Wandering Spirits: Loneliness and Longing in Greenland

Wandering Spirits

Wandering Spirits

Loneliness and Longing in Greenland

JANNE FLORA

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61042-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61056-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61073-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226610733.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Flora, Janne, author.

Title: Wandering spirits : loneliness and longing in Greenland / Janne Flora.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018031841 | ISBN 9780226610429 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226610566 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226610733 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Inuit—Greenland—Social conditions. | Loneliness—Greenland. | Loneliness—Social aspects—Greenland. | Social isolation—Greenland. | Suicide—Greenland. | Interpersonal relations—Greenland. | Kinship—Greenland—Psychological aspects. | Inuit—Kinship—Greenland—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC E99 .E7 f565 2019 | DDC 998 /.20049712—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031841

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

1  The Return

2  Loneliness

3  Persons Apart

4  Nobody Wants to Be a Qivittoq

5  Be-Longing

6  Who(se) Are You?

7  Asking Why

8  You Are Given Your Name So You Won’t Be Lonely

Appendix 1: Kinship Terminology

Appendix 2: Glossary of Other Greenlandic Language Terms

Notes

References

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

There is a long tradition in the Arctic literature of portraying the circumpolar region as remote and isolated from the rest of the world. This is part of a common romantic depiction of the Arctic as a region of majestic, pristine icescapes, harsh climates, and some of the most admired (and controversial) wildlife in the world: polar bears, walruses, seals, whales. Interspersed with all this, we like to imagine, live peaceful fur-clad communities in isolation from one another and yet each in perfect harmony with the others and the world around them. Although all this imagery may ring true in some isolated contexts, it is also the case that this depiction probably serves the people who write about the Arctic more than it does reality. Nearly a fifth of the way through the twenty-first century, it is plain to see that the Arctic is not a region that is isolated from the rest of the world, neither in terms of climate and ecology nor in terms of humans and culture. For centuries the Arctic has been part of global politics and key to the making and perception of European and North American nation-states. Of the many explorers and seafarers who have traveled to the Arctic, some made it their final destination. Others returned to the South, where they showed maps of the land and the sea routes they had conquered and told heroic tales of their battle against the most unforgiving nature in the world. The people who live in the Arctic have also migrated long and short distances to, from, and within the entire region for millennia, bringing their own cultural, material, and genetic histories with them. In this way they have made the Arctic their home. The climate in the Arctic tells a story too of human activity across the world: ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet that reveal a sudden rise in carbon emissions from the industrialized world around the time of the European industrial revolution and even contain a record of the historical volcanic eruption at Pompeii. Similarly, the levels of mercury pollution (also from the industrialized world) in marine mammals throughout the region have biologists and medical scientists concerned and questioning the extent to which local food resources are safe for human consumption. We should also note that the Arctic is a region rich in contrast; in terms of climate, wildlife, and human history there are vast differences throughout the Arctic and even within just a couple of hundred kilometers. Colonialism has made its own imprint on recent history as well, so that differences (and similarities) that may exist in terms of languages and ethnicities are complicated further by colonial histories.

As an anthropologist, I have been conditioned to see the Arctic as a place that is characterized by human activity rather than as one whole untouched and pristine realm. Even though the romantic gaze of the Southerner is indeed a powerful one, and also is sometimes preferable to less flattering depictions of the Arctic (of which there are several), it is also a dangerous one that freeze-frames the region and the people who live there.

After having lived for a time in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, as a teenager in the early 1990s, I returned to Greenland in 2003—this time to the Qeqertarsuup Tunua (Disko Bay) area. This is a region of Greenland with a long human history and some of the oldest known archaeological remains in the country, dating back to 2400 BC. The bay is host to numerous glaciers whose convergence with seawater has created unique ecosystems that have attracted animal and human life for millennia. The largest town in the region, Ilulissat, takes its name from the colossal icebergs that float through the bay. The entire bay, which stretches longer than some two hundred kilometers from its southern to its northernmost point, is home to ten permanently inhabited towns and villages. Prior to the 1950s and 1960s, which in historical terms were characterized by colonial modernization and centralization policies, the number of human settlements was much higher. The people who live here, Kalaallit (Greenlanders) are perhaps better known by the name Inuit (or, in colonial times, Eskimo). They are descendants of the Thule-Culture Inuit who arrived in Greenland around AD 1000 from what today is known as Nunavut in Arctic Canada. They were seminomadic hunters who quickly settled the coastal areas throughout Greenland, including the Disko Bay. Around the same time, the Norse arrived from Iceland and settled in the southern parts of west Greenland and lived there until they met their fateful conclusion during the Little Ice Age.

