ANG guides refused “fantasies of human mastery” (Bennett, Reference Bennett2010, p. 122).

Emphasising interpretation, hostmanship and transparency as important aspects of the skilled practice of value-based guiding, beyond safety as the more obvious integral aspect, this was further acknowledged in my conversations with the ANG guides during the exam excursion:

An example of this was how we spent most of the morning on the second-day preparing to traverse a glacier; to this end, learning to tie safe and intricate knots so that we could ski in procession, one by one, tied together by a rope, was an essential preparation. “Surrendering to the feeling of being one big organism,” as one of the guides articulated, afforded us means of acting as a collective safety net should one of us fall into a glacier crevasse. But the careful preparation exposed, also, another aspect of the safety measure: the so-called “soft skill” of patient teaching. Both “soft skills” and “hard skills” are necessary and at best deeply intertwined.

The guide as a highly composite role

In his seminal text The Tourist Guide: The Origins, Structure and Dynamics of a Role (1985), the sociologist Eric Cohen defines two main roles: the pathfinder and the mentor. Seeking to provide a general theory aimed towards structural approaches to analysis in the field of tourist studies, Cohen explores the guide’s historical roots. For him, the function of the modern tourist guide is determined by these roles (and other different subroles), characterised by what Cohen calls the leadership sphere and the mediatory sphere of the modern guide role. Here Cohen classifies mediation, particularly, as “culture broking” – a form of “communicative mediatory” work in a sphere including selection (the indication of that worthy of touristic attention), providing information and, sometimes, fabrication (the invention of accounts or the deception of tourists). Communicative mediation is then distinguished from “interactional” mediation, which consists of representation (the guide negotiating between tourists and hosts) and organisation (the guide dealing with practical arrangements).

Despite the scope of activity covered by “mediation” and the large number of subcategories identified, Cohen’s complex attempt to set out the roles and activities involved in tour-guiding posits mediation as just one of two main types of tour guide activity, and indeed as characteristic of the type of guide that he refers to as the “mentor.” “Pathfinders,” by contrast, engage in leadership rather than mediation (which, like “mediation,” is broken down into a range of components and subcomponents). It is important to stress, meanwhile, that the professional guide draws on the spheres of both leadership and mediation (Cohen, Reference Cohen1985).

Cohen’s schematic treatment permits an understanding of the guide as a highly composite role, and a look through the ANG course literature, confirms this (see the ANGs programme, 2017/2018). The course literature reveals an approach to the guide role which, apart from safety and local policies, is concerned with questions of value creation, experience and learning, hostmanship and cross-cultural communication, hospitality, Arctic nature and ecology. It thereby also further certifies a certain development in sustainable tourism, where “nature-based tourism” is one of the fastest growing subsectors of tourism, also becoming a mature area of academic research (Margaryan, Reference Margaryan2017). Effectively, all the ANG students distanced themselves from what they considered to be the conventional role of the guide in mass tourism.

Guiding against mass tourism

It is worth briefly dwelling on the ANG guide’s resistance towards the role of the guide in mass tourism. In mass tourism, guides are often understood to execute their roles as what the cultural geographer Tim Edensor (Reference Edensor2001, p. 334) terms “actors who re-enact the same script at each performance” upon an overdetermined stage where “there is little room for reflectivity or improvisation given the narrow repertoire and the rigid script around which performance is organised.” For Edensor, the guides perform “disciplined rituals.” In contrast, ANG guides consider their “guests” active and equal co-producers (Larsen & Meged, Reference Larsen and Meged2013) – something attested in their insistence on the use of the term “guests,” which itself is connotative of a performance turn in tourism studies (Gelter, Reference Gelter, Garcia-Rosell, Ilola, Paloniemi, Hakkarainen, Tekoniemi-Selkälä and Vähäkuopus2013). The performance turn thus opposes the idea of the tourist gaze, “dislocating attentions from symbolic meaning and discourses to embodied, collaborative and technologized doings and enactments” (Haldrup & Larsen, Reference Haldrup and Larsen2009, p. 3) resulting in a “very open format, more like a discussion than a lecture” (Bruner, Reference Bruner2005, p. 410). Consequently, the guided tour is regarded as a space of dialectical relations between structure and agency; the experience of a sight is constructed in the performance of the sight (Haldrup & Larsen, Reference Haldrup and Larsen2009).

