Lived Reality in the Empty Spaces of Capital: Some Lessons from Video in Northern Canada

Abstract

The image of the Canadian Arctic popularized in mass media representations is that ofvast barren tundra occupied by wild animals but otherwise sparsely populated by primitive and/or disenfranchised peoples. This image serves a useful ideological function for capital insofar as the rhetorical emptying-out of this space facilitates its deployment in the interests of Empire - interests not necessarily reflective of either the local communities or of the environment-that is, of the lived reality.