Inhabiting the Antarctic

Abstract

In recent years, the Antarctic has become a fitting space for anthropological analysis and ethnographic research as human activities intensify and populations increasingly make themselves at home in Antarctica. The processes demand a deepening of inquiry into what kinds of socialities, subjectivities, material cultures, intangible heritage and cultural practices are emerging there. In this article, we provide accounts of how people dwelling in Antarctic research stations and settlements to argue that habitation in Antarctic settlements is lived and intentional, built by simultaneously from top-down governmental practices and bottom-up improvisations of everyday Antarctic life. Thus, through an ethnographic attentiveness to Antarctic places, place-making, dwelling, and inhabitation, we aim to further the methodological agenda of empirically mapping mobile and world-spanning connections in ways that allow us to move considerations of Antarctica from the realm of abstract space to inhabited space.