Towards an Anthropology of Ice

Scholarly interest in universes of ice has a long genealogy, as reflected in the work of historians and anthropologists who have engaged with reflections from archives about places where ice is an imperative. Astrid Ogilvie (2022) examines the work of Icelandic scholars writing on the sea ice around Iceland in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries that emphasises the menacing qualities of ice, as it would bring cold temperatures, damage the land and generate famines. Alexei Kraikovski (2022) traces accounts from the seventeenth century onward about coastal areas of Russia where ice allows or prevents transport through the seasons. As an ‘insistent and lively agent’, ice, Kraikovski (2022: 66) maintains, shapes the experience of time and space in coastal Russia and generates a social imaginary that is central to the local and regional politics and economy. Building on imperial accounts, Thomas Simpson describes encounters between British explorers and glaciers during colonial India, arguing that ice played an active role in the travels of these agents as it ‘penetrated the bodies and lodged in the minds of Europeans in South Asia, at times soothing and revivifying, at others baffling and wounding’ (2022: 222). In their edited volume, Alexis Metzger and Frédérique Rémy (2015) trace how scientists, travellers, artists and other thinkers from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries engaged sensorially and intellectually with ice in different parts of the world.

One of the most notable anthropological accounts of icy environments is found in Franz Boas's study of Baffin Island (1964 [1888]). Boas describes in great detail a world where the life and subsistence of the Inuit people are conditioned by ice, its formation and its movements. Contemporary research on the Arctic continues to provide insights into life in places where ice dictates the terms, leading humans to develop unique ice-related knowledge and skills in order to thrive in a somewhat challenging environment (Hastrup 2009a, 2009b; Krupnik et al 2010; Nuttall 2017). Overall, these studies depict universes where ice is, in the words of Kirtsen Hastrup, an ‘argument’, an agent that has a pervasive presence capable of permeating people, places, representations and histories (Hastrup 2013). A salient aspect of the current scholarship on life in the Arctic is the impacts of climate change and its disruptive effects on a unique environment that has long been depicted as fierce for its treacherousness to humans, but which now reveals itself as vulnerable. Increasingly unsettled by climate change, the argument of ice is here no less pervasive in people's life. As Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer put it in their contribution to this special issue, in the Anthropocene age, ‘ice and people now live together more precariously’.

Overall, early fascination for mystical icy universes has today very much led the way to studies of icy matter underscored by the urgency of the stakes at hand in the Anthropocene. Moving from icy universes to ice as a landform, this is quite tangible in the attention given by anthropologists and scholars of cognate disciplines to receding glaciers. This has led to the production of a corpus of research on the moral and material implications of climate change, whether glaciers play an important role in the subsistence of mountain communities or in how people connect with landscapes (Brugger et al 2012; Clivaz and Savioz 2020; Cruikshank 2005; Drew 2017; Gagné 2019; Haberman and Carreño 2021; Orlove et al 2008b; Rasmussen 2015; Rhoades et al 2008). From the Andes to the Himalayas, Europe and North America, as they recede, glaciers accentuate affective, political and economic entanglements. The fragility of icy environments amid global climate change is also revealed as the very soil on which people are living is eroding, such as is the case with permafrost thawing (Crate 2021; Kunuk and Mauro 2010; Marino 2015). Here, ice threatens communities by compromising, in its demise, their very existence and cultural identity. The intertwined vulnerability of ice and humans is also increasing the potential for disaster produced by melting ice, from land erosion, avalanches and glacier hazards, something never detached from processes of political and social marginalisation (Carey 2010; Lord 2022; Marino 2015).

These studies tell us about the multifaceted nature of ice in environments where it flourishes and withers: ice is soil, mountains, frozen water bodies and more. Ice is multiple and takes varied forms and different characteristics, from being a potential threat to human lives to being a ‘vital infrastructure’ of socio-cultural importance (Gagné, this issue). Its resistance to being reducible to a single term only is well captured in scientific renderings such as the Illustrated Glossary of Snow and Ice (Armstrong et al 1966). Ice also serves different functions, from a fundamental resource that supplies water for irrigation to a useful one such as when used for cooling and refreshment. And even in this most mundane usage, when it is a commodity, ice, natural and artificial, gets imbricated in systems of oppression led by colonial actors (Hobart 2022; Simpson 2022).

