Inscribing a rural economy in Alaska, 1938--1972

The material production of cultural and economic knowledge about northwest arctic Alaska saw rapid intensifications during the middle decades in the twentieth century. The dissertation examines the inscription and mobilization of the archive itself as a cultural agent of fact production, and is preparatory to a larger project: an ethnography of the institutional archive in postwar Alaska. This was a period of rapid urbanization, of state formation, and of indigenous Inupiat re-organization throughout the territory. The study outlines the spatialities that constructed, and were constructed by, manifest regional differentiations within Alaska and the scriptural economies which localized the peculiar instruments of statecraft---particularly, institutional archives---at key points in an evolving regional relationship, thereby giving a visibly scripted geography to Alaska's cultures of neocolonialism.; The study particularly concerns the formation and cementation of Northwest Arctic Alaska as a region between 1938 and 1972. It is composed of a series of pathways that examine the production of a region---conceptually and materially---in a way that avoids reifying the region as a given object at the start of the analysis. It is structured into eight chapters, of which the first is an introduction to the major themes. The second chapter situates the theoretical objectives of the study by examining theory as a distinct object in scholarly enterprise. The third reviews literature about the "region" in northern studies and in geography. The fourth offers a snapshot of the current Northwest arctic region, framed within a discussion of genealogy as a methodological approach. The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters offer vignettes of processes and events in the regionalization of Alaska. They examine three conceptual instruments---corporate organization, regional economy, government---through three illustrative projects: the production of the Alaska Development Corporations bill in 1940, the Alaska Rural Development Board's regional studies in 1957, and the formation of the Northwest Alaska Native Association in 1966, respectively. The last chapter sketches the paradox of an ongoing project that I began---to build an oral-history archive in Kotzebue about tourists and tourism---in light of the historic instrumentalities of neocolonialism in Alaska.