Mining for Greenlandic self-government: Fractal islands in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article explores the emergence of Greenland as an Anthropocene island through anthropological fieldwork in and around the decommissioned Nalunaq goldmine in the south of the country. The article takes off from the idea that Anthropocene activities are characterized by the invention, movement, and marketing of seemingly mobile resource units that can be identified and invested in regardless of landscape specificities, and explores how the production of Greenlandic gold complicates this idea of extraction. In particular, the article discusses how Greenlandic post-colonial independence and ambitions for mining both go together and undermine each other, creating new dependencies and relationalities along the way. Through analyzing parts of Nalunaq’s political context, infrastructural challenges, the gold that came out, and eventual closure, the article presents Greenlandic gold mining as a set of partly congruous, partly contradictory practices and ideas. The article thus specifies an extractive project that both is and is not possible on the world’s biggest island, and brings this to bear on how we might understand the Anthropocene.