A closer focus on ice, including its materiality, is also found in science and technology studies scholarship, which attends to the production of knowledge about ice. This scholarship offers a unique vantage point, considering ice not only as a scientific object and a leitmotif of climate science but also as a socio-cultural object. Pey-Yi Chu (2021) studies the history of how Russian and Soviet scientists approached permafrost, revealing contrasting perspectives based on different thinking traditions, with permafrost conceived as a physical structure or as a process tied to planetary processes. Jessica O'Reilly (2017) examines how Antarctic glaciologists know the glacial environment of the Antarctic through sensory engagement and intimate encounters with ice, something that is also entangled in social and cultural complexities. Cristián Simonetti (2021) turns to how ice scientists have grappled over time with the very liminality of ice, which as a dynamic ‘solidfluid’ shifts from solid to liquid, something he approaches through the notion of viscosity. Simonetti traces how Western thought has struggled with the tension between solid and fluid states, something that has contributed to a correlation of matter, ice, with inertia and a lack of animacy.

The ‘cryo-historical moment’ (Sörlin 2015: 327–328) we have reached – one that directs ‘our attention to the historical powers of human forcing in the Anthropocene’ – has rendered problematic any adherence to ice as inanimate. Recent studies that focus on the production of knowledge about ice as a repository of time, however, reveal the difficulties of casting ice as a temporal actor. For instance, Marcus Nüsser and Ravi Baghel (2014) examine how limited knowledge about glaciers has made them easily susceptible to controversies, as extrapolations and modelling of future scenarios remain challenging (insights echoed by Drew and Gergan, this issue). Alessandro Antonello and Mark Carey (2017) examine the temporalising properties of glaciers and how from ice core extraction the history of Earth is recast, human time is foregrounded and future time is predicted. But tapping the potential of this icy object for global-scale climate modelling is not an easy process, as demonstrated by Martin Skrydstrup (2013) in his ethnographic study of everyday work at a drilling camp on the Greenland ice sheet, where ice core extraction is complicated by the stubbornness of ice. It is this stubbornness, this tenacity and dynamism, that requires expanded anthropological attention.

Ice as Vital Matter

In the face of the unprecedented crisis of the Anthropocene, scholars have argued for a paradigm shift. This entails a certain degree of humility, the recognition that humans are not only producers of their everyday realities but are also affected, constrained and fashioned by the myriad non-human actors that surround them. Two decades of reflections on non-human and more-than-human materialities have produced studies of how humans are ‘becoming with’ (Haraway 2008: 3) forests, plants, micro-organisms and a vast array of other living species. Importantly, these studies challenge the dominance of human-centric frameworks. Some scholars have even put the non-human agent at the centre of their studies by rethinking the ontology of matter and things (Bennett 2010) so that intentionality, consciousness and rationality are no longer sine qua non conditions for agentive capacity. These reflections have received much attention, generating an array of neologisms to think about the force of the material world (Harman 2011; Holbraad and Pederson 2017; Ingold 2016; Latour 2007, 2013; Povinelli 2016). To be sure, anthropocentric rationalities have their own histories, which not all humans have always embraced (Todd 2016). They have, however, been pervasive and ruling enough to alter our planet's condition. Accordingly, for many scholars, the decentring of human-centric frameworks is not just a philosophical musing but also a political project, a radical rethinking of an epistemology characteristic of social and cultural analyses.