People in Qeqertarsuup Tunua today live by the mixed economies of subsistence hunting, halibut fisheries, wage labor, tourism, and professional employment in the private and public sectors. I first arrived in the region to a small village that I have given the pseudonym Illorsuit, intending to carry out ethnographic fieldwork studying the problem of suicide. Along with its Arctic neighbors in Nunavut and Nunavik, Greenland has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. My concern was not to explore the whys and wherefores of this problem, which is clearly not only a statistical problem but also one that affects real people and real lives. Rather, I wanted to try to understand what kind of death suicide is in a world where people seem to have firm beliefs in reincarnation and where the demarcation between life and death therefore might not be as neatly drawn as we would expect. My approach was to not discount anything I found as trivial or unimportant. I wanted to explore the problem of suicide (not the act of suicide itself) by looking at everything else around it. While there, I had an internet messenger chat with one of my colleagues (telephones and dial-up internet connectivity had been installed in most west Greenlandic households at that point). Relaying to her where I had been that day—on the sea ice with a family setting nets under the ice to catch seals—she replied by typing in a series of question marks on my messenger screen. The question marks were quickly followed by the question. Do you study hunting now? she teased. The misunderstanding was a contextual one. From her disciplinary perspective, we should narrow our focus of study; from mine, we should broaden it. My argument was, as it is now, that even though hunting and suicide might not necessarily be related in any way, hunting is nevertheless part of the world in which the suicide occurs—just as suicide is part of the world in which hunting occurs. My research evolved into a focus on kinship and loneliness. Both were themes that seemed to come up all the time, and I took both to be extraordinarily important concepts in Greenland and beyond. Of those two, however, only one (kinship) has really grabbed the attention and imagination of anthropologists. Bar a few exceptions, the other (loneliness) has traditionally belonged to the philosophical realm. Part of my mission here is to avoid thinking of these concepts as polar opposites. I prefer to see them as part of the same process; not as two sides of the same coin but components of the same frame. Suicide has a place in this.

The name of the village as well as those of the people who appear in these pages have all been disguised. My decision to do so was not a straightforward one. Some of my colleagues would argue that anonymization is pointless because the people whom the book is about will recognize themselves and one another anyway. Others would argue, especially for the Arctic, where the sting of colonization lingers, that the decision to make people nameless and faceless is offensive and yet another act of colonialism. By the same token, the opposite could also be argued: that putting people on display by revealing their identities is equally an act of colonialism that conjures up images from the decades where Inuit were kidnapped, held captive, and paraded in European and American zoos and so-called freak shows for entertainment. Recognizing that there cannot be just one universal approach to whether or how anthropologists should anonymize the communities they work in, I agree with all these points. We must make a decision informed by the context and time in which we write, carefully taking into consideration what we hope to achieve or avoid by doing one or the other. Today, anonymity has become a matter of privacy more so than it ever was before. Social media have become commonplace. Individuals and their communities have become identifiable by a few tabs and clicks whether they want to be or not. Since the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Greenland has been one of the hot spots for climate change science and tourism, which has produced photographic coffee-table books and television documentaries offering snapshots of the change, the end, the last hunters, and the outermost vanishing world. This exposure comes at a cost, however, and many people whom I know regularly express apprehension at being put on display, being portrayed out of context, and, worse still, realizing that neither we nor they have any control over how their identities circulate in forums other than the one for which they were originally intended.

