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stopped by the local 'videreforedlingsbedrift' in Tanabru, where they quarter, cut and pack reindeer carcasses that come in from Karasjok - gotta get some broad coverage on the local level. place employs a few local people I know, too. unthankfully however, the guy who runs it - while friendly, civilized and happy to give me a brief tour of the facilities - refused to have anything to do with me in the longer run, due to kinship-political ties between me and my father, who is a political opponent of his in business terms. long and tangled story. as he quite rightly pointed out, he had no control over what I would go on and write about his place, if he let me in, so he wouldn't.

fair enough. this limits my ethnographic base somewhat, though not unanticipatedly. reluctance to cooperate also knocks out Karasjok Slakteeiendom AS, the largely-owned-by-him EFTA-authorised abattoir in Karasjok that delivers carcasses to his business in Tanabru [among other things]. this leaves only two more reindeer abattoirs in the whole of Finnmark, to my knowledge: one in Kautokeino, the other one on the borderland between the Karasjok and Kautokeino districts. the people who run the second one already told me in july that they hardly get access to their own abattoir, due to the strict enforcement of hygiene regulations - it is as far as I know EFTA-approved also, which means during the slaughter they have constant supervision by a veterinarian in charge of enforcing regulations and approving the meat procedures. this pretty much rules it out as a site for participant observation, though statistical data and probably building plans are in the public domain and accessible, subject to some contingencies in terms of my interaction with officialese representatives...

the Kautokeino abattoir remains an interesting possibility, and if I do take that into consideration I can quite legitimately claim to have expanded my geographic focus from eastern finnmark to the whole of finnmark. access limitations can be swiftly accounted for in the methodology as a function of harawayan situated knowledge style problems - researcher is not impersonal all-seeing eye but too too solid flesh, hence his real-world persona and psoitioning structures his engagement with the field, producing certain forms of access while disabling others.

expanded regional focus might also conceivably make it easier to secure alternative supplemental funding for a second year of fieldwork: phenomenally broad geographic area [talking 1000s of kms from one end of the bloody fylke to the other here] justifies expanded timeframe. the problem, of course, is distance and living spaces if I am to take in Kautokeino too. about 500+ km to the west of where I'm living now - day commuting is out of the question.

death in the family delays operations at the field abattoir - not concerned with the tactless ethnography of grief, so I decamped when the news got to krampenes about 12.30 today. had been sitting in the kitchen much of the day, chatting to various 'informants' - including the 14-year old elder kid of the family. he wondered whether I'd been skipping school a lot too when I was younger, I said well yeah, he said thought so, gangster-boy. made me laugh. met an apocalyptical elder man who dropped by to talk family with the couple who run the abattoir - lots of pseudo-gematria, along the lines of HITLER=666, and references to the rebuilding of Babylon (understood as the "coalition of the willing" (ptui! <-- me spitting) rebuilding in iraq...). abattoir-wifey was a bit perturbed by my interest in his beliefs. why do I attract the weirdos, even in the straightest places...

now: need to consider what to fill my in-between spare time with now and during the dead period between the end of the slaughter here and the early winter activities at the reindeer fence further west, at seidafjell. a new-zealander woman e-mailed me to find out how to reference my first MPhil essay, which I posted here and then unposted because I started disliking it. nice - guerilla publishing.

on my way to krampenes again, in the rain this time. 'll probably be a miss run - impossible to take reindeer into the enclosures when the ground is muddy, difficult to handle and risk damage etc. - but it's interesting to catch a glimpse of life rhythms when nothing happens, too. might try to get someone to draw a map of the herd migration route and point out predator and tjuvslakt hotspots on the route. also want to try and find a distant height from which to get a synoptic view of the fence-enclosures. need to see things laid out in map format to grasp the spatial dimension, and even if I climb to the highest points of the fence, all I see are wooden walls after wooden walls stretching into the distance...

