Research Seminar: Kirsten Hastrup, Prof. Emeritus, UCPH

Speaker: Kirsten Hastrup, Prof. Emeritus, UCPH

Title: Anthropology on the Edge of Time

Abstract: The landscape of High Arctic Greenland is a landscape of incredible power and beauty. At its centre stands the ice in its many forms, having always set the scene for Inughuit life through periods of bounty or poverty. Today, the Inughuit count some 700 persons, including a good number of children, and they are distributed in one town and three settlements. Their nearest neighbours live some 1000 kilometres south of the Melville Bay, where they are not Inughuit but Greenlanders (or Kalaallit).

Since 2007, I have worked in the region and sensed the upheavals of the landscape, the uncertainties of the hunt, and the shifty ice and sea upon which life depends. People and places, past and present, walruses and sea birds, narwhals and dogs, winter and summer, life and death, quiet seas, and tumbling icebergs are all part of a nature, that seems to change dramatically. How may we reshuffle the backward-looking description of what have seen or sensed and attack the present – including the still unknown? The Inughuit are, indeed, living on the edge of time. How may we incorporate such edge in our writing and contribute to a sense of the future?