Inspired by Jane Bennett's (2010) notion of ‘vital materiality’, in this special issue we build on new materialism, feminist philosophy of science and the power of ontological encounters to explore how ice – as a range of frozen bodies of water – has a commanding, even forceful, materiality that acts on humans. This is a salient dimension of materiality that needs to be better considered by political theory, as Bennett and others argue. Recognising that the material world is imbued with its own potential to command and disrupt is an apt point of departure to think about the myriad ways in which ice is entangled with human and non-human futures. In these accounts, ice sometimes emerges as a ‘hyperobject’ – an elusive yet emotive element that challenges assumed notions of space and time as it emerges from multiple relations, and inescapable affects, whether in its material or discursive form (Morton 2013). Yet the hyperobject of ice departs from Timothy Morton's model. Ice is not just ‘out there, at large’ in the way that a hyperobject like climate change is; the materiality and vibrancy of ice is also – as this special issue's interlocutors might argue while gesticulating to the icy landscapes around them – pervasive yet tangible. And while the agency of ice appears elusive, ethnographic accounts from around the world – including those in this collection – demonstrate the ways that people are learning to perceive and receive the lessons that ice has to offer. The ensuing knowledge eases, to a degree, the indeterminacy created by mixed, and contentious, understandings of glacial melt stemming from glacial science and global climate change projections.

Accounts of ice too often fail to recognise and listen to what ice is telling us. Appreciating the many aspects of ice as a vital and lively object is an important step towards less human-centric perspectives on ice. The vitality of ice manifests itself in phenomenological encounters, which emphasise how ice appeals to human senses and is generative of emotions, intimate knowledge and aspects of embodied experience rarely captured by scientific accounts. Thinking about ice through the prism of vitality also allows us to explore ice bodies as webs of relations whose emerging agency acts on, and through, populations. Ice encapsulates and activates affective storylines, we argue, and its vibrancy contributes to our understanding of past, present and future lives. Vitality also emanates from ice itself, through its capacity to be, as matter, simultaneously solid and liquid (Simonetti 2021; Simpson 2022) or to morph into objects such as rocks (Rider, this issue). Finally, ice is vital and lively, because it affords life, not only in its surrounding environment and beyond, but also because it has the capacity to afford organic life within itself (Simonetti 2021: 122; Yip, this issue).

For this special issue, we have curated a collection of articles in which the authors’ approaches to ice contribute to the derailment of conceptual orthodoxies and thus to the elaboration of plural frameworks for the material world. The material agency of ice demands more accepting epistemologies than those currently offered by the prevailing approaches that do not centre its agentive capacities. The contributions examine human relationships with glaciers and other ice bodies that emerge from different forms of icy encounters and are anchored into sensorial experiences, material experimentation, relational ontologies and principles of reciprocity. In each case, ice is a force that acts on humans – and it does so in an epoch wherein humans are increasingly seen as the primary agents of ecological and climatic change. With this special issue, we learn not strictly about ice, but also from ice, through a variety of cultural perspectives and case studies exploring different ice objects – glaciers, sea ice, rock-filled ice, and a frozen river. Significantly, the collection of articles presents narratives about ice undergirded by humility in the recognition of the limits of human agency.

Through tales of intimate encounters with climate change in the Indian Himalayas, Karine Gagné’s paper offers a critique of the detached technocratic outlook as the single authoritative narrative on climate change in the region. She does so by drawing from scholarship inspired by the work of Stacy Alaimo, which focuses on bodily experiences of climate change, including experiences of ‘the contact zone between human corporality and more-than-human nature’ (2010: 2). Building on ethnographic material from Ladakh and Zanskar, where ice is fundamental to the relations between living beings, Gagné extends these ideas through a shift in scale where the global framework for climate change is replaced by one that privileges the locus of the body, human and non-human, and that recognises the capacity of ice to affect. In her article, the uncanniness of climate change (cf. Ghosh 2016) is experienced by sensing a frozen river, listening to glaciers and attending to how ice is part of a metabolic connection that links human and non-human bodies. These mundane encounters demonstrate ‘the capacity of people, through bodily engagement in everyday life, to mediate global climate change’ (Gagné this issue). These encounters with climate change are, however, not just experiential but also bring reflections on social justice and responsibility.

Shifting the geographical and ‘geohuman’ discussion to Iceland, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer examine the ‘social life of ice’ and also its ‘death’ at the edge of the Arctic Circle. The focus of their exploration is Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change. Observing that initially the glacier's disappearance received little attention, their work revisits the loss while asking what qualities a landscape or non-living entity must demonstrate in order for humans ‘to recognise a shared precarity’. Their work creatively investigates this question with multimodal methods and the creation of a documentary film, ‘Not Ok: A little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world’ – a memorial-centred narrative and visual production that garnered international attention to Okjökull's demise. In sharing their process, from extensive fieldwork to film production and audience responses, Howe and Boyer find that an especially generative space for reflection in the age of the Anthropocene is on the ‘equivocations between the living and the dead, the vital and inanimate’. Their work invites readers (and viewers) to imagine the agency of a sick or deceased glacier, and to see their own vulnerability reflected back.