Following this, encouraging us participants to give a little information about ourselves, the ANG guides were enacting partly a mode of involving us and partly a means of “de-routinizing” their guiding performance (Bruner, Reference Bruner2005). In engaging with our different kinds of social prerequisites (including the various previous experiences and perceptions of guided tours), a gap was opened for improvisation, interpretation and negotiation – maybe even investigation. Or simply for “passion and genuine interest in people as well as the subject matter” to be “at the heart of guiding” (Widtfeldt Meged, Reference Widtfeldt Meged2010, p. 27). Yet ironically, then, in distancing themselves from the conventional role of the guide, the ANG guides expressed a rather stereotypical perception of guided tours in general. A performative turn in tourist studies offers a theoretical challenge to “value-based guiding” as something at odds to the received idea of what usually happens. In fact, emphasising being so, the ANG programme arguably reflects current economical imperatives to embrace the value-based as a (demanded) add-on in Arctic tourism.

Nevertheless, in recognising the impossibility of exercising guidance by means of methods or strategies that can be objectively valued, claiming to be “value-based” speaks to a politics of the figure of the guide, as far as it speaks to an understanding of guiding as being always infused with sensibility and sensitivity towards value from the outset, and in a sense where “value and values are conceptualised as fluid, relational and not always easy to trace” (Saville, Reference Saville2022, p. 4). In figuring the guide as an assembler, guidance is revealed to be embedded in a web of relations: encounters, contradictions and frictions. At stake, then, is less an idealised version of the ANG than a mode of thinking about the guide that potentially defies idealised portrayals of the Arctic as a barren land, touched only by expert and scientists: a politics that urgently complexifies popular public discourse, and what it truly means to guide with care and respect for nature.

Mediation is all about creation

Returning to the ANG excursion, the overall excursion was planned in daily sections. Two of the six ANG guides took responsibility for these in turns. Each day was a matter of getting from A to B, with tentatively planned stops along the way where we would eat and rest our legs. But these stops were also the moments when the guides more explicitly took upon themselves their roles as mediators.

As communicators, or middlemen, the ANG guides are thought to mediate a complex range of different contexts, in the sense of bringing these contexts together for the sake of a knowledge-based approach to the increasing awareness of global climate and environmental crisis. Meanwhile, tourism agents and organisations in Longyearbyen, the ANG programme among them, are largely founded on economically supported initiatives that, historically speaking, were established by the Norwegian government as political vehicles intended to establish a year-round community on Svalbard. Considering that there was virtually no tourism whatsoever in the 1970s and 1980s but that today it is crucial to the sustenance of the local economy and society (Arlov, Reference Arlov2003; Saville, Reference Saville2022), the question of mediating agency in the context of tourism on Svalbard underlines the status of the guide as image-builder in a place that became a tourist destination only this century (Viken, Reference Viken2011).

Any professionally guided tour is inscribed in larger institutional set-ups and within value frameworks (Saville & Hoskins, Reference Saville and Hoskins2019) and guides “always work with reference to a global framework which influences the tour and the relations between tourists and guides” (Widtfeldt Meged, Reference Widtfeldt Meged2010, p. 25). This reflects how tourism ushers in the “new imperialism” associated with capitalist globalisation (Harvey, Reference Harvey2003; Norum, Reference Norum, Huggan and Jensen2016) and makes it important to emphasise that while a performative turn shows the degree to which experiences of place are mediated through subjective stances and situations, it does not oblige the rejection of symbols selected as Arctic ideals. Experiences only rarely possible in person – acquiring close-up images of polar bears and glaciers, for example – continue to be meaningful for many visitors of Longyearbyen. Hence, while tourist destinations are, of course, more than constructed symbols, techniques and images, travel continues to be constituted by dominant discourses and mythologies advanced by media technologies and circulating in the “imagescapes” (Larsen, Reference Larsen2004). While a performative turn in tourist studies emphasises embodiment and participation, ontology and practice as valuable assets, the worth of the experience economy is often constructed by theories and strategies (Pine & Gilmore, Reference Pine and Gilmore2011). Accordingly, any guiding on Svalbard is somewhat choreographed by desires for, and imaginaries of, the Arctic.

