Introduction: Human-Muskox Pathways through Millennia

This introduction sets the frame and introduces a special issue on muskox-human relations in Greenland and the Arctic. The articles that follow grow out of the research project “Muskox Pathways: Resource and Ecologies in Greenland.” This anthropological and archaeological project explores the trajectories and transformations of humans-and-muskoxen through time. Thinking about pathways we are inspired partly by the “Muskox Way” theory (Steensby 1910), which placed muskoxen at the centre of prehistoric human migrations into Greenland, and partly by the biosciences, which see pathways as a series of actions or chains of reactions that cause an entity to change or to move (Macdonald et al. 2003; McKinney et al. 2015,). In each their own way, the articles here examine the pathways along which the muskox migrates, emerges and transforms as a relational being, and demonstrate how the muskox is located in contexts and ecologies that are at once both natural and cultural, and neither wholly one or the other. Muskoxen, humans, and other species make up the shared world in which they all act upon and shape one another. This process affords the muskox to come into being - or become - in a multitude of ways. The relations that come out of such pathways, we suggest, are deeply transformative in a variety of ways. In the four articles that make up this issue, such transformative relations and engagements - muskox-human, cultural-natural - are examined and conceptualized in different ways, while together blurring categories and emphasizing that muskox pathways are constituted by muskox-human encounters.