“We’re Not the Polar Bears”: Climate Crisis, Politics, & Environmental Futures in Greenland Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

The effects of climate change in Greenland are dramatic, leading to global sea level rise and the erasure of subsistence lifeways. This causes many outsiders to frame Greenland as a place in crisis. Despite its negative impacts, some in the country are excited about climate change. It is tied to the politics of nation-building and self-determination. Although a semiautonomous region within the Kingdom of Denmark, the government of Greenland hopes to use climate change as a springboard for economic development and independence.

The dissertation explores this tension, opening questions about the notion of “climate crisis” as a relational and world-building concept. It explores the ideologies, politics, and histories that shape the practice of field science and the ongoing efforts to improve collaboration between US and Greenland-based researchers and the public in Nuuk (Greenland’s capital city). I argue that climate-related research is shaped by a perception of climate change as a global crisis that demands timely intervention. This framing, in turn, helps reproduce (settler) colonial relations and historical power inequities between various stakeholders. Treating climate change as a crisis and Greenland as a place in crisis allows researchers to ignore the political entanglements of their work, marginalize critiques about inclusivity from the largely indigenous public, and hinders efforts to improve relations between scientists and the public that many US and Greenland-based researchers and funding agencies are working towards.

Building on ethnographic research carried out with environmental scientists and policy makers in Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq Greenland between 2017-2020, the dissertation interrogates the politics and forms of relation that the concept of “climate crisis” enables and forecloses. Advancing literature in environmental anthropology, Arctic anthropology, and the anthropology of science, I suggest new directions for engagements with climate change and the Anthropocene through attention to ambivalence and “untimely” activism which rejects the temporal urgency of “crisis” discourse. Neither dismissing the seriousness or reality of climate change, I demonstrate how climate change and “climate crisis” are more than geophysical processes: they are socially circulating and contested categories that are co-articulated with senses of history, (in)justice, and relations to space and time.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: DEPORTATIONS & ARRIVALS............................................................................ 1

I. The Shaman and the Bear............................................................................................................ 2

I.i Deportation.............................................................................................................................. 2

I.ii “We’re Not the Polar Bears”...................................................................................................... 6

II. The Argument............................................................................................................................ 8

II.i Crisis, Science, Colonialism....................................................................................................... 8

II.ii Crisis Discourse...................................................................................................................... 9

III. Interventions.......................................................................................................................... 12

III.i Geography and Ethnography of Climate Science......................................................................... 12

III.ii Ethnography of Arctic Colonialism.......................................................................................... 14

III.iii Anthropology of Climate Change and Climate Crisis.................................................................. 17

IV. Dissertation Structure........................................................................................................... 22

V. The Study................................................................................................................................. 26

V.i The Where............................................................................................................................. 26

V.ii The Who............................................................................................................................... 32

V.iii The How: Methods and Study Considerations............................................................................. 38

CHAPTER 1: DOGS, IMAGES, & FORMATIVE FICTIONS IN/OF GREENLAND............................... 43

I. The Image Itself........................................................................................................................ 44

I.i. Global Meltdown.................................................................................................................... 44

II. Theory, History, Images........................................................................................................... 49

II.i Aesthetics, Politics, and Visual Representations of Climate Change.................................................. 49

II.ii Images Which Create and Constrain.......................................................................................... 53

II.iii Ultima Thule, Geographies of Imagination, and the Erasure of Colonialism..................................... 58

III. Images and (Mis)Conceptions in/of the Field............................................................................. 68

III.i Greenland as a Place Without History....................................................................................... 68

III.ii “It Encapsulated Everything People Knew about Greenland”....................................................... 77

III.iii Melt, Media, and Representation............................................................................................ 84

V. Make Greenland Ordinary Again............................................................................................. 99

CHAPTER 2: FIELD SCIENCE, ICY LANDSCAPES, AND THE CLIMATE (NON)CRISIS IN GREENLAND        105

I. Climate Crisis, Climate Ambivalence, and Ice........................................................................... 106

II. Place, Science, and the Poetics of Ice...................................................................................... 112

III. Changing Seasons, Ice Melt, and Climate Crisis...................................................................... 117

III. i Summer in Kangerlussuaq: Sermersuaq, the Watson, and Falling Bridges..................................... 117

III.ii Kangerluarsunnguaq: Year-Round Perspectives and Virtual Entanglements................................... 126

IV. Intimacy, Landscape, and Relations to Place......................................................................... 133

IV.i Attunements, Non-Humans, and Fieldwork................................................................................ 133

IV.ii Foxes, Birds, Sunlight, and Embodied Memory in Kangerluarsunnguaq......................................... 135

IV.ii Experiential Memory, Code-names, and Distancing Analogues.................................................... 147

V. Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 161

CHAPTER 3: TIME, CRISIS, AND COLLABORATION.................................................................... 163

I. “A Collective Sigh of Sadness’................................................................................................. 164

I.i The Stakes of Speed and Time................................................................................................... 164

I.ii. Glaciers, Children, and Friends: Interface Ethnography and Crisis............................................... 165

I.iii. Rapid change and Slow Partnership Building............................................................................ 168

II. The Temporality of Crisis: Anthropology, Time, and Multi-Rhythmic Realities........................ 174

II.i. “We Are Always in Time:” Emergence, Cacophony, Power.......................................................... 174

II.ii. The Temporality of Crisis: Anticipation, Apocalypse, and the (False) Promise of an End.................. 180

III. Hunting, Lifestyle Choices, and Institutional Times............................................................... 184

III.i Time and The Organization of Difference................................................................................. 184

III.ii Immaqa and Danskhed......................................................................................................... 185

III. iii Stuck Between Africa and the Arctic: “Island Time” in the North............................................... 188

III.iv Co-production, Colonialism, and the Politics of Knowledge........................................................ 191

IV. Institutional Time and the Speed of Science........................................................................... 196

IV.i “Nobody is Pushing Deadlines”.............................................................................................. 196

IV.ii The Speed of Science........................................................................................................... 197

IV.iii The Durability of Colonial Science........................................................................................ 206

V. Untimely Relations................................................................................................................ 209

CHAPTER 4: RECOGNITION, RESEARCH, AND COLONIALISM................................................... 212

I. Pastries, Ravens, and Revolution............................................................................................. 213

I.i (Mis)translations and Attacks................................................................................................... 213

II. “It’s Another World”............................................................................................................. 219

II.i A Life of Respect................................................................................................................... 219

II.ii Everybody Hates Scientists..................................................................................................... 227

III. Science, “Society,” and Public Outreach................................................................................ 234

III.i Global Science in a Local Place.............................................................................................. 234

III.ii Samfund and The “Who” of Society........................................................................................ 239

IV. Greenland Science Week and Public Outreach....................................................................... 244

IV.i Connecting Communities and Science...................................................................................... 244

V. Recognition, Grief, and Justice............................................................................................... 259

CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................... 263

I.    Beginnings and Ends............................................................................................................ 264

I.i Where We have Been.............................................................................................................. 264

I.ii Snapshots of the Field, Snapshots of the Contemporary................................................................ 266

II. Where is Next?........................................................................................................................ 270

II.i The Visibility of Crisis............................................................................................................ 270

II.ii Ambivalence and Climate Ethnography................................................................................... 271

II.iii The Untimely Present........................................................................................................... 272

Works Cited    276

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Anthropology
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Anthropology, Cultural Climate Change Scandinavian Studies
Stichwort	Science and Technology Studies Political Ecology Colonialism Greenland Anthropocene STS Postcolonialism Arctic
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	David Nugent, Emory University

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