Rockwell Kent and Early 1930's Greenland: A Comparative View of Environmental, Social and Cultural Change in Contemporary Greenland

罗克韦尔·肯特和 1930 年代初的格陵兰：当代格陵兰环境、社会和文化变迁的比较观点

• 批准号: 1524176
• 负责人: Denis Defibaugh
• 金额: $ 64.52万
• 依托单位: Rochester Institute of Tech
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-12-15 至 2020-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1524176&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Rockwell; Kent; Early; 1930; Greenland

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.

美国将于2015年担任北极理事会主席国，因此有必要承认美国及其公民在塑造对北极的理解方面所发挥的作用。尽管人们的注意力往往集中在美国的政治和经济政策上，但美国人个人也起到了将思想带到北方的作用，并将这些偏远地区的知识带回美国和更广泛的全球受众。美国艺术家、摄影师和作家在世纪上半叶冒险前往北极，捕捉到了一些最早广为人知的北极景观和居住在该地区的人民的图像，创造了一个不为大多数公众所知的世界地区的持久代表。这些照片、文字和其他视觉材料继续塑造着今天人们对北极的理解，并成为该地区及其人民在过去100年中所经历的变化的持久记录。洛克威尔肯特就是这样一个人，他是一位美国艺术家和作家，20世纪30年代初居住在格陵兰岛，并收集了大量关于他在这个国家的照片、艺术和文学作品。肯特？的工作及其当代影响说明了美国和格陵兰岛的历史和两国之间的持续关系。这个合作项目结合了人类学，视觉和历史的方法来探讨社会，文化和环境的变化和连续性是如何在格陵兰岛构建和体验的。该项目以罗克韦尔肯特的作品为中心，以肯特的照片和艺术为起点，吸引当代社区成员参与Illorsuit、Sisimiut、Nuuk和Uummannaq的研究社区，并讨论如何理解和定义社会、文化和环境变化以及与过去的延续。在更广泛的层面上，该项目将解决北极和北方人口的代表性问题。北方的历史照片主要是由外国探险家，艺术家和旅行者在有限的时间内为特定目的进入该地区。然而，他们留下的视觉产品往往比他们的著作少得多的批评，作为构建该地区及其人民历史的资源。该项目将研究历史照片在制作过去和现在中的作用，以及它们与当代北极社会、文化和环境变化概念的关系。肯特的作品以及他与格陵兰人的关系将通过对死者的采访、口述历史、肯特与格陵兰人和丹麦人之间的书面通信以及在历史悠久的格陵兰语报纸上发现的文章和致编辑的信来审查。这项工作将提供一个更清晰的看法肯特，为数不多的美国人生活和工作在格陵兰岛的时间，他与国家和人民的关系，并洞察格陵兰人如何看待肯特和他的工作在20世纪30年代。将与社区成员讨论这些调查结果，并在每个社区与学生举办摄影讲习班，鼓励当代青年制作自己的社区照片。学生照片将在社区展览中展示和讨论肯特的原创作品和PI Deadlaugh的当代纪录片。视觉作品将被用作讨论格陵兰岛，因纽特人文化，连续性和变化，包括从20世纪30年代到现在的环境，社会和文化转变，不仅在格陵兰岛，而且在整个北极的快速过渡时期的表现形式的工具。总的来说，这个项目将有助于更好地了解外国人和社区成员在过去和现在制作的视觉媒体如何在当代格陵兰和格陵兰身份的构建中交织在一起，并有助于我们理解美国和格陵兰之间的历史和当代关系。 为了与北极社会科学计划倡议保持一致，该项目将提供比较研究，研究人员之间的伙伴关系，并与社区居民开展教育和互动合作。社区成员、学生和研究人员之间的教育交流和合作是这项研究的基础。在每个学习社区举办的讲习班将教授学生摄影技术，并允许他们制作自己的图像，这些图像将被展示和讨论，有助于在当地制作与环境，文化和社会变化有关的种族和区域身份记录。这些当代照片的公开展览和讨论，肯特的历史作品和研究过程也将允许来自不同学科的研究人员和社区成员之间的进一步合作，通过互动和多媒体论坛，加强社区在研究过程中的作用，并允许表达和探索多种观点。因此，这一项目将为当代格陵兰提供重要的学术贡献和视觉文献，并开展重要的公共外联和传播活动。该项目将进一步发展北极地区基于社区的互动式参与性研究方法，并将与来自美国各机构、纽约的罗切斯特理工学院和宾厄姆顿大学以及格陵兰努克的Ilisimatusarfik（格陵兰大学）的研究人员和学生开展合作，在学生研究培训和能力建设方面发挥重要作用。