Kirsten Hastrup’s research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

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Publications (41)


Early Ethnography in the American Arctic: Tristes Arctiques
  • Book

September 2023

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27 Reads

Kirsten Hastrup

The muskox world: human-animal histories in the Arctic

January 2022

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48 Reads

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4 Citations

Acta Borealia

This article follows the trail of muskoxen over many millennia and continents, focussing on their relations to humans – as their hunters and their protectors, itinerant partners and boundary makers. The human-animal histories referred to in the title began when the Pleistocene era was replaced by the Holocene and continued until the present. The article is not “historical” in the sense of being governed by a strict timeline, but the argument unfolds through topics of different historical origins, tracing particular themes. It starts with “origins” and the early loss of genetic variation, proceeds to early modern naturalist “discovery” and naming, and then onwards to early twentieth-century political skirmishes over territories and hunting rights, and finally to recent activities of muskox hunting. The story closes with a reflection on the poetics of the Muskox World.



The End of Nature? Inughuit Life on the Edge of Time

May 2021

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49 Reads

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2 Citations

Ethnos

The Inughuit of Northwest Greenland are hunters of marine mammals and other animal species of the High Arctic ecological system. Their life is rapidly changing along with the warming Arctic, and they experience massive changes in the environment that always sustained them. This fuels a question of the end of nature, to be addressed through three different natural materialities: ice, water, and land – all of them deeply infiltrating social life. The ice, now melting rapidly, has provided the infrastructure of moving into and about in the region. The water, now opening widely, has made marine mammals the major game. The land, now slowly expanding, increasingly features as a repository of unknown resources. It is suggested that the Inughuit have always dwelled within an ‘ending of nature’, seen as a non-linear process deeply embedded in larger geo-social processes of multiple temporalities.


Living (with) Ice: Geo-sociality in the High Arctic

March 2021

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6 Reads

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2 Citations

Journal of Northern Studies

The main tenet of this article is to show how the ice, so visually dominant in the High Arctic, is also a prominent life force. The ice is never still and as it moves, melts or freeze, it deeply affects human and animal life in the region; conversely the diverse life-forms affect the icy environment in their own way and tempo. This interplay exposes the geo-social relations at the centre of this article, taking off from the gradual retraction of the ice after the last Ice Age, opening up for human movement and settlement in High Arctic America and eventually in Thule (Avanersuaq), in Northwest Greenland. Today some 750 people live there as hunters in the unsurpassable old hunting style, yet also as modern as anybody when it comes to outlook. Through brief discussions of particular periods, from the “discovery” of the Inughuit in 1819 and until the present, it is shown how deeply their life is implicated in the living ice, for better and for worse. The ice emerges as a refrain that holds the landscape together. The argument is based both in historical research and in regular anthropological fieldwork in the region over ten years 2007–2017.


Thule as Frontier
  • Article
  • Full-text available

March 2020

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247 Reads

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5 Citations

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

Located in Northwest Greenland, the Thule region is a remarkable frontier zone. This article focusses on the undecided nature of the frontier in both time and space. The article explores the unstable ground upon which ‘resources’ emerge as such. The case is made in three analytical parts: The first discusses the notion of commons and the implicit issue of spatiality. The second shows how the region’s living resources were perceived and poses a question of sustainability. The third centres on the Arctic as a ‘contact zone’; a place for colonial encounters and a meeting ground between human and nonhuman agents.

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Colonial Moments in Greenland: Mutable Tensions in the Contact Zone

August 2019

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50 Reads

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4 Citations

Itinerario - European Journal of Overseas History

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.


A history of climate change: Inughuit responses to changing ice conditions in North-West Greenland

November 2018

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135 Reads

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26 Citations

Climatic Change

This article presents a small community of High Arctic hunters (the Inughuit in North West Greenland) who have always had to negotiate climatic changes with great impact on their living conditions. This points us toward the natural-social entanglements implied in the notion of the Anthropocene, and to the new intellectual challenges that both natural and social scientists are facing in relation to the current climatic changes. These challenges are discussed through the case of the Inughuit with whom the author has worked over many years. Departing from their dire situation in the 19th century, when they were first described and became known to outsiders, it is shown how flexibility and mobility were always preconditions for survival in this environment. Then, they were trapped in too much ice, while now they have to negotiate a rapidly melting environment. In both cases their response is deeply implicated in their sense of who they were and are, also in relation to a larger world.