Interestingly, then, the tourist scholar Heidi Dahles has noted that scholars in research on tour-guiding have historically shared “a strong emphasis on the mediation activities of guides,” portraying the guide as “someone who builds bridges among different groups of people” (Reference Dahles2002, p. 784), and relation to a government or an industry. However, concerned with politically or ideologically strategic use of tourism, she points out how a consideration of guiding as operating “according to a harmony model of ‘mediation’ of keeping all parties involved satisfied” is problematic as it “fails to capture the political component of guiding” (Dahles, Reference Dahles2002, p. 785). Dahles’s problematisation of a “harmony model of mediation” thus serves to contest considerations of the ANG guides as simply middlemen assembling the interests of the tourist industry according to their own values and expectations; demands from guests and both scientific (epistemic regimes) and politically driven discourses and imaginaries are folded into the mix. And yet, the historical scholarship on tourism – situating the political dimension of the experience-economical aspect of tourism through a prism of imperialism (Smith, Reference Smith1989) and disclosing Dahles’s “harmony model of mediation” – helps me to acknowledge another politics of the mediation activities of the ANG guides. This politics is implied in thinking of the guide’s mediation activities as a navigation and negotiation of increasingly charged modernist assumptions of binary nature/culture relations.

As I am considering this, a particular situation comes to mind. At one point, a guide was asked to interpret the “landscape” during a break in an open hilly glacier terrain. The guide chose to talk about an organ in the gigantic head of the sperm whale that produces a white waxy substance once mistaken by early whalers for sperm. This, however, led the situation to be used as an example of a complete failure of interpretation; the guide had talked about the sperm whale in a context where there was no ocean and thus, it was asserted, it was hard for us as guests to relate and gain knowledge from their story. However, as one of the other guides observed in a later casual conversation, to talk about the sperm whale in the hilly glacier terrain had made her aware of this discordance and so even more aware of her own interpretation of her surroundings. Consequently, she found the moment revelatory. And I would agree. The mediative aspect of the ANG guide’s interpretive effort challenged interpretation as meaning-making while simultaneously embodying a conceptualisation of nature as something authentic and worth travelling for (Reisinger & Steiner, Reference Reisinger and Steiner2006). Situated somewhere between the planned and the unplanned, the ANG guide’s “failed interpretation” rather challenged a paradigm concerning the source and transmission of knowledge by evoking a sense of being in a momentary constellation of different registers “working” on each other (without, of course, anyone assuming equal distribution). I suggest that the instance exposed a sort of “creation model of mediation”– or simply communication as difference rather than consensus or dialectic interaction (Zhang & Doering, Reference Zhang and Doering2021) – revealing the guide’s care for nature as a form of performative, improvised and co-production.

“Creation is all about mediators,” wrote Gilles Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1995, p. 125). “Without them nothing happens.”

The sperm whale anecdote exemplifies how the ANG guides on Svalbard, as emblematic representatives of the High Arctic and a symbol of climate change, are deeply entangled in negotiating representation as an (experience-economical) authenticity effect. Effects of representation condition their guiding. Importantly, the guides do not escape their own role in producing the Arctic. The guide discloses problems with the representational discourse without escaping it.

Nature: A useful analytical category

It is perhaps simpler to grasp the increasingly charged nature/culture confrontation by pointing at the ways in which social imaginaries of Svalbard are closely connected to social imaginaries about nature. While the tourist body Visit Svalbard strives to make Longyearbyen a sustainable tourist destination (a label scheme, owned by Innovation Norway), tourists travel to Svalbard in increasing numbers to experience nature, based on the basic premise that there are areas on Svalbard where very few people have been. This paradox challenges Longyearbyen’s label as a sustainable tourist destination: there is an inherent tension between this status and the visible and environmental effects of tourism in a place where technology, imaginaries and people – including myself – come and go at an extraordinarily high frequency.

