Antarctica is almost always described as a space defined by its uniqueness. The continent is colder and more arid than any other. Its interior is covered by ice and snow—over four kilometers thick in places, pushing the bedrock below sea level and compressing ice into great sub-glacial lakes. Antarctica has no indigenous human population, and the brief history of human activity on its surface (and within its waters) has failed to dispel a pervasive image of an alien frontier inimical to human presence.
The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), which came into force following the Treaty’s ratification in 1961, regulates activity in and around Antarctica and reifies this conception by demarcating Antarctica from the rest of the globe, aiming to limit who and what may enter the Antarctic and what people may do once they are granted access. The natural sciences have become privileged within this framework. Antarctica is a “natural reserve devoted to peace and science,” in the words of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (ratified in 1998). 1 The implication is clear: unlike the rest of the world, with its complicated relations between people and nature, Antarctica is governed by an enlightened political order that acts both through and for science. 2
Defining Antarctica in this way has left little space for the humanities. But it is precisely the naturalization of a very particular and contingent set of choices and values that make it important to consider Antarctica as a continent for the humanities. The task is both necessary and overdue. For a continent that is often depicted as paradigmatically non-human, it has generated a great deal of art and literature (as well as science), testament to a significant presence in cultural imaginations. The Antarctic region is ripe for investigation from the perspective of the humanities, to subvert its status as a space without a human element by considering how the Antarctic has been explored, represented, and imagined over time.
The human history of Antarctica may be short, but much of it is massively over-documented, with visitors often feeling compelled to record their experiences. But silences in the written historical record ought not to be equated with absence. For many early nineteenth-century sealers, the desolate islands of the Antarctic Peninsula were a place of work rather than a site for ostentatious heroism, their presence recorded only through ruins that must speak for the totality of a lived experience. 3 The experiences of many workers on the continent today—the multinational crews of tourist vessels, for example, or enlisted South American military servicemen—tend to be overlooked as not being representative of what is “really” important to understanding the Antarctic—and perhaps even more importantly, to representing it.
There are many ways of knowing Antarctica, not only through the sense-making of science, but also through imagination—and most prosaically, through work. 4 These processes have always revealed as much about the people doing the working or the imagining as about Antarctica itself. In the time of the ancient Greeks an Antarctic continent was presumed to exist in order to counterbalance the landmasses of the northern hemisphere, its existence both natural and necessary—but its precise nature entirely unknown. 5 For Captain James Cook in the 1770s, Antarctica was sufficiently remote and icebound to be presumed useless, 6 even though a boom and bust in fur seal hunting would ensue around the Antarctic Peninsula within 50 years of his gloomy pronouncement—followed more than a century later by the dramatic rise and fall of the Antarctic whaling industry. For explorers of the so-called “Heroic Age” (stretching roughly from 1895 to the First World War), Antarctica’s harsh and seemingly monolithic remoteness made it a perfect setting for races to traverse territory and obtain scientific data in the service of personal and national glory. 7 For interwar empire-builders such as Leo Amery of Great Britain, Antarctica was another swathe of the earth awaiting European annexation and dominion, science working hand in hand with development. 8 For earth scientists in the post-1945 years, Antarctica represented a treasure trove of geological and geophysical data (and in many imaginations, of treasure in the form of uranium and other strategically important minerals), ultimately becoming a space for Cold War competition without recourse to guns or missiles. 9 And during much of the 1980s, dissenting opinions on whether Antarctica ought to be governed by the states who were part of the ATS, or by a genuinely global body such as the United Nations, brought to the fore the continent’s status as a colonized space in addition to a potential natural resource base. 10
Antarctica’s present-day status as a continent for science and peace is merely the latest in a series of frames for understanding what kind of space the Antarctic is—and what kind of space it ought to be. This raises another set of questions. How did this particular conception of Antarctica become so dominant? Why are science and peace envisaged as almost self-evidently suitable for a space imagined as a “natural reserve”? 11 What values are coded within those terms—and what exactly are they presumed to mean? How have they changed through time and across space? Many political geographers now take space as the product of narrative rather than the setting for it, inverting the older view of the environment as the fixed frame in which humans act. 12 The point is not to deny the reality of the world around us, but rather to stress that places are always embedded in narratives, that living and acting in the world always involves constructing it in some way.
