Summary Of The Hvalsalen

The narrative of “The Hvalsalen” begins with an act of turning around and revisiting. This essay from the collection Sightlines details a trip Jamie takes to Bergen, Norway, and her visit to the Hvalsalen, or whale hall. The Hvalsalen houses a large collection of whale skeletons acquired throughout the 19th century during a boom in commercial whaling. The essay begins with Jamie’s initial visit to the Hvalsalen, where she peruses the whale skeletons by herself, noting that “In the way of old-fashioned museums, there was next to nothing in the way of explanations or information” (S 99). Given this lack of information, the essay’s narrative expands only after Jamie finds that “the presence of all those whales’ bones … had got under my skin,
This attests to a certain kind of praxis that informs Jamie’s travel and writing: by returning Jamie connects directly with the scientist/conservationists at the Hvalsalen and gains a deeper understanding of the efforts going on there. One of the perspectives Jamie gains from the conservationists is how they regard the whales: “Later, over tea, I asked the conservators if they thought of the objects they were working on as animals, or objects. ‘Animals,’ they said. They were all of a mind” (S 112). Though long dead and distanced from the height of industrial whaling, the bones of the whales have a lingering “presence” (S 100) in the whale
While Norwegian tourist websites such as visitnorway.com suggest “the welfare of the whales is a top priority on our tours” (“Arctic Whale Tours”), the site makes no mention of the history of whaling. This absence is comparable to greenwashing, or a misrepresentation of the practice as more environmentally responsible than it may be, and it makes Jamie’s essays that cover whale watching in the oceans and in the museum vital. Katja Neves examines the connections between whale hunting and whale watching and suggests that "while the potential damages of whale watching may seem trivial in comparison to the damages of whale hunting, the important issue it raises concerns the fetishization of ecotourism as conservation practice” (727, emphasis in original). Neves goes on to use Marx’s concept of metabolic rift to trace the continuities between commercial whale hunting and whale watching; in Neves usage, metabolic rifts in relation to cetourism (cetacean tourism) are the disruptions to dynamic ecosystems due to human investment. Neves links the practice of whale watching to a shift in market conditions with the advent of the petroleum industry rather than a more environmentally responsible understanding of the relationship between whales and humans.