Document Type
Creative Work
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Eco-feminism, cultural study and the environment coalesce in the form of poetic cultural commentary, originally fieldnotes. I draw exclusively from my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iñupiat Eskimo, who call themselves "the People of the Whale." The striking and severe natural environment, a landscape of endless ice, is central to the poetry, which richly portrays a vision of the Arctic absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes. These magazines vend the Far North's beautiful austerity, including at times the physical beauty of its animal inhabitants, including humans, while disregarding human specificity and violence in the Arctic - aspects inherent to every culture. This article remarks on the cultural tourism and ethnographic subjectivity employed in commercial travel writing, and endeavours to present a more comprehensive view of today's Arctic environment.
Repository Citation
Baum, Rob. "The World is White and Slow and Infinitely Flat." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/13