Envisioning Greenland: Contested naturecultures in the making

Currently, the traditional ‘cool’ representation of Greenland as a frozen landscape devoid of people and human structures is being challenged by an emerging vision of Greenland as ‘hot’. This article presents and describes these two versions of Greenland, showing how demarcations of what is ‘nature’ and what is ‘culture’ play active roles in representing and performing Greenland in very different ways. The visions of a ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ Greenland may be seen as contesting and contested naturecultures (Latour 1993) that enact Greenland through shifting configurations, making some elements visible while others disappear. By attributing performative capacity to entities which we usually confine to the roles of props or backdrops to human agency, many new and alternative actors emerge on scene in creating possible Greenland(s). Question is how the current uncovering, distributing and reshuffling of resources, whether of a human or non-human kind, may contribute to visions which are able to sustainably integrate and bring forward Greenlandic - and global - naturecultures.