For me, anonymization comes down to the subject matter of this book and the fact that the predominant Danish discourses about Greenland and Greenlanders since the mid-twentieth century have focused on social problems. These are discourses that most, if not all, the Greenlanders whom I know feel only applies to them in terms of the prejudices they encounter because they happen to be Greenlandic. In other parts of the world, people would call this racism. Although I want to avoid telling this same old story, I cannot escape the fact that the subject matter of this book is of a sensitive nature. My concern is to remain true to the subject matter, because I think it is an important one, while also remaining true to the people in Greenland, whom I consider my friends and family. Another reason I have decided to anonymize the names of people and places is the unfortunate tendency there has been in anthropological writings to isolate the people we write about from the rest of the world—even the rest of the country. Though geographical and socioeconomic distances are great in Greenland, and each place has something that makes it special and distinct from all other places in Greenland, we should be cautious not to depict these places as remote or the people who live in them as isolated tribes with a The prefix. People in Greenland travel all the time. Many settle in new places and make these places their home. Some may return, others may not. My decision not to call the village by its real name is thus an attempt to free up and make the ethnography, which is clearly located in space and time, reach beyond the finite boundaries of one locality and the people who happen to live in it, since neither are actually finite at all.

From its conception to its current form, this book has been several years under way. The journey both I and the book have been on would not be possible without the help and support of many people. First, I want to express my gratitude to a host of people in Greenland, especially Sofie Schultz Christiansen, Ingrid and Jakob Lindenhann, Susanne and Julius Sandgreen, Thora and Sakarias, Regine and the late Mikkili Tobiassen and their respective families for looking after me, housing me, feeding me, encouraging me, and making so many impossible requests possible. I am grateful to them and to the people in the village I refer to as Illorsuit for their patience, unconditional hospitality, their affinity, and everything they have taught me. Ilaqutarakka kamalaatikkalu asavassi, qujanarujuk! Words of encouragement, generosity, inspiration, literature suggestions, helpful discussions, astute comments and critiques of early drafts are countless, and I am thankful for them all. At Cambridge, in Denmark, and beyond I want to thank my colleagues, friends, advisors and examiners: Piers Vitebsky, Barbara Bodenhorn, Hugh Brody, Michael Bravo, Kirsten Hastrup, Signe Gundersen, Catherine Baxter Buckwell, Lydia Wilson, Signe Nipper Nielsen, Iris Monterro, Natalie Kaoukji, Farès Moussa, Katie Earnshaw, Julie Coimbra, Olga Ulturgasheva, Luis Guilherme Resende de Assis, Elana Wilson, Elena K. Rockhill, Larry K. Rockhill, Peter Evans, Hugo Reinert, Martina Tyrrell, Jackie Price, Astrid O. Andersen, Marcelle Chabot, Remy Rouillard, Ruth Horry, Tania Kossberg, Eleanor Peers, Fiona Scorgie, Laur Vallikivi, Rane Willerslev, Sophie Elixhauser, Giovanni Da Col, Vera Skvirskaya, Isabella Warren, Matthew Carey, Niamh O’Mahony, two anonymous readers, the Magic Circle Seminar at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, and the late Jamie Starr, whose notes and words inspire so much.

Neither this book nor the decade of research and fieldwork it is based on would be possible without the generous financial support from the Danish Research Agency / Forskningsuddannelsesrådet; the Carlsberg Foundation; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; and the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. Sections of the chapter Asking Why were previously published in ‘I Don’t Know Why He Did It. It Happened by Itself’: Causality and Suicide in Northwest Greenland, in The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach, edited by C. High, A. Kelly, and J. Mair (New York: Palgrave, 2011). I am grateful to Palgrave for allowing me to reproduce those parts here.

Finally, I want to thank my family in Denmark, in Greenland, and in Satu Nou . . . for everything. I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Ester Flora.