To assume that the status quo of today is an ideal state rather than the consensus of a particular historical moment—however much that status quo has to commend it—is to mistake the contingent for the necessary. Antarctica has been imagined and experienced in many ways in the past, and there are at least as many possibilities for the future. The conflation of ecological preservation with science might seem logical considering the important role Antarctic data has played in research into the ozone layer and climate change. But this has not always been the case: scientists such as the Norwegian Johan Hjort considered science and Antarctic whaling as a natural partnership (a position still articulated in the Japanese Whale Research Program), while the creation of an infrastructure to support the United States Antarctic science program in the 1960s helped justify the rather unsuccessful operation of a nuclear reactor at McMurdo Station. 13 Dogs, now banned from Antarctica and labeled as ecological contaminants, were once indispensable aids to field science in addition to inspiring memoirs and literary narratives. 14 Nor has the perception of Antarctica as a lode of data with relevance to understanding marine and atmospheric systems in the past and present completely replaced a perception of Antarctica as an Aladdin’s Cave of rare and valuable minerals. 15
A Different Perspective
The humanities can help us to think more clearly about Antarctica, but encounters (imagined or otherwise) with Antarctica can also prompt insights of more general relevance to the humanities. Natural scientists rightly point to the relevance of Antarctica as a source of data for questions with global implications—most notably concerning climate change. 16 Can Antarctica also offer a conceptual space for humanists to probe the limits of the imagined world for different cultures at different points in time? Not only does a humanistic approach offer useful ways of critiquing the existing political and scientific status quo in Antarctica; it can also offer insights into the “human condition” more broadly.
The question of the utility or non-utility of the humanities creates a tension that runs through this collection. Words like “relevant” and “useful” can quickly raise red flags for humanities scholars, for whom the study of art, literature, and history is often assumed to be intrinsically valuable. To demand utility is to make the humanities a pale imitation of the sciences—social as well as natural. But in the Antarctic context, it is precisely the fact that humanities scholarship is not an obvious part of the standard toolbox for interrogating the far south that makes it so important. By offering different ways to imagine Antarctica, the humanities subvert the idea that Antarctica is by its very nature a “continent for [natural] science.” While we recognize the intrinsic worth of humanities scholarship, we also emphasize the value of investigating the Antarctic from a range of disciplinary and epistemological perspectives.
Indeed, the question of utility today confronts the humanities as a whole. As we write this essay, we are aware of finding ourselves in a time in which “insert-adjective-generally-recognized-as-socially-important humanities” are proliferating. This is by and large a good thing. The environmental humanities have pushed scholars to think critically about how discourses and practices concerning physical environments embody—or even naturalize—particular sets of values or beliefs. The medical humanities remind us that healthcare is fundamentally about people, and that wellness and illness have social dimensions that stretch far beyond the clinical status of particular individuals under treatment. The digital humanities are concerned with how information technology shapes (and is shaped by) cultural production rather than viewing technology as a deterministic driver of change. What these new formations have in common is a desire to bring the human back into domains often perceived as naturally belonging to the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Each of these fields, or sub-disciplines, recognizes that suffixing such terms with “humanities” is more a means of bringing the humanities—and indeed humanity—into a broad conversation than a statement of the primacy of one particular mode of inquiry. (There is also a recognition that disciplinary boundaries provide fascinating subjects of analysis in their own right.) 17
Should we therefore start to think in terms of “Antarctic humanities”? While leery of disciplinary frames based on geography—especially as so much activity in Antarctica may be read as projections of cultural and scientific power from much further north—we nevertheless see value in the term if it prompts reflection about why Antarctica is relevant to disciplines beyond the natural sciences, and how the concept of a “continent for science” has shaped knowledge production even in the humanities. Perhaps the most striking case is history. For many years histories of Antarctic...