Alexis Rider begins her contribution by recounting the glaciated landscapes and ‘rock-filled ice’ of Svalbard, the archipelago in the High Arctic she visited in 2017. Drawing on archival research about scientific projects on the Southern ice cap, Rider then offers an exploration of the relationship between meteorites originating from far across the cosmos and the deep blue Antarctic ice in which they are routinely discovered. In examining how ice takes on a different mode of vitality as a ‘monomineralic rock’, she queries how viscous and rock-filled ice (and ice-as-rock) can complicate and ‘glitch’ a teleological, linear narrative of change of non-human history. These efforts draw attention away from the at times overwhelming framing of impending catastrophe that dominates narratives of ice, ‘pointing us instead towards capriciousness’. Drawing from geo-histories, as well as recent scholarly insights and complications regarding the ‘Anthropocene’ and its epoch of human-induced geological change that offers ‘a truly profound and all-encompassing glitch’, Rider's article aims to provoke a reframing of human and non-human time. By focusing on the ‘geo-logics’ of ice, her work explores ‘a conception of ice that is attentive to an alternate history the material can tell’.

Focusing on the scientific search for ‘rotten ice’, Julianne Yip's work engages vitality from the perspective of Arctic sea ice and the people who study it. Taking us to the coasts of Utqiagvik, Alaska, she highlights efforts to examine the sponge-like nature of rotten sea ice, a physical-biological-chemical unit in which bacteria, algae and their collective gel-like secretions constitute a form of ice that is actively engaged in shaping its own degenerative fate. Yip suggests that the process by which ice becomes rotten illustrates an underappreciated form of ice's agency insofar as the ice is imbricated in changes to its own structural integrity, above and beyond the exposure to rising greenhouse gas emissions. The agency of rotten ice was also evident in the ways that it confounded and stymied scientific efforts to locate and study it. Rather than viewing these scientific failures as errors, she approaches them as ‘openings that allowed ice to unmake and remake scientists’ concepts’. In this way, the search for better understandings of rotten sea ice helps to shape fieldwork and experimentation while complicating simple explanations of ice – its assumed or expected constituent parts, and its likely behaviours and manifestations.

For their discussion of icy vitalities, Georgina Drew and Mabel Denzin Gergan take us back to the Himalayas to dive into the disciplinary disagreements that arise over imagined glacial futures at the world's ‘Third Pole’. While centring concerns for the loss of mountain ice, and while also cautioning against a foregone ‘glacier-ruins’ narrative, they examine knowledge rifts between social scientists and a select subset of Indian glaciologists. Their work seeks to better understand what insights, and what pockets of potential hope, might lie in the longue durée perspectives on glacial resilience arising from glaciological knowledge production. This effort is set in contrast to the dangers of seeing the total demise of Himalayan glaciers projected from popular ‘before and after’ images of glacial retreat generated over the last century, a limited dataset that has captured the imagination of international audiences and ‘Euro-Western’ academics and policymakers. Even if the glaciological pushback on ‘climate alarmism’ that they investigate is eventually disproven, they argue that the exploration of disciplinary perspectives ‘is a useful way to re-insert the possibility that Himalayan glaciers may have greater resilience and “vitality” than we previously imagined’.

Conclusion

The submissions to this special issue add to the examples of a flourishing corpus of research by anthropologists, geographers and historians that recentres ice, and the socio-cultural and ecological significance of icy encounters. Taken together, they reveal the importance of ice as a framework to learn about human beings. As a window onto humanity, ice is never a passive and inert object: it forces humans to develop ways of life; it imbricates how the world is apprehended; its materiality plays a role in how it and related planetary processes are known; and it registers human actions and becomes an archive of humanity. Collectively, this work pronounces a key insight in no uncertain terms: ice is an agent.