On “catching wild deer”? Representations of Scots-Arctic extremes and ethnologies

Scotland has a long history of complex, and often ‘complicit’ engagement and ‘exploration’ narratives with the places, communities, and cultures of the circumpolar north. These illustrations and narratives include those of the ‘Highlander’ polymath scholar, folklorist, artist, scientist and traveller, John Francis Campbell of Islay (1821 – 1885). Campbell travelled extensively across northern Sápmi from Finnmark to Arkhangelsk. His notebooks (“from these northern lands”) offer sketches of the ‘everyday’ that offer both a visual and narrative representation and signification of place, people, and material culture at ‘the extremes’ of his time. On the eve of his bicentenary, this paper seeks to critique, and invite comment on Campbell’s textual legacy. We examine Campbell’s archival relevance to sustaining a Scottish-Arctic sense of ‘extreme’ identity and place, discuss ethnologies as visuality tropes, and issues of indigeneity, cultural and environmental survival then, and our continued ‘connectivity of extremes’ today.