Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Finnish Lapland, this presentation discusses the local idea of keli ('conditions for movement') and juxtaposes it to the idea of climate change as an alternative idiom for understanding transformations of an environment’s mobility affordances.

Paper long abstract:

Inhabitants of the province of Lapland use the Finnish term keli as a shorthand for the conditions that enable outdoors activities, in particular travelling. Today referring to anything from driving a car to rowing a boat or collecting mushrooms, linguists assume that the term originates in describing the state of winter travel routes. With its direct link to specific activities, keli is a relational and malleable concept, subsuming a range of mostly weather-related phenomena. People widely use it to index seasonal transformations of their lifeworlds, but also to comment on unusual phenomena in the seasonal round, phenomena that are addressed under the label of climate change, too.

This presentation outlines some of the practical meanings of keli for people from Finnish Lapland, and sketches some of the strategies these people use to deal with its breakdown - kelirikko, or unfavourable conditions for movement. Furthermore, it speculates how a framing of unfavourable conditions in terms of keli parallels, and differs from, their framing in terms of climate change. I argue that a critical difference in conceiving (im)mobility through keli or climate change lies in their degrees of abstraction, where the former always refers to concrete ways and projects of movement. Therefore, keli(rikko) may afford a more meaningful way to understand a changing climate and ways of dealing with it.