Oral/Past Culture and Modern Technical Means in the Literature of the Twentieth Century in Greenland

Abstract

The present article takes as its starting point a short story from 2001 and relates it to the development of the Greenlandic literature in the twentieth century. The Greenlandic literature evolved around 1900 and mirrors the socio-political trends and the stages of nation building through the twentieth century. The overall tendencies of the century start with a striving towards more knowledge of and competence in European culture (including technical know-how) before 1950. Then a feeling of overwhelming impact from Danish culture followed during the Danification policy of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and this resulted in a protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s and Home Rule from 1979. However, if we read the literature in details and supplement it with the contemporary newspapers a much more diverse picture of an appropriation process (i.e. a conscious adaptation of selective parts of the impact from outside) emerges. The present article focuses on how these sources give us glimpses of an ongoing debate already in the first half of the twentieth century i.e. in colonial times: the Greenlandic population was not just passively under colonial domination. The history of the twentieth century is the history about a fairly well functioning appropriation of technical means and cultural impact from outside up till 1950, and then – after three decades of heavy modernization and Danification –-a process from 1979 on towards more and more agency in a “ glocalized” Greenland.

Keywords:

• Appropriation
• Glocalization
• Literature Greenlandic
• Newspapers Greenlandic
• Oral/past culture
• Technology Greenlandic

Notes

1. The article is based on a paper presented at the 15th Inuit Studies Conference, Paris, 24–29 October 2006. Glocalization (combining globalization and localization) is here used in the broad sense, to cover how the impact of global cultural trends is seen as partly opposed by local tendencies, and how the globalized present is perceived from the local. Glocalization is not used to denote local losers not participating in the globalized world, as Zygmunt Bauman used the term (Bauman, 1989), neither as it was used originally in Japan for marketing.

2. Transl. by Karen Langgård from the Greenlandic "NASA-p isertaasa isertugaanersaat" in Berthelsen 2001. The translation was made for “ARCUS Conference (Arctic Research Consortium US)”, Washington DC, 19 May 2005 and for “The Greenland Festival”, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, 20–22 May 2005, as part of an exposition made by professors and students from the Department of Language, Literature and Media, Ilisimatusarfik University of Greenland.

3. That is objectified, frozen in content and through this made objects that can be used as symbols (Eriksen, 2002: 71).

4. However some of the Greenlandic CDs now have English translations in their inner cover to promote the CDs outside Greenland too. Furthermore, during the last decades a sizable proportion of Greenlandic literature has been translated into Danish, partly to serve the small group of Danish-speaking Greenlanders, partly to cater to the market of Danish readers who have become interested in Greenland and its culture.

5. The translation on the inner cover has “haitry”. The Greenlandic wording is equivalent to “bits of hatred”.