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Colonial Moments in Greenland: Mutable Tensions in the Contact Zone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2019

Kirsten Hastrup
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Abstract

In 2009, Greenland obtained self-government, terminating Danish supremacy, which had taken many forms over the centuries. This article analyses significant moments in Greenlandic-Danish relations by unpacking distinct contact zones that have emerged through the many encounters between locals and newcomers. Contact zones are always emplaced and create their own logic, which is not always easily readable as “colonialism” in the sense of appropriating lands and extracting surplus. While wrongs may have been perpetrated and ill-informed actions towards the inhabitants taken, relations between Greenland and Denmark illustrate how “colonialism” is neither uniform nor scalable. The analytical focus on colonial moments stresses the nonlinearity of colonial relations and allows for a subtler understanding of the postcolonial remains.

Keywords

Greenlandcontact zonescalabilityemerging citizenshipcosmopolitanismDanish colonialism
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 43 , Special Issue 2: Colonial Entanglements: Crossroads, Contact Zones and Flows in Scandinavian Global History , August 2019 , pp. 243 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

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Kirsten Hastrup is a professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has worked on Greenlandic issues over the past ten years, mainly as related to the Thule region, where she has done recurrent fieldwork. Before that, her main field was Iceland. She has published numerous articles and books on both of these areas, with a sustained focus on the interface between nature and society.

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