Between Land and Life: The Human Sciences and the Cold War Arctic

The history of the human sciences – the collection of fields, as Michel Foucault put it, “that takes as its object man as an empirical entity” – is also a history of landscapes. During the 1940s and 1950s, as the United States military ranged across the globe, the human sciences, often backed by military funding, flourished. Their experiments were frequently driven by a geographic sensibility, one which linked the northern reaches of the globe, for instance, to the “study of man in isolation” (to borrow the title of one exemplary publication). This paper considers the conjuncture of life and landscape, as expressed by the human sciences, which accompanied the extensive militarization of the North American Arctic during and immediately after the Second World War. As northern terrain was reshaped by radar stations, testing grounds, and air bases, it was also reconsidered as a space for human life. The soldiers and civilians stationed at these new installations were not the only subjects of study; indigenous northerners also came under intense scrutiny, and were targeted for modernization initiatives and scientific experiments. Their resistance and responses to the varied aspects of militarization formed an important component of the indigenous political movements which coalesced in the 1960s, driven by alternative understandings of the relationship between land and life.