The Historicity of Health: Environmental Hazards and Epidemics in Northwest Greenland

October 2018

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27 Reads

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5 Citations

Cross-Cultural Research

The Thule community (Northwest Greenland) sets the scene for this study of health and environmental hazards in a historical perspective. In the early 19th century, when European contact was first made, the region was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, and the tiny population was on the brink of extinction partly owing to epidemics. This was to change in the late 19th century when more regular contact was made and provisions became more secure. During the 20th century, new political realities were mixed into the environmental issues, leaving the local population on the brink of disaster once again. Most recently, global warming is undermining the hunting economy, yet few subsistence alternatives are present this far in the High Arctic. Increasing contamination of the sea is having negative effects on all Arctic trophic levels with consequences for human health. This article discusses the historicity of health, and the unification of the world through disease and pollution and unpacks a pervasive sense of disequilibrium owing to many factors.


Living in an oasis: Rapid transformations, resilience, and resistance in the North Water Area societies and ecosystems

March 2018

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408 Reads

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19 Citations

AMBIO A Journal of the Human Environment

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Kirsten Hastrup

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Based on lake sediment data, archaeological findings, and historical records, we describe rapid transformations, resilience and resistance in societies and ecosystems, and their interactions in the past in the North Water area related to changes in climate and historical events. Examples are the formation of the polynya itself and the early arrival of people, ca. 4500 years ago, and later major human immigrations (different societies, cultural encounters, or abandonment) from other regions in the Arctic. While the early immigrations had relatively modest and localised effect on the ecosystem, the later-incoming culture in the early thirteenth century was marked by extensive migrations into and out of the area and abrupt shifts in hunting technologies. This has had long-lasting consequences for the local lake ecosystems. Large natural transformations in the ecosystems have also occurred over relatively short time periods related to changes in the polynya. Finally, we discuss the future perspectives for the North Water area given the many threats, but also opportunities.


Citations (36)


... Mining is hard, daily work, and it requires what Rolston (2013) calls 'pit-sense' an embodied knowledge of the moving underground, along with an 'understanding of the materials' own will' (Rolston 2013: 589). The notion of geosocialities has enabled me to shed light on these everyday interactions, giving notice to how people navigate in and with geos (Palsson & Swanson 2016;Hastrup 2020). Geos are not just sceneries, nor are they only of planetary concern (Yusoff 2013;Clark & Gunaratnam 2016). ...

Reference:

Elusive Gold and Uncertainty in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining
Living (with) Ice: Geo-sociality in the High Arctic
  • Citing Article
  • March 2021

Journal of Northern Studies

... The objective facts that the prey's own habits and behaviors stem from its purely biological instincts validate the possibility of prey survival and a synergistic relationship with nature under real natural conditions. Meanwhile, the prey serves as the center of attention for the hunter's hunting team, and it links the hunter, society, and the natural environment (Feit, 2001;Hastrup, 2022;Milbourne, 2003). Thus, prey is not objects of indifference in the eyes of the hunter but are endowed with forms or meanings in the mental representation system. ...

The muskox world: human-animal histories in the Arctic
  • Citing Article
  • January 2022

Acta Borealia

... In 1979, the home-rule law increased Greenlandic independence, and the self-rule law (2009) acknowledged the Greenlandic people as independent people with the right to become a nation. The self-rule law also grants Greenland the right to take authority (including costs) over multiple areas of law and government that are now under the jurisprudence of Denmark (Hastrup, 2019). ...

