Scholars from Bangor in law and the natural sciences (Dr Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Law and Dr Lynda Yorke, Life Sciences), joined together with composer Anders Hultqvist (University of Gothenburg) and artist Dr Dann Hignell-Tully (Guildhall School of Music and Drama) to understand how material formations (such as found in geological layers of sediment and rock), may impact upon the cultures of given communities, affecting language and the kind of law created, in turn.

The material forms of ice, slate, natural resources that are integral to the surroundings of native Sámi and Welsh cultures in turn, based in, on and around, the Norwegian Arctic Circle and Welsh Snowdonia; are part of a this convergent investigation as to how these minerals, processes and formations create materio-linguistic cultures of law.

Our key research questions: 

1. 1 - What can the thermodynamic laws of entropy (such as through physical and geological phases states) tell us about the materio-linguistic processes of state law?

2. 2 - What role does oral culture and storytelling play in the development of Sámi and Welsh law and in the development of law in general?

3. 3 - What do indigenous laws tell us of the processes of entropy, such as Sámi custom about ice, Welsh custom about slate, and vice versa?

4. 4 - How might sonic practices foster new understandings of law and its material interactions, through both oral storytelling traditions and the reification of socio-entropic processes? 

This exploration unravels the nature of decay, disorder, petrification, within law, inscribed in a legal pluralist understanding of legality through the North Welsh and Sámi traditions of Northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and the extent to which the materiality of ice and slate makes its way into vernacular understandings of law and legal plurality.  

In this instance, oral and sound research of the Welsh and Sámi traditions are researched to denote how ice and rock morphology might influence bottom up understandings of law, and their entropic move to formal legality. Similarly, how notions of law and its variant resistances may frame conceptions of ice and rock.

This is based upon a connection between oral cultures of relaying law, with aurality, what it means to hear and the impact and role of sound within the production of law, and how these forms of law are ‘told’ through through materiality as a form of storytelling.

The Great Strike of 1900-1903 in Bethesda, North Wales, in response to colonial use of law and the resultant slavery by the Penrhyn Estate, alongside legislative developments (or lack thereof) in employment protections, health and safety law are looked to; as well as those as a result of mining in Repparfjorden, Norway, as materio-legislative events in response to, and in confluence with, the material formations of law developing in the surrounding natural environments.

The connection between oral storytelling with sound and the processes of the socio-material world, albeit unique to this project, are time old.  In Julia Cruikshank’s ‘Do Glaciers Listen?’ (2005), she repeats how Athapaskan and Tlingit cultures’ oral tradition sees glaciers as social landscapes, both generative of, and generating, stories that invoke voice and witnessing in various forms: “glaciers take action and respond to their surroundings. They are sensitive to smells and they listen.” By considering communities as a process in which language and storytelling serve as creative means of exploring and constructing social dynamics, the project falls within the remit of contemporary social anthropology and the consideration of language with materiality through translation studies. For Tim Ingold, storytelling is synonymous with the acts of walking, weaving, observing, wayfaring, singing, drawing and writing - all of which are subsets of line-making where storytelling is a reflective, constructive practice; not as a fixed, immutable ruleset, but as an entropic process.

Beyond their immediate linguistic function, stories impart knowledge through the timbral diversity of sound - the tone of the voice is as much the message as it is the messenger. Whilst this has long been discussed in media-theory (notably in Roland Barthes’ discussion on the ‘grain’ of the voice), our point of departure is to examine how sound conveys and dictates process. 

The project aims to be an emergent space we are creating for participatory and experimental practices in recording oral histories and their materio-socio-linguistic enmeshment. With sonic, aural and vibrational rhythms harnessed as artistic practice we aim to identify processes of bifurcation both in relation to laws of entropy as in laws of the state.