Locally, the anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková (Reference Sokolíčková2022) has noted how the environmental effects are translated into difficulties that people living in the “melttown” of Longyearbyen experience when being confronted with the overwhelming dilemmas without the support of a collective sense of belonging to a community. The notion of Longyearbyen as a “melttown” refers to the fact that while the limit of a 2°C target limit has been set (over the preferable 1.5°C) globally, on Svalbard there is a local increase in temperature of 8–10°. Svalbard is becoming more humid and greener, and the sea ice in the fjords is disappearing. Some species are disappearing; new species are arriving. In this context, what Sokolíčková has further pointed out is the observation that while it may not be possible to talk about “communities” on Svalbard in any traditional anthropological sense, Longyearbyen residents strive to conjure a local community precisely and particularly by emphasising certain values and attitudes towards living in nature. These values and attitudes, however, do not necessarily match the geopolitically motivated strategy of Norwegian central authority.

What I take from this is how nature emerges as a useful analytical category (Hornborg, Reference Hornborg2017). Whether the aim is to ensure its sovereignty over Svalbard (the Norwegian government), to attract tourists (Visit Svalbard) or to conjure a local community, nature – often coupled with terms such as eco-friendliness and sustainability – is exposed as a term used and exploited in public debate and political institutions alike. Put differently, as image-builders of Svalbard as a tourist destination, the guides, navigating and negotiating social imaginaries of nature, display an image-politics of nature. Consequently, the idea of nature as an analytical category, playing a central role in conversations about future developments on Svalbard and in the Arctic at large, further adds to the idea that Svalbard is a place constantly narrated – an indeterminate image (la Cour, Reference la Cour2022).

Colonial legacies of (Gendered) authority in no man’s land

Recalling the ANG ski excursion and the long day of roped walking across the glaciers, the following, third, day offered us a chance to move at our own pace. We crossed a large open plateau, which meant that the polar bear guards (the guides carrying the rifles that day) had a good view and that we could therefore ski a little more spread out from one another. For a while, then, I skied next to another participant, someone I had already chatted to about the sometimes tiring need to be patient when operating as a group. He said that if ever he became a millionaire, he would prefer to buy a personal tour guide – it was a “mindfuck” to be serviced by our guides, on one hand, and to have to show patience for their “exam training” on the other. While he was of course referring to the specific form of exam excursion we were participating in, I noted the comment as an expression of a desire for some kind of “unspoiled” experience.

Revising my fieldnotes in my studio a year later, the (imagined) millionaire seems to exemplify a common ignorance of that which the sperm whale anecdote revealed: the weight of a variegated companionship. Nature is necessarily relational; there is no place outside the imaginaries carried by our relations to our surroundings. Meant as an informative and pedagogical act, aiming towards us as guests gaining knowledge through an affective experience, the sperm whale interpretation was interruptive and, in the Brechtian sense, alienating. The guide arguably made it comprehensible by making it strange. There exists already an established recognition of the experiential worth and “client value” of the tourist guide’s dramaturgical skills (Røkenes et al., Reference Røkenes, Schumann and Rose2015) and a wider debate on the role of interpretation in guiding (see Reisinger & Steiner, Reference Reisinger and Steiner2006). But concerned with a creation model of mediation, the ANG guide displayed agency in “value-based” as a common, and communalising, process towards knowing differently; this functions through an evocation of perceptive sensibilities that resonates with increasing attempts to recognise the value of affect and emotions in Arctic geopolitics (Sörlin, Reference Sörlin2021) while exploring multiple epistemic authorities (Brattland et al., Reference Brattland, Kramvig and Verran2018).

I shall elaborate this as a geo-aesthetical condition (a term I will define below). But first I will briefly return to Cohen’s (Reference Cohen1985) historical tracing of the role of the modern guide as the pathfinder of Greco-Roman antiquity, where guidance was in demand from the army, the traveller and the explorer. Cohen’s idea of the pathfinder offers a perspective on the relationship between the role of the guide on Svalbard and the archipelago’s status, maintained until 1920, as a no man’s land, different to the various historical understandings of the guide as a local with the authority of a cultural broker, an authentic representative of a locale (or mentor, when, according to Cohen, involved in communicative and interactional mediation). The guide, as “host,” has thus often been assumed to be a local. Precisely for this reason, for a long time, the idea of a host was considered contradictory to Svalbard’s apparent lack of inhabitants and infrastructure, making the archipelago a site seemingly irrelevant for the social sciences. Roughly speaking, the authority of the guide on Svalbard has derived from the possession of a rifle or from the specific, hard-earned skills one must possess if one is to survive outside settlements. From a contemporary perspective, however, there is a contradiction between the ways in which imaginaries of Svalbard as an empty wilderness, based on the historical observation that the archipelago never had indigenous inhabitants, played a role in the authorisation of extractive activities which continued for decades. While there is a somewhat long history of human activity on the archipelago, what is contradictory is the fact that human presence and extraction have been permanent, and year-round, since the turn of the last century. Coal, scientific data and images have all been extracted. There is, in other words, an interesting relationship between the historical lack of interest in Svalbard on the part of the social sciences and the kind of authority that the pathfinder, as a heroic male guide, holds in anthropogenic imaginaries of the “empty” High Arctic. An effect of contemporary and more self-questioning approaches in the social sciences, so to speak, arguably implies that historically the social science researcher encounters himself as a male explorer and guide, as much as researcher.