yesterday I dressed up in a bloodstained white rubber apron, snapped on my snazzy little blue plastic examination gloves and helped cleave carcasses, wrap them in plastic, weigh them, carry them into the cooler and finally drove down to vadsø late at night to deliver half a plastic-wrapped calf to a guy at a local supermarket. starting to feel like a slaughtering trainee rather than an ethnographer, but I guess that's a good thing. got some priceless footage of the couple who run the field abattoir at night in the dark cooler-wagon, deep in a jungle of hanging carcasses, trying to identify a specific one out of 50 carcasses by the metal number-tag in the light of a mobile phone... they didn't have a flashlight.

does anyone out there know how to extract .jpg or other still-picture formats from DV footage? I am convinced this is ridiculously easy, but internet access is too pricey and I'm too impatient to sit down and research it at the moment.

on my way back to polmak from the krampenes fence. utterly exhausted. today: flayed and rope-pulled 'skanker', reindeer legs. the skin is used for the top part of 'skaller', or sami reindeer shoes. the sole is made from the head-skin. painfully patient, precise knifework. also, spread and salted reindeer skins, for preservation. climbed around the fence like a monkey, perched astride the 20-foot fence leading to the stunning pen, filming boltgun neckshots for the calf-stunning - calf slaughter today, so everything went quicker and there were up to four animals in the stunning pen at a time. most of this in stiff winds and pouring rain. and more, but frankly I'm too knackered to write anything more. hour and a half's drive back to the healing farm, too. gotta get going.

down in vadsø, taking a break from the fence to buy some insulated boots, woollen socks and grab a double latte at what is to my knowledge the only coffee bar on the varanger peninsula. at least its not starbucks - i feel enough sympathy for the poor entrepreneurs up here trying to sell mochas to the fishermen that I feel entirely justified in purchasing an occasional coffee from them. nothing much happening at the fence anyway until 11.30 when the vet comes and they start the commercial slaughtering.

progress is good. yesterday I flayed reindeer skulls, the day before I learned to cleave them with an axe to get the chunk with the eyes out - they're edible. reindeer brains and blood everywhere, all over  - very far from the meat desk at the local supermarket. site is extremely interesting - full of children. yesterday a sami kindergarten was up in the fence to watch the slaughter. have some funky gestating ideas about temporary hybrid spaces and the structural conditions for establishing them - yes, I want I want I want to stick hakim bey and temporary autonomous zones into my phd...

fuck me.

today: got up at six, drove 110km in heavy rain to the field abattoir at krampenes only to find nothing was happening there due to the weather. took a few pictures, avoided a herd of reindeer that took no notice of the car, and gave a herder who was there a lift down to vadsø. on the way he changed his mind, instead we drove over to finland to buy vodka [120 km]. then drove back to varangerbotn [35km] to have a look at the abattoir there - wandered into the 'clean zone' by mistake [still with the herder, now progressively drunk] and got sternly kicked out by a stern veterinarian. no signs of the owner of the abattoir, so we drove over to a friend of the herder to pick up a bag, after buying a mobile phone charger on the way. door was unlocked so we wandered into the living room, but everyone was asleep in the house except a blonde little russian whore in a black silk nightie, who kicked us out in broken norwegian. drove over to another friend, where we caught by surprise the sister of the husband of the woman who runs the abattoir at krampenes, coming out of the shower in her bathrobe. chatted for a while, while the herder tried to hook me up with the sister - when she left the room to get dressed he made very explicit hand gestures and raised his eyebrows a lot. I left to buy the two some beer, when I got back herderman kept telling me the sister was interested, she's interested. I got their mobile numbers and politely made my exit, now en route to finland [35km] to buy a scooterdress and some warm clothes for the fence, then back to polmak to edit some film and make plans for tomorrow.

all in a day's work. can you believe I'm getting paid for this?

talk about a change of phase - when I looked out this morning only the ground was visible under the thick, cottonlike mist that was just beginning to rise, and the world entire was crystallized with frost. first sign of winter- last night was perfectly clear, the heavens littered with stars, and people were muttering about kuldegrader [degrees below zero] and how cold it must be to sit out here. it was cold, but ok. I managed to fill some ten pages of recollective notes with impressions from the fence.

when I got to the reindeer fence yesterday the slaughter had already started, one day early. weekend and no veterinarian was available, so the slaughter was for personal consumption - each driftsenhet or herding unit is permitted to take up to ten animals out for personal consumption on an annual basis.

