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In this article we examine what can be captured, recorded, remembered, and shared through different note-taking modalities. The case narrated is one of a simultaneous fieldwork experience carried out as part of a larger interdisciplinary project in Greenland. It reveals how the same situation is recorded differently in our respective notebooks; and that the way we write fieldnotes is not just determined by the anthropologists, but also by the field. We present three kinds of fieldnotes from the same day, produced partly by writing/not writing in notebooks, and by using handheld GPS devices that map activities related to hunting and travel. We suggest that our fieldnotes may best be understood as fragments, details and contexts. Although our fieldnotes may add up an entirety, they cannot represent a complete whole. Together, these fragments are mosaic configurations rather than complete or coherent sets of registered events and situations that come together kaleidoscopically.

The formation of the North Water in Smith Sound about 4500 years ago, as evidenced by the establishment of bird colonies and human presence, also initiated a long-term anthropogenic agent as part of this High Arctic ecosystem. Different epochs have influenced the human occupation in the area: immigration pulses from Canada and Alaska, trade with meteorite iron throughout the Arctic, introduction of new technologies by whalers and explorers, exploitation of resources by foreigners, political sequestration, export of fox and seal skins and later narwhal products, and recently fishing. Physical drivers in terms of weather and climate affecting the northern hemisphere also impact accessibility and productivity of the ecosystem, with cascading effects on social drivers, again acting back on the natural ecologies. Despite its apparent isolation, the ecosystem had and still has wide ranging spatial ramifications that extend beyond the High Arctic, and include human activity. The challenge is to determine what is internal and what is external to an ecosystem.

The formation of the North Water in Smith Sound about 4500 years ago, as evidenced by the establishment of bird colonies and human presence, also initiated a long-term anthropogenic agent as part of this High Arctic ecosystem. Different epochs have influenced the human occupation in the area: immigration pulses from Canada and Alaska, trade with meteorite iron throughout the Arctic, introduction of new technologies by whalers and explorers, exploitation of resources by foreigners, political sequestration, export of fox and seal skins and later narwhal products, and recently fishing. Physical drivers in terms of weather and climate affecting the northern hemisphere also impact accessibility and productivity of the ecosystem, with cascading effects on social drivers, again acting back on the natural ecologies. Despite its apparent isolation, the ecosystem had and still has wide ranging spatial ramifications that extend beyond the High Arctic, and include human activity. The challenge is to determine what is internal and what is external to an ecosystem.

This report describes a collaborative project involving hunters, anthropologists, and biologists. The collaboration is part of an interdisciplinary research project, The NOW-Project (2014-2017), which addresses the relations between living resources and human societies around Pikialasorsuaq – the North Water (NOW) in a long-term perspective.

The Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo is one of the global hotspots of deforestation and forest degradation. The planting of oil palm has played a key role in the transformation of land use in the state. While much of the expansion in Sarawak so far has taken place in state forests (80%), many new plantations are being established on native customary rights (NCR) land. A significant portion of the total land area in Sarawak (20–25%) is claimed as native customary land where villagers traditionally practise extensive, semi-subsistence farming. This article explores how major resource development projects intersect with and accentuate internal community differences in sites of new plantations. We do so by examining the case of an Iban village where the introduction of a large-scale oil palm scheme has resulted in conflict and division within the community. By analysing the narratives that suggest that large-scale land development projects ‘bring development to the people’, utilising ‘idle lands’ and ‘creating employment’ to lift them out of poverty, we argue that political and economic processes related to cultivation of oil palm intersect with local community differences in two ways. First, these projects cement and enhance internal power structures and inequalities. Second, the government's development narratives influence communities and link local community relations with national political discourses in complex ways., The Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo is one of the global hotspots of deforestation and forest degradation. The planting of oil palm has played a key role in the transformation of land use in the state. While much of the expansion in Sarawak so far has taken place in state forests (80%), many new plantations are being established on native customary rights (NCR) land. A significant portion of the total land area in Sarawak (20–25%) is claimed as native customary land where villagers traditionally practise extensive, semi-subsistence farming. This article explores how major resource development projects intersect with and accentuate internal community differences in sites of new plantations. We do so by examining the case of an Iban village where the introduction of a large-scale oil palm scheme has resulted in conflict and division within the community. By analysing the narratives that suggest that large-scale land development projects ‘bring development to the people’, utilising ‘idle lands’ and ‘creating employment’ to lift them out of poverty, we argue that political and economic processes related to cultivation of oil palm intersect with local community differences in two ways. First, these projects cement and enhance internal power structures and inequalities. Second, the government's development narratives influence communities and link local community relations with national political discourses in complex ways.

This article reflects on the merits of the expedition as an anthropological method on the basis of a recent cross-disciplinary experience, involving biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists working together in High Arctic Greenland. True to the term, the expedition had chartered a vessel from where the team could go ashore in places that would otherwise have been difficult to access, and where the individual perspectives could cross-fertilize each other in actual practice. It is argued that anthropology itself is a mode of experimentation in practice, which enables new trains of thought, and an engagement with other disciplinary practices. The gain of our cross-disciplinary experiment was therefore not only to know more about the makings of a particular landscape in a multi-disciplinary perspective, but also to understand how anthropology makes sense of inherently moving facts.

Th is article examines what economic growth and state versions of progress have done to small and medium-scale farmers in an urban setting, in Arequipa in southern Peru. Th e general reorganization of production, resources, and labor in the Peruvian economy has generated a discursive move to reposition small and medium-scale farmers as backward. Th is article analyzes how farmers struggle to fi nd their place within a neoliberal urban ecology where diff erent conceptions of what constitutes progress in contemporary Peru infl uence the landscape. Using an analytical lens that takes material and organizational infrastructures and practices into account, and situates these in specifi c historical processes, the article argues that farmers within the urban landscape of Arequipa struggle to reclaim land and water, and reassert a status that they experience to be losing. Such a historical focus on material and organizational infrastructural arrangements, it is argued, can open up for understanding how local and beyond-local processes tangle in complex ways and are productive of new subjectivities; how relations are reconfi gured in neoliberal landscapes of progress and dispossession. Such an approach makes evident how state and nonstate actors invest aff ects, interests, and desires differently within a given landscape.

This article examines the implementation of Peru’s new water law and discusses how it produces new forms of water citizenship. Inspired by the global paradigm of “integrated water resources management,” the law aims to include all citizens in the management of the country’s water resources by embracing a “new water culture.” We ask what forms of water citizenship emerge from the new water law and how they engage with local water practices and affect existing relations of inequality. We answer these questions ethnographically by comparing previous water legislation and how the new law currently is negotiated and contested in three localities in Peru’s southern highlands. We argue that the law creates a new water culture that views water as a substance that is measurable, quantifiable, and taxable, but that it neglects other ways of valuing water. We conclude that water citizenship emerges from the particular ways water authorities and water users define rights to access and use water, on the one hand, and obligations to contribute to the construction and maintenance of water infrastructure and pay for the use of water, on the other.

I Arequipa, Perus næststørste by, placeret på grænsen til Atacamaørkenen, mellem aktive vulkaner med afsmeltede gletsjere, er forudsigelser om vejr og om fremtid en central del af vejrdagen. Denne artikel udforsker forskellige måder hvorpå mennesker i Arequipa tyder tegn i deres omgivelser, for at forstå vejrfænomener og forudsige hvad fremtiden bringer.