Chaired by Michelle Bastian
Convenors: Kristin Asdal and Espen Ytreberg
At the face of it, the extinction of species such as the whales presents a time-arrow from the past, via the present, to the future; from plenty via scarcity and to (a possible) extinction. It also seems to involve finality, an end of time which is what Deborah Bird Rose calls “double death”; the death of the final individual from which the species can never reemerge. These versions of temporality are real, but they are also never the full or whole picture, indeed they are not always the main forms of temporality. Other temporalities may run alongside these, and in opposition to them. For instance, conservationists propose measures of renewal and balance, envisioning futures that avoid fatality, and researchers have pointed to the temporal grey zones that emerge between a species being pronounced scarce and extinct. Moreover, the whole idea of extinction is a contested issue, linked up with procedures and tools that have aimed at both knowing and steering a species’ own version of speed, reproduction and timing. This panel investigates the encounters, tensions and clashes between multiple temporalities involved in the contested issue and practices of producing and knowing the temporal trajectories of extinction. This panel is set up chronologically as Asdal addresses 19th century Norwegian whaling, Ytreberg 20th century industrial whaling in the south Seas and natural waters. Åman examines the situation for the indigenous Makah whalers of Northwestern USA within the International Whaling Commission’s framework of the 1990s, while Hale addresses contemporary temporal multiplicities of whale tourism in the Azores. On top of this rough chronology the papers aim to trace how the plural times and temporal contestations of extinction recur and change.
Espen Ytreberg: The moment, eternity and time running out: Vernacular photography from Norwegian 20th century industrial whaling
The industrial whaling that took place in the South Seas and international waters during much of the 20th century, and that brought the Great Whales to the brink of extinction, included a number of workers and professionals who were also amateur photographers. The rich photographic archives that exist today thus provide a vernacular and visual history of industrial whaling as seen from the viewpoint of its foot soldiers. One might say those photographs were taken with the specter of extinction as a backdrop, since this was a theme in Norwegian public life already before industrial South Seas whaling started in 1904.
The photographs can thus be seen in light of the extinction context, as a response to the uncertainties and risks of a future extinction event. Based on archive collections mainly from the Sandefjord Whaling Museum and the Norwegian Polar Institute, the paper examines temporal dimensions of some recurring photographic motifs. It finds in heroicising images of whalers a preoccupation with the exalted and decisive moments of catching and processing. In other images, the idealization of workers is combined with an ideal of permanence visually expressed in whale bones and developed in what one might call a bone iconography. Other, more unsettling photographs show time running out, literally and figuratively, as whalers are caught at work surrounded and submerged in the waste matter of animals they have killed.
Bio: Espen Ytreberg is Professor of Media Studies at IMK, UiO.
Sadie Hale: Haunted by extinctions: The temporal dimensions of contemporary whale tourism in São Miguel, Azores
This paper draws on recent fieldwork undertaken on the island of São Miguel, part of the mid-Atlantic Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, where whale watching is a popular tourist activity. Before people paid to see whales alive, whaling had constituted a significant industry on these islands since the 18th century, with sperm whales especially targeted. These and other whale species were hunted close to extinction at the global peak of 20th-century industrial whaling, a fact that constitutes a tangible part of the local heritage in São Miguel today through the display of former whaling boats and use of lookouts (vigias) by whale tour companies. Nowadays, ‘resident’ sperm whales live around the islands and can be observed year-round, shot not by harpoons but by tourists with cameras.
This paper explores the multiscalar temporalities at play in the work of a contemporary whale watching company in a small town on São Miguel. It investigates the notion that whale watching in itself collapses – and attempts to manage – different temporal modes, including the haunted time of extinctions that never (but almost) happened, the seasonal comings and goings of different whale species, the working hours of tour guides versus the fleeting visits of tourists, the ‘sacred time of transcendental contact’ with nature (Szczygielska 2022: 643) and the unsettled timescale of rapidly rising temperatures which is already altering the Atlantic Ocean around the Azores.
Bio: Sadie Hale is PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology, UiB
Sonja Åman: Back from the brink: International Whaling Commission and the revitalisation of the gray whale
In 1994 the gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) was removed from the list of endangered species after a period of revitalisation which brought a population back from the brink of extinction caused by industrial whaling some six decades ago. While the announcement was received with jubilation in the news, for the Makah it meant the beginning of what would become a long and arduous process of affirming their treaty protected rights. The Makah, who call themselves the qidiaa·tx meaning “the people who live by the rocks and seagulls”, are a people indigenous to the Northwesternmost point of today’s United States. For thousands of years, they have secured a livelihood from their customary waters by fishing, sealing and, crucially, whaling.
This paper examines what happened at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) when the Makah applied to resume their whaling practice following the re-categorisation of the gray whale. The debate, dubbed a “chrono-controversy” by Matthew Brigham, illustrated some of the complexities of negotiating across temporalities, as timescales of bureaucracy and natural resource management collided with timescales of colonialism and intergenerational boundness. This paper investigates how different conceptualisations of extinction and time were negotiated by the IWC and how the impacts of the negotiations reverberated through communities who live with and by the whales in comparison to those who govern human-whale relations.
Bio: Sonja Irene Åman is PhD Candidate at IKOS, UiO.
Kristin Asdal: Assembling-time, document-procedures and the 19th century’s extinction rebellion
It is sometimes suggested that it is the invention of the steam-engine that ought to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. In that case modern whaling can serve as a case in point: It was precisely the steam engine in combination with the grenade harpoon mounted on the ship that enabled whalers to hunt these large animals down, bring them to shore, and initiate the oil age that preceded ours. (The whale gained its commercial worth first and foremost from the oil that could be extracted and manufactured from the blubber under their skin) Hence, the very event of modern whaling can be directly related to ‘coming on’ of the Anthropocene.
The hunting down of the large whales is inextricably linked to the Anthropocene also in the meaning of the human capacity to have other species go extinct. As it was put before before parliament, the Norwegian Storting, in 1879: “It is commonly known …that in later years a war of extinction has begun against the species of whales present in the Varanger Fjord in the east of Finmarken” (Document No 31, 1879). Confronted with this unsettling issue, these once so lively and massively present huge creatures, the extinction issue, the weapons with which these mammals were caught, the flesh of nature, its very material, its sounds and smells ….
What on earth could be the interest and relevance of those entities that are in the title of this paper? It traces document-acts and procedures in the 19th century’s extinction rebellion, namely the fight against whaling. It investigates how the politics of nature is inextricably linked to the question of time: not only as a time-issue, but also a timing-issue; about working upon time and about having different modes and versions of time to meet. The paper argues that documents are sites as well as tools through which nature-times and human times meet and confront one another.
Bio: Kristin Asdal is Professor and Head of Department at the TIK Centre, UiO