1

The Return

I signaled to her that I had finished my coffee and that I intended to leave by stacking my cup and saucer on the side plate. Still she didn’t move. Sitting across from me at their dining room table, she—her name was Sikkersoq—pushed the plate of buttered raisin buns toward me. Her eyes offered me one of them to eat. We were alone. Conversation was slow and inhibited by the fact that we were strangers and that we spoke different languages. She spoke Greenlandic and I spoke Danish. Granted, I had planned that learning Greenlandic would be part of my fieldwork, and since her position as a nurse in the village necessitated that she speak to Danish doctors at the municipality hospital some one hundred kilometers away—something she found quite difficult—one of her intentions for our meeting was for me to help her learn Danish. At some point during the afternoon we would agree that I teach her Danish and that she in return would teach me Greenlandic. We were a generation apart. I was in my late twenties, whereas she was fifty years old, born in the same year as my father, married, and a mother to five children. In the 1980s her firstborn had died of pneumonia at only six months old, and an enlarged golden-framed photograph of the baby had pride of place on the wall above the sofa.

Sikkersoq had telephoned me earlier in the day to invite me to this kaffemik (celebration with coffee and cake) for her daughter’s birthday. Her daughter and I had not met before. Nor did I know her oldest child, a son, nor any of her three daughters. I had met her husband several times, however. His name was Aqqalu. He was always smiling, and I usually saw him helping a frail old man named Inuk around the village. Aqqalu had spotted me earlier that day as I struggled with a heavy gas cylinder I had bought in the shop. He had offered to help carry it up the steep flight of stairs along the cliff wall and to install it to my cooker. My television set filled the silence that otherwise penetrated my old house. It transmitted the memorial service of the assassinated Swedish politician Anna Lindh in September 2003. There were hymns, tributes, mourners, politicians, world leaders, public displays of horror, sadness, and disbelief. Aqqalu looked at the television screen. He sighed while moving his hands toward his chest and made a gesture that I took to mean something like a heavy heart. Her death saddened him. Lindh’s parents’ grief and her family’s grief saddened him. This much I understood. Later that afternoon, as I looked at the framed photograph of Aqqalu’s own firstborn child that hung above the sofa in his living room, I was to learn that his feelings of sadness and compassion for Lindh’s parents came from somewhere very real. He too had lost a daughter.

I hadn’t really understood why his wife had invited me, a perfect stranger, to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. Nevertheless, I found the house. As described on the telephone, it was a dark green house adjacent to the shore, with the Greenland flag raised on a short pole tied to the gable. I noticed that flags had been raised by other houses too; some Danish, others Greenlandic. Steering clear of the white sled dog¹ and her inquisitive puppies examining the hem of my flared jeans, I tried to open the makeshift gate—a bespoke plywood board—that kept the sled dogs out of the porch area. I stepped over it and unknowingly broke all social conventions by knocking on the front door. I knocked again and yet again, until Sikkersoq finally opened it, smiling while drying her wet hands on a towel. She brought me in through the kitchen, where meatballs were sizzling—presumably a birthday dinner for the family—and into the living room, where the coffee table and dining table were both laden with cakes. My heart sank; I was the only guest. Having lived in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, as a teenager, I had been to kaffemik before and therefore anticipated a house full of guests. When Sikkersoq invited me, I immediately realized that this would be my first opportunity to introduce myself to other people in the village in a relaxed setting and, I hoped, lay the foundations for making acquaintances and friendships.

We sat there drinking coffee. The meatballs in the frying pan in the kitchen were no longer sizzling; she had turned off the stove. I gazed out through the window to my left and out across the water. An open boat lay moored to some rocks. A heavy fog rolled across the water from the shore on the other side, making the water appear heavy, dark, thick, and shiny, almost like oil. We didn’t know what to say to each other. At that point it seemed unlikely that these would be the moments—these quiet, awkward silences—that would cement what was to become a close kin relationship. In time, she would want me to call her mother. Instead, I would call her aunt (aja), because another woman called Karla had beaten her to that kinship position. It was only much later that I realized that I could have had several mothers without offending anyone. It would have been just as natural and logical as it was for Sikkersoq to have several daughters. I didn’t imagine then that one day we would sit on the sofa just behind us, underneath the framed photograph of her oldest deceased daughter. Nor did I imagine that, one day, we would hold hands and gossip, just as she would with her own daughters and nieces, one of whom was the namesake of her deceased daughter.