Furthermore, in accordance with Cohen’s definition of the guide as pathfinder and mentor, a gendered reading of the figure resonates across a spectrum bridging the roles of the safety officer and the spiritual mentor. While exposing the term “guide” as hopelessly broad, the two ends of this spectrum connect in an interesting fashion in the context of the Arctic – continuously “an arena for the performance of conflicted narratives about masculine heroism, supposedly anchored through recourse to normative male rationality and beliefs in technological progress” (Körber et al., Reference Körber, MacKenzie and Westerståhl Stenport2017, p. 4) – through a long trajectory of heroic male explorers. The influential authors of the Arctic from the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz (1550–1597), recognised as the discoverer of Spitsbergen, to the English explorer Sir Martin Conway (1856–1937), author of No Man’s Land (Conway, Reference Conway2011), or the Norwegian polar hero Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), are precisely those conquerors of the inhuman, empty, Arctic wilderness. They become mentors for other like-minded adventurers embarking on new expeditions. These are authors often thought to have accumulated particular, almost superhuman, insights and authorial knowledge: hard and soft skills, the acquisition of which speaks to highly productive behaviour and supreme mental strength. Countless diaries, texts and photographs have functioned as sources for like-minded adventurers in search of new (unspoiled) experiences, and in this instance, not only do authorisation and authorship connect with the Arctic expert; the role of the polar explorer in the construction of the Arctic is rendered deeply entangled with the production of the modern state’s territory and sovereignty precisely through notions of civilisation and non-civilisation; imaginaries of no man’s land.

Guiding as epistemological practice

Michel Foucault’s description of a regime of representation is fundamental here. Foucault proposes that modernist conceptions of nature as a realm outside society have evolved through the coalescing of a network of discursive strategies since the Renaissance (Foucault, Reference Foucault1991). In these strategies, in which an agent is basically a productive subject, a (hu)man who produces representations produces knowledge. But through Foucault we are increasingly trained to conceive of such knowers – from Barentsz, Conway and Nansen to contemporary Arctic experts – as situated in particular relations, both to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower.

Importantly, from a feminist perspective, the world is experienced according to the various constitutions and locations in space and time those bodies enjoy (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2022). Briefly, as feminist epistemologies function as a sort of commentary on the (Foucauldian) idea of authorial constraint, disclosing that what is at stake is not only epistemological transformation (what is known) but a politics of ontological pluralism (how it is known; see Povinelli, Reference Povinelli2016).

All of this activates the figure of the guide as a tool with which to enable and explore a shift in focus from representation to mediation. Informed by trends in new materialist ideas of human culture and non-human nature as inseparable entities (Povinelli, Reference Povinelli2016), the figure of the guide becomes less concerned with transformation – even if “transformation” was a term used by many of the ANG’s students – than with the negotiation and investigation of what and how we know. To care for nature emerges as a concern that reflects a move towards a “rethinking of the role of research and researchers as co-creators” (Ren et al., Reference Ren, Jóhannesson, Kramvig, Pashkevich and Höckert2021, p. 6); value-based guiding and teaching in Arctic Nature emerge as self-affective processes, based on somewhat contingent encounters (Lien, Reference Lien2021, p. 1). The human geographer Samantha Saville (Reference Saville2021) writes that

What emerges from these shifts, she argues, is a re-shaping of the self which potentially changes the way a researcher works. This is, of course, inherently political. Being widely recognised that the colonial legacy of tourism is caught up in the enduring (albeit historically shifting) symbolic politics of imaginary geographies (Salazar, Reference Salazar2012), and how the field of the social sciences – and the field of anthropology in particular – has played an equivocal role in producing these imaginaries, at stake is an epistemological strategy to challenge continuous productions of the Arctic as exterior to the global West (la Cour, Reference la Cour2022). The figure of the guide emerges as an analytical tool for interrogating illusions and ideas of authenticity, pure authorship and undisturbed knowledge production.

