A Sense of Direction: A Conversation with Icelandic Anthropologist Kristín Loftsdóttir

ABSTRACT: Haukur Ingvarsson and Jenna Grace Sciuto, literary scholars based in Iceland and the US respectively, interview Icelandic anthropologist, Kristín Loftsdóttir, whose research projects have taken place in Iceland, Niger, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. The interview focuses on Loftsdóttir's research and her understanding of space, power, temporalities, and colonial histories in today's global society. Loftsdóttir interrogates the symbolic meaning or value assigned to the directions north, south, west, and east, in addition to spatial binaries, such as West vs. East and Global North vs. Global South. She is interested in destabilizing stereotypical associations: for example, the North and the West with Whiteness, "purity," and "civilization." Further, the differences between conceptualizations of Norths (Global North, Far North, Arctic, Nordic, etc.), Nordic exceptionalism or the myth that Nordic countries were not involved in colonialism, and the relationship between Nordic languages and cultures are also explored. Loftsdóttir considers the global impacts of the climate crisis, migration and the experiences of asylum seekers and other migrants, and resulting neoliberal policies, extrapolating from the present into the future. Loftsdóttir's intersectional scholarship and her research on the experiences of West Africans in Europe gives her a distinct perspective on Iceland's transnational history, the treatment of racism in Icelandic society, and the exoticism of the Far North.