blood ran like thick crimson paint, jutting out of sliced jugulars, pooling in slicks in the grass, staining trousers and hands and the hair of children. guts like bloated gray-green balloons wrapped in sausages, drying in the sun, and heaps of reindeer heads with large black soulful eyes, looking alive, sad and surprised, cut off at the ears to keep the pelt identifiable by the earmarks. kids running around with bits of animal, old jawbones in the parking lot, bloodied pelts nailed up to the wall, and the sounds - bone crunching, slicing, tearing, snapping, grunting. lines of convulsing reindeer bleeding on the concrete, lined up for death and postmortem decapitation, gray-green stomach contents dribbling out of the torn necks of the ones already taken.

and so on. promise to produce more systematic outline of this some day, but right now no time, and impressions are still too unstructured. did get some footage of standard practice reindeer slaughter for personal consumption, quite distinct from the commercial stuff, even at a field abattoir. slaughterers were professionals from finland, made communication a bit awkward.

...to the reindeer fence! 

system is fucked from last night, too damn cold sitting outside for five hours and subsequently too damn many drunk and confused perambulating middle-aged women knocking on my cabin door and waking me up at 4 am in the morning for unclear reasons and a short meaningless conversation, only to shamble off hazily into the night again, unclear purpose unfulfilled.

[ok, there was one, but that is still too damn many when you're trying to get some restorative kip to stave off that cold rolling towards you at 50 microns a minute from the viral cellular subspace dimension - and be fresh for the potential reindeer murder tomorrow, that is, today. ach.]

and me, kind fool that I am, volunteer for another night tonight, with the slaughter starting tomorrow at the last-est, thanks to the little flagellant imp in my head that opens my mouth to say, emphatically not 'no damn way am I doing this again', but rather 'yeah sure, no problem, gotta get up at 5 the next morning but cool, I'll do it for free again', leaving me to stand there stranded, wrapped in a world of needless obligations, with the mental expression of a penguin, wondering what the snot-eating welfare-abusing funk is wrong with my subconscious.

unbelievably, after about a month of patient tinkering on my part, my fused wireless configuration has miraculously untangled itself and is for the time being working painlessly... have thus shifted down to the wireless zone in the lobby of the hotel in tanabru for the morning, doing routine maintenance tasks, checking for virii and downloading security updates.

preparations for the fieldwork proper phase of this are complete - mainly, sending refundable project expenses and a revised budget plan incorporating gasoline expenses for approval to funding body, as well as doing enough semi-useful things around the farm to ensure that my presence is tolerated in the longer term, and that a rent-cut is even envisionable.

everything points towards a pacing shift from this weekend onwards. will call one informant later today to see if they've managed to gather the herd somewhere that is accessible by car, so I can come and have a look at it - this is the preliminary gathering, from which they move the herd down to the separation fence at krampenes and start slaughtering, hopefully by saturday or sunday.

then the slaughtering moves in spurts until october 31, when the seasonal field abattoir at krampenes closes down for the year. slaughtering here overlaps with the slaughtering at the indoor abattoir in varangerbotn, which starts around the same time and keeps slaughtering until over christmas, possibly as late as march. interspersed in this timeframe there is private slaughtering, as well as a second winter slaughter which might end up taking place partly on the other side of the finnish border.

am saving helicopter herding trips for later in the season. the chief of police in tanabru vividly compared the experience for me to sitting on the end of a long telephone pole balancing on the back of a tiny truck doing 120 down the freeway. maybe I'm shy but I prefer to know people a bit better before I vomit in the cabin of their helicopter...

one of the main interesting experiences so far has been the way in which certain informants attempt to enrol me in their critical-political projects. as expected, herding and how herding should be done, as well as meat quality and the distribution problems, are controversial and politicised subjects, where strong opinions emerge with little provocation. preliminarily and in simple terms, the main camps are the culturally conservative traditionalists, in my case strongly represented in a slightly new-age tinged variant by my hostess, and the entrepreneurial modernisers, strongly represented by my prospective main informants. this puts me in a slightly odd position, pulled by wild(ly opinionated) horses...

