Wild men in and out of science: finding a place in the disciplinary borderlands of Arctic Canada and Greenland

• Comparative case study of constructions of knowledge in early twentieth-century field science.
• Features Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton and Danish geologist Lauge Koch.
• Contextualizes disciplinary borderlands in Arctic Canada and Greenland.
• Focuses on status of field science in an age dominated by laboratory methods.

This essay compares the early twentieth-century Arctic experiences of the artist-naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946) in Canada and the explorer-geologist Lauge Koch (1892–1964) in Greenland during a time of transition in the history of scientific exploration. It focuses on the extraordinary careers of two uneasy contributors to this transition, from both inside and outside of the scientific profession. Seton's and Koch's careers serve as fault-lines marking important disputes over the production and construction of knowledge, and conceptions of scientific truth. Seton, internationally famous author of the ‘realistic’ animal stories Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), endured public criticism as a ‘nature-faker’ who anthropomorphized his animal subjects unduly. Intent on earning recognition as a modern field scientist, he travelled to Canada's Barren Grounds in 1907 to stake new claims to scientific knowledge and field methods. Koch joined the legendary Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen's Second Thule Expedition (1916–1918) before leading Denmark's Jubilee expedition to North Greenland (1920–1923). He returned to Denmark a national hero whose further expeditions during the 1930s transformed Arctic geological fieldwork, but not without very public challenges from the Danish scientific community. The problems encountered by Seton and Koch in their efforts to establish their field practices in the disciplinary borderlands between traditional natural history and modern ecology and geology, respectively, offer insights, over several generations, into the historical transition from the older Romantic lore of the heroic individual explorer to modern infrastructures and practices. Their responses highlight larger fissures in twentieth-century reconceptions of the Arctic, of nature, and of science at large.