| 英文摘要: | As the United State assumes chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2015, it is important to acknowledge the role the country and its citizens have played in shaping understandings of the Arctic. Although attention is often placed on US political and economic policy, individual Americans have also served to carry ideas to the North and to bring knowledge of these remote regions back to the United States and to a broader global audience. American artists, photographers and writers that ventured to the Arctic in the first half of the 20th Century captured some of the first widely seen images of Arctic landscapes and the Peoples that inhabit the region, creating lasting representations of an area of the world unknown to the majority of the public. These photographs, writing and other visual materials continue to shape how the Arctic is understood today and serve as lasting records of the changes the region and its Peoples have experienced over the past 100 years. One such individual is Rockwell Kent, an American artist and writer who resided in Greenland in the early 1930's and produced an extensive collection of photographs, art, and literature about his time in the country. Kent?s work and its contemporary influence illustrates the connected history of United States and Greenland and the continued relationship between the two counties.
This collaborative project combines anthropological, visual, and historical methodologies to approach how social, cultural and environmental changes and continuities are constructed and experienced in Greenland. The project centers around the work of Rockwell Kent with Kent's photos and art used as a starting point to engage contemporary community members in the study communities of Illorsuit, Sisimiut, Nuuk, and Uummannaq and discuss how social, cultural and environmental changes as well as continuities with the past are understood and defined. On a broader level, the project will address issues of representation of the Arctic and Northern populations. Historical photographs of the North have primarily been produced by foreign explorers, artists, and travelers that entered the region for specific purposes over limited periods of time. Yet, the visual products they left behind are often utilized with far less criticism than their writings as resources for constructing the history of the region and its Peoples. This project will examine the role of historical photographs in the production of the past and the present and their relationship to contemporary notions of social, cultural and environmental change in the Arctic. Kent's works as well as his relationship with Greenlanders will be examined through interviews with decedents, oral histories, written correspondence between Kent and Greenlanders and Danes and articles and letters-to-the-editor found in historic Greenlandic language newspapers. This work will provide a clearer view of Kent, one of the few Americans living and working in Greenland at the time, his relationship with the country and its peoples, and insight into how Greenlanders viewed Kent and his work in the 1930s. These findings will be discussed with community members and photographic workshops will be held in each community with students to encourage contemporary youth to produce their own representations of their communities. Student photos will be displayed and discussed alongside Kent's original works and contemporary documentary photographs by PI Defibaugh in community exhibitions. The visual works will be utilized as vehicles to discuss representations of Greenland, Inuit cultures, and constructions of continuity and change, including environmental, social, and cultural shifts from the 1930s to the present, a period of rapid transition not only in Greenland but across the Arctic. Overall, this project will contribute to a greater understanding of how visual media, produced in the past and in the present by both foreigners and community members, become intertwined in the constructions of contemporary Greenland and Greenlandic identities as well as contributing to our understanding of historical and contemporary relationship between the United States and Greenland.
In keeping with Arctic Social Sciences Program initiatives, this project will provide a comparative study, partnerships between researchers and develop educational and interactive collaborations with community residents. Educational exchange and collaboration, between community members, students and researchers, is the foundation for this research. Workshops, held in each study community, will teach students photographic techniques and allow them to produce their own images that will be displayed and discussed, contributing to a locally produced record of ethnic and regional identities in relation to environmental, cultural, and social change. Public exhibitions and discussions of these contemporary photos, Kent's historical works and the research process will also allow for further collaborations between researchers from various disciplines and community members through an interactive and multimedia forum, strengthening the community's role in the research process and allowing multiple perspectives to be expressed and explored. As a result, this project will provide significant academic contributions and visual documentation of contemporary Greenland as well as important public outreach and dissemination activities. The project will further the development of interactive community-based participatory research methodologies in the Arctic and will have a crucial student research training and capacity-building aspect in the form of collaboration with researchers and students from US institutions, Rochester Institute of Technology and Binghamton University (SUNY) in New York, and Ilisimatusarfik (University of Greenland) in Nuuk, Greenland. |