anyway. tonight I have volunteered to sit at the door for a concert in the stjernegamme - KM Myrland, a kind of soulful country and northern singer who translates kris kristofferson into norwegian with a northern twang, sings about derelict fishing communities and getting drunk on a saturday night in tana bru, is having a release party for his new album at the healing farm... i'm sure I can get you all free tickets if you want...

lately my previously cordial, mildly excited relationship to the outdoor sauna tub has devolved into a kind of angry, primal man-against-machine struggle for supremacy. after an hour firing the beast up in sub-arctic autumnal gale with horizontal rain two days ago, yesterday I wrestled with the damned object for six hours to get it to heat the fucking water. something that one might think, being the only purpose, meaning and design behind the damned object's existence, the damned object might be capable of doing.

but no. and no. and no again. finally at 11pm an older female member of the saami acute psychiatric response team - guests of the healing farm these last couple of days, for whose progressively delayed pleasure the damned object was being heated - gazed down upon me in mercy and accepted the charge of keeping the reluctant object stoked up while they took their pleasure, seeing that the damned object refused to keep going by itself... enabling me to go to bed, after a long hard shower to rub six hours of woodsmoke out of my charred, sooted skin.

otherwise - as previously mentioned, the slaughter might start this weekend. in preparation for this much-anticipated event, I intend now to go home, having just delivered a third visiting female in as many weeks to the airport in Kirkenes - no, no hanky panky you dirty dirty reader. mere unpaid cab driver activity - and busy myself going through 200 pages of legislation and prescriptions concerning food safety, animal welfare and the practice of ante- and post-mortem examination of dead animals. never a dull moment huh.

and today, the erratic tape player in my car was only in the mood for Queen. pity me.

the vacuum cleaner incident needs to be seen in the light of an ancestral curse on all male members of the clan, delivered by a scorned woman two generations back from my hostess who gannet grandfather for choosing another woman. a gann is a sami curse - very useful part of Sami identity management a couple of hundred years back, when norwegian settlers were scared by the dark powers of the heathen natives. also a two-edged sword - led to some measure of folk and administrative persecution. anyway, it's a dark story that involves finding 50-year old tufts of hair secreted away in grandpas old house, and an exorcism...

on other fronts:

I now have independent confirmation from two sources that my kraftdyr or power animal is currently a large silvery wolf. apparently a lone stray wolf also turned up in the area around the time when I came, and was seen by some locals: source of some speculation. find this considerably preferable to my usual bestial diagnoses, which tend towards the teddybear end of the spectrum.

the slaughter in reindeer grazing districts 6 and 7 - my districts - is scheduled to start sometime next week. the reindeer-gathering helicopter is coming on wednesday, and expensive day rates will likely force 'my' herders to act on this regardless of unfriendly weather, towards the end of the week. [yes, my informants are high-tech herder dudes who gather their herds using helicopters...] this means that finally, finally! I might get to do some proper participant observation directed towards my thesis, rather than sitting around all day drinking coffee, looking after the cafe and talking fluff.

in my relentless volunteering activity I have also invaded the memetic soundscape of the stjernegamme. given that I am the only sentient and incarnated being around most of the time, I've replaced the steady flow of joik with odd børretzen and lars martin myhre... norwegians out there know what I mean, and can probably appreciate the discontinuity of walking into a huge neo-traditional gamme structure in the middle of the tundric nowhere and getting a slo-mo jazzy story-song about boating life around tønsberg in the summer. lovely.

in vadsø, doing some shopping for the farm and raiding the fylkesbibliotek [regional library] for reindeer books. a 90km drive along the coast through cold torrential rain and stiv kuling, and the only tape that matches the erratic biorhythms of my tapeplayer today, that is, the only tape that works, today, is Kraftwerk's 1986 Electric Cafe, a budget/pirate recording that I purchased in India around 1994. [scratchy:] 'boing... bom tchak... boing... bom tchak... boing... ping! bom tchak!' etc.

a very peculiar combination.

got a lovely and quite clear I Ching reading this morning [from the Wilhelm translation]. Contemplation - hexagram 20 - with transforming lines at 2 and 4, indicating two forms of contemplation - 'through the crack of a door / furthering for the perseverance of a woman' (2) and 'of the light of the kingdom' in which one is a guest of the king (4).

