To See and to Respect: On the Relations between Humans, Supernatural Beings and the Landscape in Northeast Iceland

This article explores selected aspects of relationships between humans, supernatural beings and the landscape in Northeast Iceland. The landscape is understood as a changeable and dynamic dimension, encompassing all the continuously emerging processes of the terrain, vegetation, land, water, gases and atmospheric phenomena. In local perceptions, both humans, with their social practices and meaning-making, and non-humans – in our case especially supernatural beings – are integrated into this dynamic landscape. Belief traditions and interactions with the supernatural have an influence on agricultural and everyday practices, as well as on the social relationships within the community. Moreover, they are always situated in a specific environment. This intertwining of visible and invisible, material and immaterial elements and actors brings forth the question of respect, through which we can think the complex relationality between humans, non-humans and the landscape.