Puzzling Pieces and Situated Urgencies of Climate Change and Globalisation in the High Arctic:Three Stories from Qaanaaq

• Main Authors: Andersen, Astrid Oberborbeck, Flora, Janne
• Other Authors: Stensrud, Astrid Bredholt, Hylland Eriksen, Thomas
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Pluto Press 2019
• Subjects: Arctic; Climate Change; Anthropology; Greenland; Globalisation; Global economy; Globalization; Hunting livelihoods; Climate change; Qaanaaq
• Online Access: https://vbn.aau.dk/da/publications/49cc4856-4551-4e3c-961d-212eb3993a91; https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339566/climate-capitalism-and-communities/

This chapter traces situations in which economic and material practices that can be connected to a globalised economy intersect with elements connected to climate change. We present three stories from the High Arctic, each showing moments where such intersections happen in different ways, generating specific concerns and lines of effects. The stories are situated in Qaanaaq, the northernmost town in Greenland, located at 77° N. Here, although human livelihoods and ecosystems are affected by globalised economies – capitalist modes of production and lines of consumption – people live with limited access to free flows of money and commodities. The chapter describes and situates particular concerns and effects related to climate change, and analyses how climate change effects tangle with and impinge upon the complexity of local livelihoods and national aspirations in Greenland. It questions how public and political discourses tend to engage with climatic and environmental change as one phenomenon that takes place globally, and poses a puzzle to be solved by a global community. Rather than seeing climate change as providing humanity with one broad puzzle to be solved, we propose these ethnographic stories as pieces of a puzzle, or puzzling pieces, each providing viewpoints and specifically situated challenges and concerns to learn from in order to deal with climatic changes and changes in livelihood opportunities, theoretically as well as practically and politically.