On Svalbard, complications in the politics of image production and guiding, then, potentially contribute to a “vision for Svalbard as a progressive testbed not only for technical Arctic solutions and tourism management beyond ‘sustainability’ but also for alternative ways of thinking,” as Saville (Reference Saville2022, p. 10) has it. Or a mode of thinking tourism that disconnects “from the growth paradigm and strengthens alternative visions and futures” (Ren et al., Reference Ren, Jóhannesson, Kramvig, Pashkevich and Höckert2021, p. 117; Hall et al., Reference Hall, Lundmark and Zhang2021).

Guiding in geo-aesthetical terrains

The striving towards “alternative ways of thinking” reflects the need to develop a more integrated critique of colonial and neo-colonial presence in the Arctic. There is an urgent need to transgress a historically purified separation between “natural” and “social” phenomena (Latour, Reference Latour1993, p. 99), and its subsequent assumptions of binary relations between “local” and “tourist” or “long-term resident” and “seasonal service worker.”

As assemblage-makers, the ANG guides contribute to this. Even if the categories of the “natural” and “social” are widely used in guides’ discussions about environmental preservation and resource management on Svalbard, as Trine B. Andersen (Reference Andersen2022, p. 6) has shown, “the guides do not adhere only to the binary division of nature and society.” Rather, she argues, “they transgress it … by engaging in pro-environmental practices.” I have the same impression of the ANG guides. But, considered as creative, I have come to understand their mediation activities as a more fundamentally pro-environmental model of practice that contributes to a contemporary striving, so urgent today, towards more circular modes of thinking and acting. For example: on the last day of the ANG ski excursion, we experienced a white-out. As a result, plans were changed; we stayed in our tents for the entire day, only striking camp at three in the morning the following day when the blizzard began to abate (one can easily swap day and night on Svalbard in summer on account of the constant light). This was principally a matter of safety. It is, naturally, crucial to be able to see. Nevertheless, the situation created a moment of reflection on the difference between considering the white-out to be a phenomenon making it impossible to see nature, and a phenomenon considered to be nature itself. In a rather simple manner, the white-out was an outside manifestation of Svalbard as a situated set of material conditions rather than as scenery or bounded place. This includes both the agency of weather and ideas of so-called value-based guiding as educative and transformative ends of an experience economy.

This resonates with how, elsewhere, I have tried to grasp a sense of lack – or gap of potential differentiation – in the representational discourse, with reference to the term “geo-aesthetics,” a neologism combining the terms “geography” and “aesthetics” (la Cour, Reference la Cour2022). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “geography” as the study of the earth’s physical features and the interactions of human activity with those features; etymologically, the Greek origin of the word “aesthetics” designates perception and perceptible objects. Thus, the term geo-aesthetics proposes the idea of aesthetics as understandable through situated global infrastructures alone.

“Geoaesthetics” is a term used primarily by geographers attending to the visual arts as a mode of bringing together considerations of environment, place, and geology (Hawkins, Reference Hawkins2013; Hawkins & Straughan, Reference Hawkins and Straughan2015), in media art histories, and as a mode of disclosing a geology of media (Parikka, Reference Parikka2015). It is also a topic for artists and theorists coupled with so-called geophilosophy (Shapiro, Reference Shapiro2004).Footnote ¹ In relation to the figure of the guide, however, geo-aesthetics is principally a term allowing material contingencies in a place like Svalbard to connect with the context of its constant change – of public values, climate, economy and geopolitical relations (Kaltenborn et al., Reference Kaltenborn, Østreng and Hovelsrud2020). I redefine geo-aesthetics by hyphenating “geo” and “aesthetics,” coupling the terms whilst acknowledging the gap remaining between them. Stressing that a grid of representational discourses interact to produce Svalbard as we know it, the hyphenation between “geo” and “aesthetics” discloses a temporary (and temporarily communal) space for negotiation, brought forth exactly by time – time as duration, time as memory and time as consciousness (Kember & Zylinska, Reference Kember and Zylinska2012). Embodying the Arctic’s historical signification as a critical and exceptional space of modernity, the figure of the guide connects the ever-more serious global environmental crisis scenarios of the future to a larger representational breakdown (Scott, Reference Scott2016). The different kinds of knowledges and relations to the real that exist and play out in the interplay between non-human formations, human practices and knowledges of guides and guests remain “larger than and beyond the knowing subject” (Grosz, Reference Grosz2005, p. 5) and can perhaps best be considered as effects of the mediative aspects of collaborative efforts.