the two transforming lines resolve the hexagram into Conflict - hexagram 6.

a simple reading, leaving aside confucian misogynism in line two [ha ha, inferior woman peers through cracks in the door...], indicates that the I Ching is quietly telling me to get on with what I'm supposed to be doing - perseverance of woman on the one side, contemplation of what makes the kingdom in which one is guest flourish on the other. the two are in conflict, and the emphasis is on line four, which is more favourable partly because it is closer to the ruler in line five.

so, on that note, the plan for today is to ponder the light of my host kingdom. also write up a fieldwork description cum revised budget proposal for my funding body, and lay siege to some of my more elusive informants. [the question, of course, is which kingdom I am currently a guest in - the new age, or the world of reindeer herders? argh...]

have also been gathering advice regarding purchase of solid winter clothes, a woman at the farm said she'd make me some proper woollen socks [raph: now is the time for that bargain scooter-suits, or be for ever silent...]. winter looms out there, in the dark just beyond the circle of the campfire, biding its time, scratching the ears of its arctic wind-puppies...

today I helped pick some berries at the gjestegård. clear autumnal vibe this morning, bright sunlight and crystal cold translucent air, the hillsides tinged with a wash of yellow and brown. the world looked razor-sharp and sharp in colour. love this time of the year, though I'm used to temperatures about 10-15C higher...

as a tonic in my ongoing battle against spiritual sugar shock, this morning I also read 'the moment of freedom', the first volume of Jens Bjørneboe's chronicle of human inhumanity, the 'history of bestiality' trilogy. not as satisfying as I expected, from having read the last two books a few years back, but I finally have the chance to read all three volumes back to back, courtesy of the public library in tanabru.

spent the whole morning indoors, reading in the cozy warmth. peace was only broken by a two-dozen-strong flight of birds that spent the whole morning on my windowsill, scratching and headbutting the windows and doors, flying back and forth past my windows, pecking each other and seemingly desperately interested in getting in. slightly unsettling echoes of hitchcock, however eventually they left.

if nothing happens by tomorrow, I am going to start chasing down some informants, whether they like it or not. enough acclimatization.

and moved back into my old gamme. weather is - for a change - cold and windy... also now erratic, oscillating wildly between blazing sunshine and torrential rain. often in 2-minute bursts.

while down south I stocked up on my old tape collection, not enhanced upon since I was 15, as my car has a built-in old-school tape player. came up with a rucksack full of old tapes. sadly, most of my musical leftovers from teenybopperdom are utter trash. absolute reggae, roxette albums, billy joel, the lot. listenable tapes have long since gone on to the great big retro-technology dumping ground in the sky - through overplaying, theft, mindless lending and magnetic accidents. what I am left with is a handful of metallica albums, a recording of the papal mass in cuba a few years ago and several unmarked tapes with mid-90s techno. picture that...

also decided to rekindle an old intellectual crush on contemporary occultism I used to nurture way back when, as a counterbalance to all the fluffy rainbow-coloured lightworker channelling healing crap I get over-exposed to here. picked up an assorted compendium while in Oslo - austin osman spare, lavey, terence mckenna, tim leary, aleister crowley, that sort of thing. nothing like a solid dose of good ol' Beast 666 trying to immanentize the eschaton in the desert with wacko drugs and thelemic masturbation rituals to counteract my emerging spiritual hypoglycemia [defined as 'the body's inability to properly handle... large amounts of sugar'. from here].

on the practical front, I have received some veeeery interesting but absolutely unpublishable data on russian whores and the performance of masculinity in a small arctic community. also, have learned that a relative of my hostess' is a famous armed robber in Oslo, now serving time, who once killed his neighbour up here in austertana [where I stayed initially] and shoved a vacuum cleaner up his dead ass. isn't that just remarkably interesting.

now planning to leave the Tanabru public library - free e-mail and I got copies of both germaine greer's 'the female eunuch' and 'a rough guide to adorno's aesthetic' at a clearing sale! remarkable how well-stocked the arctic tundra can turn out to be... - and buy some groceries. then head home and... well, I'll come up with something.