Outside the window the white sled dog howled. It must have heard Aqqalu rustling by the side of the house since, at that moment, he appeared holding a heavy sack of halibut heads over his shoulder. It was feeding time. The food consisted of offcuts from the fish factory, which hunters could purchase cheaply when the hunting wasn’t good, or if they hadn’t had the opportunity to go out. At this time of year, when the dogs weren’t working, they didn’t eat as much as during winter. Besides, as far as I had understood in Aqqalu’s case, it was the outboard motor that was the problem. It needed a spare part, and those were not easy to acquire. He threw a few offcuts to the dogs and stored the rest in the shed for later. These would be kept—Sikkersoq told me—for the rest of their dogs, which they kept on a small island during summer, where they could roam free. She wanted to know if I could help her with her Danish, and, in return, she would teach me Greenlandic. She also wanted to know if I would join the church choir. Singing, she assured me, was a good way to learn Greenlandic.

I reassured her that I would go, but at this point I was much more interested in knowing where her daughter was. Where was the birthday girl? And where were all Sikkersoq’s other children? I had estimated that there were three, maybe four children in total, from the framed photographs on the living room walls. None of them was present. Naja, whose sixteenth birthday it was that day, as well as her younger sister, both lived in dormitories in the city some one hundred kilometers away and three or four hours by boat, depending on ice and weather conditions. Like all the other teenagers from the village, they went to school in the city because the local school could only take them until they reached the age of fourteen, at approximately seventh or eighth grade.² Petrine, the oldest sister, who was eighteen, was visiting her boyfriend in another town farther north, and their son was away working on a fishing trawler. It was a birthday celebration for a daughter who wasn’t there. In fact, none of her children was there. It was hosted by a mother who was, for that day and for the time being, at least, partially without children.

As I made my way back up the hill a couple of hours later, I puzzled over the fact that I had been invited to a birthday party for someone’s daughter who wasn’t even there. What eventually made me leave was the fact that so many people had suddenly arrived and I was occupying a seat that rightfully belonged to one of the guests who were now all standing between the kitchen and the living room waiting for a seat to become available. I had been there the longest; it was time to go. Sikkersoq, my host, was now busy in the kitchen and she no longer had time to entertain an awkward visitor who demanded more of her attention than anyone else. She was making more coffee and had started up the frying pan again so that the smell of cooking was beginning to pervade the atmosphere. Two little boys, maybe four or five years old, were under the coffee table playing with plastic toys imported from the South. These were the sons of one of Aqqalu and Sikkersoq’s nieces—a woman I had also greeted quietly once or twice when our paths had crossed. She was now shaking hands with everyone, including Aqqalu, Sikkersoq, an elderly couple, her own younger sister who carried the name of the infant in the photograph above the sofa, and even with her own parents. She congratulated them all: Pilluaritsi! which prompted each of them to respond in turn, Qujan, illillu (Thanks, you too). Apparently, Sikkersoq was not the only one who took the birthday seriously; her extended family did too. They all celebrated Naja’s birthday as if she were there herself. Or perhaps it was because she wasn’t there?

Returning through Loneliness

This book is about how the inhabitants of a small Greenlandic village—which I have given the pseudonym Illorsuit³—live and reinvoke human relatedness. They do so by bringing into play notions and experiences of loneliness and longing. Loneliness is not, this book contends, merely an obstruction to kinship or human relatedness. Nor is it located outside the human experience of sociality, which is where anthropology generally tends to locate it, place it, or leave it be. Loneliness is equally a state of being, a social process, and a human potential, and it is a key part of what makes human relations in Illorsuit relevant and affective. Human relations, like humans themselves always possess the potential to fail, disappoint, or cease to exist. If relations do fail, we may regard loneliness as an outcome of relatedness. Although not produced by relatedness, loneliness certainly results if relatedness fails. Yet loneliness and associated concepts, such as longing and homesickness, may equally be a prerequisite for relatedness to occur. This will be especially evident if we dwell a little longer