Panel 2A: Greenland-Denmark relations in history: Insights from the ERC Arctic Cultures project Format: Paper panel in English Conveners: Dr Peter Martin & Richard Powell Panel 2A abstract: This panel will present findings from the European Research Council funded project, ‘Arctic Cultures’, 2017-22, that relate to the conference theme on Greenland-Denmark relations. The ARCTIC CULT project investigates the imaginative construction of the Arctic that emerged from the exploration of the region by Europeans and North Americans and their contacts with indigenous peoples from the middle of the sixteenth century. During the exploration and colonisation of the Arctic, particular texts, cartographic representations and objects were collected and returned to sites like Copenhagen, Berlin, Philadelphia and New York. The construction of the Arctic thereby became entwined with the growth of colonial museum cultures and, indeed, western modernity. The panel will present aspects of research from the project that focus upon relations between Greenland and Denmark, as well as other imperial states such as Britain and Germany. Studying transnational histories of knowledge co-production, papers will reflect on the formations of cartographic, ethnographic and geographic knowledges within the Danish-Greenlandic colonial context. The panel will also consider the extent to which these processes of knowledge formation continue to have important consequences for contemporary relations between Greenland and Denmark.

Speaker 1: Dr Richard Powell Title: Introduction to the Panel – ERC Arctic Cultures Project Abstract: A brief introduction to the ERC Arctic Cultures project and the context for the panel papers and discussion. Speaker 2: Dr Peter Martin Title: Anthropogeography in the Arctic: H.P. Steensby and study of the Thule Inughuit Abstract 2A.1: In the early twentieth century the Danish geographer H.P Steensby published several articles and monographs contributing to ongoing scholarly debates pertaining to ‘the origins of the Inuit.’ His work was influenced heavily by the concept of Anthropogeography, a school of thought predicated on the ethnographic analysis of ‘contained’ societies – i.e. those who did not have a long history of inward migration. Using this framework, Steensby identified the Greenlandic Inughuit as an ideal case study on which to apply these problematic anthropogeographical approaches. Reflecting on Steensby’s study of the Inughuit, both in the field and in the museum, this paper will consider the extent to which his work had lasting impacts on how this community was understood in Greenland, Denmark and beyond. Speaker 3: Dr John Woitkowitz Title: Mission Stations and Meeting Places: Transimperial Encounters and Arctic Science in the Second German Arctic Expedition, 1869-1870 Abstract 2A.2: Since the eighteenth century, the Moravian Brotherhood maintained mission stations along the southern coast of Greenland. Places of complex relationships, these mission stations became sites of a series of transimperial and cross-cultural encounters among Inuit, Moravian missionaries, Danish colonial authorities, and the shipwrecked crew of the Hansa, one of two vessels despatched to East Greenland as part of the Second German Arctic Expedition (SGAE) in 1869-1870. The purpose of the SGAE was to search for access to the central Arctic Ocean and to prove the existence of an ice-free, navigable open polar sea. When forced to abandon ship, the Hansa crew engaged in a series of social, cultural, and material interactions with the residents of the Moravian mission stations over the course of the summer of 1870. Drawing on diaries and correspondence records of the Moravian missionaries at Friedrichsthal, Lichtenau, and Lichtenfels as well as the expedition reports and Prussian government records relating to the SGAE, this paper examines the rescue of the German sailors, the moments of cross-cultural encounter, and their return journey via Copenhagen to Bremen. In doing so, this paper reflects on questions about the role of science and exploration in the colonial projects of European powers. Conceiving of the Greenlandic mission stations as transimperial meeting places, this paper aims to contextualize the colonial encounter within the wider history of Greenlandic-Danish-German transnational Arctic science and polar exploration. Speaker 4: Dr Nanna Kaalund Title: Publishing 'Danish Greenland': Hinrich Rink and the Making of an International Community of Researchers Abstract 2A.3: In the preface to the book Danish Greenland, Its people and its products (1877), Rink outlined his reasoning for publishing it in English. Rink argued that there had been an increased interest in cross-cultural exchange in Greenland following the disappearance of John Franklin's last expedition, but many of the key English-language resources on Greenland were outdated, and reinforced commonly held misunderstandings about Inuit. In publishing Danish Greenland, Rink was not simply seeking to correct mistaken beliefs about Greenland and Inuit in England and English-North America. Rather, his broader ambition was to create an international network of researchers focusing on Greenland, with himself and his Danish colleagues as the gate-keepers of knowledge. With a starting point in a study of Rink's translational and collecting practices of Inuit knowledge and history, this paper examines the efforts of various actors, including Rink and the Royal Greenland Trading Department, in exercising colonial, economic, and intellectual control over Greenland in the second half of the nineteenth century. Speaker 5: Dr Johanne Bruun Title: Ecological research in Greenland in the 1920s Abstract 2A.4: Upon the establishment of the Oxford University Exploration Club in 1927, one of its first expeditions set out for Greenland to continue the ecological work begun during three ‘foundational’ expeditions to Svalbard during 1921-1924. This paper compares how the geographical fields were enacted, imagined, and represented by members of Greenland and Svalbard expeditions. In particular, it hones in on how geographical imaginaries emerging from encounters with Svalbard impacted enactments of socially and culturally different Greenlandic spaces. This discussion is positioned in relation to the early managerial and imperial logics underpinning ecology as a scientific discipline as well as the position of the Arctic (and its peoples) as part of a natural as opposed to cultural order. Time: 13 minutes Discussant: Dr Jens Heinrich Title: Discussant Abstract: Discussant’s comments and reflections on papers and panel themes. Audience Q&A: Dr Richard Powell (Chair) Abstract: Questions and comments from the audience for the speakers.