| Title | 3. THE SOUNDS OF SNOW |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | AN EXPLORATION OF HUMAN-SNOW RELATIONS IN ILULISSAT, KALAALLIT NUNAAT |
| Contributor | Nanna Kisby (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.63308/63878687083054.ch03 |
| Landing page | https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2025/03/04/meam-2/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Nanna Sandager Kisby |
| Publisher | The White Horse Press |
| Published on | 2025-07-01 |
| Long abstract | Snow is ever present during the long winter months in Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). It covers houses, doorways, roads, cars, sleeping dogs, and mountains. It shapes the landscape, re-configures town infrastructure, and hinders – as well as enables –human practices. In order to understand human life in Ilulissat, it is crucial to understand snow and its behavior. This chapter therefore focuses on snow as a vibrant materiality (Bennett, 2010) that acts from certain inherent capacities: snow is a shape shifter, it moves, it takes up space, it is a source of life, and it produces impressions that can be registered by, for example, human senses. These capacities of snow influence its relationship with other actors in more-than-human assemblages. In order to study these capacities of snow, the author made use of artistic methods and sensory ethnography in addition to traditional ethnographic methods during her fieldwork in Ilulissat. In particular, soundscapes and photography enabled her to explore the ways in which snow behaves, and to capture its various manifestations. Artistic methods also created the possibility to collaborate with snow as a nonhuman actor in the process of making art, in order to share the research findings with other humans. The author shows that artistic methods function as a bridge between the nonhuman and the human, and help in producing art as embodied knowledge. This chapter includes four sound recordings and six photographs. At specified moments in the chapter, the author invites the readers to listen to the snow recordings and to look at the images and thus to go with her on a multi-sensory journey to meet the snow in Ilulissat. |
| Page range | pp. 82–100 |
| Print length | 19 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Media | 8 illustrations |
| 5 audio |
Nanna obtained her MSc in Cultural Anthropology: Sustainable Citizenship at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her thesis focused on human-snow relations in Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat, and shows how nonhuman matter (such as snow) has an inherent agency. She obtained her BSc in Anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Nanna also has a background in art and movement studies, which has inspired her to draw on artistic methods and bodily inquiry in her ethnographic work. Throughout her fieldwork in Ilulissat, Nanna experimented with data collection through a combination of methods in order to capture aspects of human-snow relations that escape the written word. These methods included recording soundscapes, photography, and exploring snow through sensory ethnography. Nanna currently works for a small company in the Dutch energy sector. In her work, she conducts cultural analyses and co-coordinates a project in Egypt developing Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs on sustain- ability and green hydrogen.