Guidance as productive behaviour

The problem with image production and guiding in relation to Svalbard is not so much a matter of “coming from the outside” (as is so often the case elsewhere in the Arctic) as it is a matter of the ways in which Svalbard imaginaries are produced through the images people create of, from, or in relation to, embodied and situated encounters with and in the archipelago. While often promoted as a frozen diorama threatened by climate change, and historically used and imagined by “outsiders” (and continuously) as “a location where the past, present and future of the planet’s environmental and geopolitical systems are played out” (Körber et al., Reference Körber, MacKenzie and Westerståhl Stenport2017, p. 1), the guide emerges as a figure on an ever-shifting ground.

This is relevant for the manner in which geopolitical means of ordering the world are implicit in tourism as a practice – not only in the sense of a top-down/distanced geopolitical analysis of tourism, but in the sense of an analysis of transient constellations of both affective relations and temporarily available historical knowledges. As the human geographers Mary Mostafanezhad and Roger Norum have shown, a performativity of imaginative geographies reflects the co-constitutive relationship between tourism practice and geopolitical imaginaries (Reference Mostafanezhad and Norum2016), and these are crucial for comprehending place as exceptional. But the guide’s locatedness more fundamentally certifies that geopolitical spaces are reconfigured through representations, places and experiences in their co-constitutive aspect, insofar as we can understand the guide to display agency in meaning-making. The guide puts their agency to the service of what can perhaps be thought of as a kind of ontologically conditioned politics of experience – or what the cultural geographer Ben Anderson calls “representations-in-relations” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2019), relational configurations of which representation is but a part.

Western imaginaries of the Arctic are founded in no small measure on heroic figures and “great” authors, announcing the names of “strange things” and, by naming them, bringing them into being. But the figure of the guide affords a model of practice that considers a multiplicity of agencies at play. Importantly, it requires an ontological register to drive representation. In this sense, the guide reveals how both social and natural stories emerge from being in – or part of – nature: an increasing lack of sea ice does not only complicate safe crossings of fjords (requiring nature guides to seek new paths in the terrain), but also it reveals also how human behaviour and communities are constituted as an improvised negotiation of environmental and social stories (Tsing, Reference Tsing2005, p. 11); the remains of blubber ovens, oil boilers and now-ruined huts, left behind by whalers of the 18th century to become cultural heritage in the present, allow the nature guide to track human presences and histories in a landscape often narrated as barren and empty. Meanwhile, perceptions of nature are mobilised in an effort to frame Longyearbyen as a sustainable tourist destination.

Of course, the title “guide” may cover a wide range of job functions; “the guide in the global perspective may be anything from someone who is self-taught to someone holding a university degree,” as the tourism scholar Jane W. Meged (Reference Widtfeldt Meged2010) writes. Yet, the assemblage-maker emerges from a genuine understanding of guidance as productive behaviour affording temporal communality and action – both embedded within socially constructed imaginaries and affective perception, permitted by technology (Norum, Reference Norum, Andersson, Hartmann and Hill2021). Importantly, however, the guide’s agency (and thus power) does not originate in authorship as a first principle. While pathfinder and mentor, the guide’s authority is nonetheless quite different to that of the traditional author and expert; it is more an engaged attitude towards skilled differentiation.

It is in this sense, finally, I find the figure of the guide to be interesting in the context of Svalbard, where mediation as creation is so closely connected to questions of territory, sovereignty and ownership.