Kemi River

"Do people who live with a river also think like a river? Does everyday and professional engagement with a flowing stream resonate with ways of understanding social and ecological relationships in terms of flows? This thesis explores in what ways Kemi River dwellers, in the Finnish province of Lapland, use and have used the waters of their home river, and how their skills and experiences are reflected in their conceptualisation of the riverine world.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, I portray river dwellers’ relations with the Kemi, focusing on practices and narratives and how the flow of water and other matter figures in them. Having undergone radical transformation over the course of people’s lives, the river is tightly interwoven with personal biographies. An environmental history reveals how people and stream have mutually shaped each other for a long time and continue to do so today. Even orientation and topology in the area reflect the layout and flow of the river.

I focus on three activities, fishing, transport and hydroelectricity generation, that have been and are of central significance for the relations of river dwellers and the Kemi River. Fishing, formerly the major political-economic river use but economically marginal today, continues to provide a significant way of engaging with and coming to know the river. Boating has radically changed with damming, mechanisation and the displacement of travel and transport to the roads, and presently constitutes a way of performing one’s belonging to the Kemi, in terms of both “understanding” its waters and claiming them politically. Similarly, timber transport has recently shifted from the river to the roads, though the memories of large-scale floating operations are still prominent in river dwellers’ stories and the riverine landscape. The roads, in turn, provide transport arteries quite different from the river, but do share some characteristics with it, such as a dependence on weather conditions. Finally, hydroelectricity infrastructure widely transformed the river dwellers’ world and introduced a powerful technology negotiating water flows, electricity markets and inhabitants’ sensibilities.

Scrutinising these practices and narratives reveals profoundly rhythmic patterns in the river dwellers’ activities, the river’s dynamics and the world around. The annual course of the seasons and weekly and daily rhythms of discharge, temperature, work and other patterns, make the river dwellers’ world an ever-transforming phenomenon. Life on the river emerges as the ongoing articulation of these manifold rhythms, shaping and being shaped by their interaction. The flows of life and the frictions of everyday encounter continually make and remake the river and its inhabitants, negotiating national strategies, economic power, river dweller ingenuity, and the currents of the Kemi River."

This article argues for an approach to the seasons as rhythms that emerge in the articulation of human and non-human processes. First, it contrasts two anthropological conceptions of the seasons, as temporal blocks and as rhythmic dynamics, and subsequently indicates how life on the Kemi River conforms more to the latter approach. It goes on to show that the seasons exist in the context of many other rhythms, for instance those of discharge and water level in the river. Finally, it explains how river dwellers not only adapt to the rhythms of river and landscape, but in practising their activities they also shape these rhythms. Therefore, the seasons and the plethora of longer and shorter rhythms of which they form part are simultaneously ‘social’ and ‘natural’.

This paper takes the management of the Kemi River in the Finnish province of Lapland as an example for asking what environmental management is or can do, in practice and in theory. It argues that environmental management – if understood as controlling an environmental phenomenon following a ready-made plan – is not a suitable concept for understanding the interactions between the river and the people on its banks. Either, environmental management has to be defined widely as a dialogue between human and non-human actors, or it must be discarded as the illusion of a modernist, positivist ideology that projects static categories on the world. This paper juxtaposes the dams used for salmon fishing and those used in hydroelectricity production on the Kemi River. It illustrates the adaptability of the former to the river’s processes and then shows how very different the technology and rhetoric of the latter appears when it comes to relations with the river. In spite of the significantly larger impacts that hydroelectricity production has on the river as a whole, it will be argued that upon a closer look, the operation of the system of power stations has much in common with that of the salmon weirs.

The stark discharge variations on the Kemijoki, the longest river in Finnish Lapland, have long formed an integral part of the rhythmic dynamics of social and ecological life along its banks. With the spread of permanent infrastructure and activities, however, the annual spring-flood is increasingly conceived as a hazard. Fuelled, among others, by recent flooding events, climate-change scenarios, conflicts about hydropower developments and an EU directive, plans are being debated to dam the river in hitherto protected areas in order to decrease flood-risk downstream. This article outlines the divergent perceptions of floods, development and the nature of a river, on which the debate is based, and argues for a political ecology that understands non-human dynamics not as a backdrop, but as integral constituent of environmental politics.