Cultural Encounters at Cape Farewell: The East Greenlandic Immigrants and the German Moravian Mission in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This nicely illustrated and informative publication is a cultural history of the southernmost part of Greenland with a particular emphasis on the East Greenlandic immigrants settling at or in the vicinity of the Moravian mission stations in that area in the nineteenth century. The book has been translated into English and original quotes are made available in the endnotes for those proficient in Danish, German, or Greenlandic. Furthermore, it contains a useful appendix of the censuses of Greenland as well as an extensive index.After the brief introduction, the volume falls into three distinct parts organized according to methodological approaches: a macro-historical part is followed by a section dedicated to an analysis of societal organisation in East Greenland. The last two chapters take a micro-historical look at South Greenlandic culture. The three authors come from different academic disciplines. This allows a range of approaches from archaeology to anthropology and history. Yet, the methodological and disciplinary differences sometimes amount to contradicting statements and findings. I will return to this point later.The brief but informative introduction provides the framework for the volume and sets the stage by giving descriptions of climatic and topographic conditions and particularities of southern Greenland, which is quite useful given their impact on the cultural history of the region. Furthermore, the variety of source materials and approaches employed by the authors is introduced as an explanation of the chosen orthography. In the first macro-historical part, the authors introduce what they call the “prehistory” of southern Greenland based on detailed archaeological research focused on trade and transfer of knowledge. The following chapter deals with southern Greenland in the eighteenth century, again with a focus on trade and exchange as well as relations between east and west Greenland. The focus in this chapter are the mission stations in the Cape Farewell area established by Danish and Norwegian missions, which were often connected to the Danish trading stations. The Moravian mission, particularly the main station Friedrichsthal (1834), plays a leading role in the last of the macro-historical chapters exploring cultural encounters in the region in the nineteenth century.In the “struggle for the East Greenlandic immigrants,” as the next chapter is headlined, the rivalry between the Danish/Norwegian and the Moravian missions is highlighted as along with the ambiguous relation between the mission and the Danish authorities and trade stations. The two subsequent chapters on societal organization, demography, and demographic changes provide an intermezzo before the focus shifts to the material and mental traces of the past in southern Greenland. The authors are all museum curators, which becomes clear in the final and rather detailed and technical chapter of the book that discusses the ethnographic museum in Herrnhut, the Völkerkundemuseum.The publication provides insights into interesting aspects of an understudied part of Greenlandic history, but two points needs further discussion. First, the meaning, content, and analytical function of the main concept of the publication, cultural encounters, remain underdeveloped throughout the volume, leaving the reader puzzled by motivations behind the methodological choices. Second, and to me slightly more troubling, is the distinction that the authors made between “history” and “prehistory” in the Cape Farewell region. This distinction gives an impression that history arrived with the Europeans by the end of the eighteenth century (15). While I recognize that new types of sources became available with the introduction of writing culture and that different scholarly disciplines have different vocabularies (the distinction is most prevalent in the archaeologically informed sections of the book), it is necessary to reflect on the wider implications of the use of this distinction. It implies that peoples without writing cultures were without history, i.e., static and incapable of change. This last point, however, is mostly terminological in nature since the authors go a long way to show exactly the opposite, that the southern and eastern Greenlanders were in fact flexible and sensitive to changes in their surroundings, making the distinction between history and prehistory even more unfortunate as it seems to work against the overall goal of the publication.Despite these minor theoretical problems, the book is informative and edited with superb pictures accompanied by extensive captions. The volume is especially useful for those who are not familiar with Greenlandic history and culture and those who have a particular interest in the fascinating field of Moravian mission studies.