Abstract
In 2012, Visit Greenland, the Greenlandic national tourist organisation, conducted a survey on Danish prejudices towards Greenland and Greenlanders. The survey, linked to an ambivalent nation-building strategy that pitched Greenland as ‘the pioneering nation’, was aimed both at challenging and reconciling subnational relations within the Danish realm. Central to the Danish representational history of Greenland is a split between viewing Greenland/Greenlanders as lost subjects in a modernising project and holistic subjects in a tradition-bound society. The holistic image caters also to a wider tourist audience more concerned with preserving whales than with accepting the sustainable visions of indigenous modernity that are currently being articulated by Greenlanders. Contemporary Greenlandic nation branding is a response to these internal and external dichotomies.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Historian Thorhild Kjærgaard is a former Danish associate professor at Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland in Nuuk. Through a long series of articles, mostly in Danish national newspapers, he challenged the idea that Greenland was ever a colonial power, which sparked considerable debate. Kjærgaard’s campaign and the ensuing debate unfolded in two stages: first, from January to June 2014, and second from January to July 2015. Among the participants in the debate were the chief editors from two major national newspapers, Politiken and Weekendavisen, both of whom spent parts of their childhood in Greenland as children of Danish civil servants. In addition, several researchers on Greenland participated, challenging the argument that Greenland was never a colony (Rud 2014; Andersen 2015; Rud and Seiding 2015a, 2015b). Kjærgaard’s views in the media campaign have also been dealt with in academic research (Thisted 2015).
- 3.
The Pioneering People is a central element in this earlier campaign called ‘The Big Arctic Five’. The Big Arctic Five, inspired by the Big Five concept of the Safari destinations in Africa, brands Greenland as an adventure tourism destination promoting Powerful Nature. The Big Five include dog sledding, Northern Lights, ice and snow, whales and The Pioneering People as the five-core attractions of Greenland. The campaign’s core elements are a website and a toolkit, which are available in Danish, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Japanese.
- 4.
Unpublished survey commissioned by Visit Greenland from YouGov 2012.
- 5.
The survey was cited in a series of articles, referred to twice from the Danish Parliament’s Rostrum and used as background material for The Danish Institute for Human Rights Report on Equal treatment of Greenlanders in Denmark (Laage-Petersen 2013).
- 6.
The survey showed that 42 % of the respondents erroneously thought that a third of all hunters in Greenland use the kayak as their primary vessel for hunting on the sea. Total 46 % erroneously thought the majority of Greenlanders live in small settlements in secluded small communities, 56 % erroneously thought that Greenlanders have a larger average consumption of alcohol yearly than Danes. On the open-ended question ‘What do you immediately think of Greenlanders?’, 40 % of the answers associated to ‘alcohol, abuse and social problems’, 16 % thought of ‘Nature, snow, ice, hunters, hardy, primitive’, 13 % thought of ‘Happy people, lovely, sweet, nice and kind’ and 11 % thought of ‘Discriminated, ruined by colonialism, forsaken, misunderstood’ (YouGov 2012; author’s translation, Visit Greenland 2012).
- 7.
For a discussion on the variety of Danish spoken in Greenland today as a result of language contact, see Jacobsen (2003).
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Andersen, A. (2016). Greenland, My Greenland—Accessing Greenlandic History, Identity and Nation-building through its Nation-branding Strategy, a Tourist Website and 247 Comments. In: Abram, S., Lund, K. (eds) Green Ice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58736-7_4
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