HASTRUP, Kirsten B., 2015 Thule på Tidens Rand, photos by Carsten Egevang, Copenhagen, Lindhardt og Ringhof, 496 pages

Written by one of the leading figures in Danish anthropology, Thule på Tidens Rand (‘Thule at the Edge of Time’) presents a comprehensive account of the Inughuit of Avanersuaq, a.k.a. the Thule people of northwest Greenland. The point of departure for the book is that Thule is not a place at the edge of the world; for those who live there, it is the centre of the world. Moreover, ever since their ancestors migrated across Smith Sound from what is now Canada, they have repeatedly been involved in movements and structures of a global reach. Against this backdrop, the thesis is that Thule now finds itself at the edge of time: Inughuit have always been adaptive and have always welcomed useful technology, but climate change is eroding the material conditions of life as known for generations: a hunting-oriented life in a landscape shaped in and by ice. In Hastrup’s conclusion, “time is not linear […] It consists of specific densities […] and empty stretches. […]. Right now, it’s quiet; not much happens, but it is building up to dramatic changes” (p. 458, all quotes my translation). The book is kaleidoscopically organized into eight chapters on “The Place,” “The People,” “The Ice,” “The Hunting,” “The Technology,” “The Colony,” “The Invasion,” and, finally, “Time.” Hastrup bases this choice of “thematic pillars”—rather than a “chronological narrative”—on the observation that “The history of the Thule population is not a simple narrative of progress” (p. 462). Each of the chapters approaches its theme from different angles rather than presenting a linear argument. However, all of the chapters are about change: about a diversity of changes or perhaps rather about the diversity of changeability. The radical character of some changes is downplayed. Hence, contact with European modernity was more gradual than explorers (e.g., Ross, Peary, and Rasmussen) have told us. Other changes are rendered more monumental than they are in earlier interpretations. Thus, the post-World War II establishment of the huge American air base at Thule not only led to the forced relocation in 1953 of Inughuit who had settled by the Danish trade station, but also made a central part of their landscape off-limits and severely restricted their ability to travel in the ways necessary to diversify hunting. Most instructive for this reader was Hastrup’s explanation of the variety of ways in which climate change makes navigation difficult in a landscape that has always been characterized by changes (recurrent, recognizable) in weather and seasons, and in migration and behaviour of prey. To a non-anthropologist, the main ambiguity of this book concerns the definition of its object of study. The book opens with a declaration that “Thule is the name of [1] a place in the world, but as we shall see, it is also the name of [2] a set of conceptions with a long history—and not the least [3 the name of] a community” (p. 12). Each of the chapters prioritizes one of these foci, sometimes to such a degree that the other two disappear from sight. By the end of the book, however, it becomes clear that the argument is that the three phenomena have indeed—over the course of time—become entangled to form a community subjectively self-identifying as distinct due to its relationship to a specific place in a way influenced in part by the way others have conceptualized it. This package deal is too neat—and Hastrup knows that well enough to insert the qualifiers necessary in her analyses. Nevertheless, her perspective produces distortions and blind spots—as would any alternative perspective. The most important alternative perspectives one could have chosen concern the money …