.png)
53 Views
Society for the Anthropology of North America
Volunteered - Oral Presentation Session
Les Field
University of New Mexico
The potential for expanded and more intensive agriculture in Southern Greenland can be addressed via prisms of food and landscape. Numerous sources describe Greenlanders’ historical food preferences and the existence of markets in Greenland’s growing urban areas where these foods are available and sold. What agriculturally produced foods would Greenlanders prefer or want to experiment with? Would agriculturally produced foods, rather than being destined for markets serving Greenland‘s own population, seek instead to serve the growing tourist sector? Would agriculturally produced foods be destined in part, perhaps in large part, for foreign workers laboring in Greenland under time-limited contracts? Possibilities for agriculture do not simply expand in the wake of climate change and attendant landscape changes such as retreat of ice in southern Greenland- -agriculture itself is a form, in fact a major form, of landscape transformation in and of itself. What do Greenlanders envisage as the result of the kinds of landscape agriculture produces, particularly in areas if the country, such as Southern Greenland in particular, which also happen to be areas where major resource extraction projects will apparently be occurring in the near future. How do agricultural landscapes fit into the imagining of Greenland as an independent country, a country that has differentiated itself from its colonial past?