Colonial Moments in Greenland: Mutable Tensions in the Contact Zone
  • Citing Article
  • August 2019

Itinerario - European Journal of Overseas History

... Scientists arrive in Greenland each year to study sea-ice changes, melting glaciers, shifting fjord dynamics and the changing ocean-ice interface. Despite the fact that local communities are increasingly considered, there are variable amounts of research being conducted in West versus East Greenland due to global geopolitics, infrastructural access, grant funding, historical cultural narratives that divide the island and du jour topics of scientific research (Hastrup, 2019;Nuttall, 2019;Christensen and others, 2020). Additionally, funding for societal research that includes the effects of ice loss on community health and welfare, especially for Indigenous Greenlanders, is lacking. ...

The Historicity of Health: Environmental Hazards and Epidemics in Northwest Greenland
  • Citing Article
  • October 2018

Cross-Cultural Research

... Qaanaaq (77 • 28′ N, 69 • 14′ W) is situated in the Avannaata municipality in northwestern Greenland (Fig. 1a) populated by approximately 650 residents (Hastrup et al., 2018;Nuttall, 2020). The village was established in 1953 when population of Pituffik and Dundas was relocated. ...

Life around the North Water ecosystem: Natural and social drivers of change over a millennium

AMBIO A Journal of the Human Environment

... "Rural Market Community" [28].It is believed that the Sichuan community can be divided into metropolis, county, eld, and youngest store according to economy; according to politics, it can be divided into metropolis, county, township, township, bao, and jia, both of which are related to each other [29].The oasis economy is closed and single, so that the Bazaar has become the oasis community commodity trading, exchanges and exchanges of places, and gradually become the oasis important political and religious activities of the center [30],oasis decentralized [31],determines the Bazaar radiation range of the limited, but the passenger terminal breaks the "Bazaar ring" distance makes cross-Bazaar range of contacts possible [32],the spatial structure of the settlement will be transformed, yet to be explored. ...

Living in an oasis: Rapid transformations, resilience, and resistance in the North Water Area societies and ecosystems

AMBIO A Journal of the Human Environment

... Bearded seals are rarely recovered in the European zooarchaeological record [20], but often used by prehistoric and contemporary Inuit for materials and consumption (e.g. [21]). ...

Walrus history around the North Water: Human–animal relations in a long-term perspective

AMBIO A Journal of the Human Environment

... Renowned for its many dwelling remains from the Ruin Island Phase of the Thule or early Inuit culture (ca. AD 1250-1450), the Nuulliit site is situated at the eastern edge of the resource-rich polynya, Pikialarsorsuaq, or The North Water (Hastrup et al. 2018;Hastrup et al. [eds.] 2018) in northern . ...

Introducing the North Water: Histories of exploration, ice dynamics, living resources, and human settlement in the Thule Region

AMBIO A Journal of the Human Environment

... European historiography of polar expeditions in Avanersuaq offer a particular marginal position for Qaanaaq: the recently discovered, isolated place. In this version, the story goes that the Scot Captain John Ross was the first to report on the existence of humans in North-West Greenland in recent centuries, encountering what he called Arctic Highlanders on a quest to find the Northwest Passage in 1818 (Hastrup 2017). But until Polar explorer Robert Peary's repeated expeditions to Avanersuaq in the late nineteenth century, European connections with those living north, beyond the vast Melville Bay, were scarce and intermittent, with centuries of isolation where the Western world's knowledge of a people living in North-West Greenland diminished or was forgotten ( Fig. 11.1). ...

The Viability of a High Arctic Hunting Community: A Historical Perspective
  • Citing Chapter
  • August 2017

... The point to highlight with the above example is that communities, instead of seeking to understand environmental changes in a general way, locate these changes in their immediate context with the tools they have at hand (Tsing 2005;Helmreich 2009Helmreich , 2016Choy 2011;Hastrup 2013Hastrup , 2015Jónsdóttir 2013;Hastrup and Rubow 2014;Bond 2022;Mehta et al. 2022). In this way, "Reasoning about climate change and the possible futures is a continuous process of combining different kinds of knowledge and bringing it to bear on the present challenges" (Hastrup 2015, p. 145). ...

Comparing Climate Worlds: Theorising across Ethnographic Fields
  • Citing Chapter
  • August 2015