Colonialism, racism and exceptionalism.

• Main Author: Petterson, Christina
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2012
• Subjects: colonialism; racism; Greenland; exceptionalism; Grønland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1059380

In his article from 2003, ‘Dansk raceantropologi i Grønland’ (which translates as Danish race-anthropology in Greenland), Danish historian Poul Duedahl argued that Danish anthropology, because of its inherently apolitical and disparate nature, could not and did not legitimate Danish colonialism in Greenland. Such an argument is but one example of a larger discourse on Danish colonial exceptionalism, and not only operates with a very limited notion of colonial violence, but also a very limited view on colonial violence. I will argue that Duedahl’s category of ‘Danish anthropology’ could not avoid legitimating Danish colonialism, because the social structures as well as the scientific discourse, in which anthropology had to operate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were already implicated in and conditioned by colonial power structures. My reading involves several steps. First I address the perception of exceptionalism in Danish relations to Greenland more broadly and complicate this narrative by a deeper understanding of violence. I then discuss racism and its relation to whiteness. Finally I offer a number of background analyses that show the Danish racial state in Greenland, and how it was established long before Duedahl’s anthropologists measured skulls.