The Voice of Ice in the Turku Archipelago: Narrating Icegraphy with Environmental Ethnography

Winters in the Turku archipelago have become milder. During the last few decades, inhabitants have witnessed a relatively sudden loss of permanent ice cover during the winter months. In our chapter, we use ethnographic tools to conceptualise local skills, experience-based knowledge and tacit knowledge concerning ice as an environmental heritage – and explore the role of nostalgic narration in the process of environmental heritage, including an historical perspective, in times of change. We examine nostalgic narration as future-oriented action in the production of environmental heritage. This chapter builds on prior ethnographic fieldwork done by the authors in the Turku archipelago. Our methodological starting point is to assess how environmental ethnography is produced in intra-actions between human and non-human actors, such as ice. We examine the myriad ways in which archipelago dwellers have defined ice and the presence of ice in different local places. We also describe how people in the archipelago have encountered ice over numerous decades and how they have learned to utilise and co-exist with ice – how they, for example, found paths when walking on the ice, how they allegorised drowning in their nostalgic narration practices or how ice conditions have impacted fishing practices in the archipelago.