By Marine Duc

My name is Marine Duc, I’m a Ph.D. student in geography from France. My research project is about the trajectories and experiences of Greenlandic students staying in Denmark (Copenhagen region and to a lesser extent Aarhus). I’m actually in the writing process, but before that, I spend about 8 months meeting people, listening to personal stories from the students, and meeting diverse educational stakeholders to produce this work. Ph.D. is a long way to go, but writing articles (and have them reviewed by other scholars) help you to build your analysis. In that process, I’ve published my first peer-reviewed in an A-rank journal about the stigmatization of Greenlandic students in Denmark. I’ve seen a translation of this article in my timeline. Or, should I say, a partial translation of my paper by Mikael Hertig. You can find it here. Of course, as a scholar, you have to accept that you can’t always foresee and control all the circulation and the effects of your work, both among people who generously accepted to share their stories with you and more generally in society. This paper has been abstracted/translated and it was circulating in the flows of Facebook these last months. Discovering it was destabilizing for me and I mainly disagree with the statements it is attributing to my work, and to myself. I would like to precise that I’m not the initiator of this translation. I never asked for it. The reason is that many challenges are at stake in translating an academic paper. Which is why I am responding to the translation, as I would like my work to be properly understood.





Translation is not innocent

Let’s just go back first to what is at stake in the translation. First, here, Mikael Hertig doesn’t speak French. Second, because the topic is here political. My own responsibility as a researcher is involved in my conclusions and analysis. There is a reason why all academic translations are always double-checked by author and translator. Sometimes, we debate about using this or this word or concept for hours to see what’s the most relevant and close to what the author means. Third and last, there is always an intent with a translation. As we write with a certain point of view, we translate with a certain gaze. Even though the translation can come with a good intention, Mikael Hertig’s reading of my paper is in that way very selective. It is contributing to share a victimized view of Greenlandic Students, powerless against the structures of racialization. His reading is also a huge simplification of my analysis. Here an example from his article:

“The 540 Greenlandic students in Denmark are, seen with Greenlandic eyes, elitist exceptions. In Denmark, they are stigmatized at universities. Prejudices lie beneath the surface; they move unconsciously up through the social strata. The Greenlandic students are hardly deliberately expelled, but end up in isolation. That is the message of Marine Duc's article, which is part of the author's French PhD thesis. The focus is on the socialization of Greenlandic students in Denmark”

  • I never said that students were stigmatized at universities. It’s more complicated. Stigmatization happens everywhere and racism is not limited to universities – as sexism or other structures of oppression.

  • No, the students don’t end up in isolation. It is time to stop seeing minorities as isolated and helpless. In fact, it’s almost the contrary. They tend to be alone at the beginning of their stay in Denmark, and then, it changes. But it depends also of their personal networks. More, they are resourceful people and develop all kinds of strategies to negotiate stigmatization (as I explain in the paper).

  • The use of « elitist » is also ending in oversimplification of the reality of the student migration to Denmark.

  • The focus of my paper is not on the « socialization » of Greenlandic Students in Denmark. « Socialization » is a precise concept in sociology, which can be define simply as the way society is shaping and transforming individuals (Darmon, 2010)[1].

So, no, this is not at all the message of my article. Furthermore, the abstract attributes me some thoughts that are not mine, for example about the term “indigenous”. As I explained it on my paper, this idea is coming from the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, not for myself. Mikael Hertig has also decided not to include the last part of my paper in his abstract, where I explained the different ways in which students are dealing with stigmatization. The choice not to include how they deal with stigmatization invisibilizes people’s reactivity to stigma, and let them appears as really passive, and there is many other points that could be commented in this way of abstracting my paper. In my point of view, this abstracting/translating choice is symptomatic of a white male gaze. The abstracting choices are invisibilizing the indigenous scholars quoted in my paper (Linda Tuhiwai Smith, among others). More, if you’re never been stigmatized for any reason, you can’t really understand the importance of highlighting resistances, from meaningful silences to bachelor thesis about qallunaat gaze in art (I don’t mean understand as a logic process, I mean understand something in your body, flesh and memory). And thus, minorities are again seen as victims – that are eventually in a need of help, which basically is one among many justifications of colonization. Being marginalized (as a women, a LGBT, a working-class person, a Black person, an Inuk) gives you some advantages to understand better a situation of oppression, because you know it also by experience. This “advantage” of not being dominant in the society has been called by the feminist scholarship the « epistemic privilege ». It doesn’t mean that we can only analyze or research what we are in the tools we have on behalf of our social location: Sarah Harding[2] pointed that defending this position can lead to essentialization of social locations. Some indigenous scholars, such as the Hawaiian geographer Renee Pualani Louis[3] are also positioning themselves in the same way. Consequently, we are come to recognize that it is particularly important to reflect on who you are and how you are doing research and sharing your analysis - writing academic papers included.

Considering these explanations, one may ask why I didn’t directly publish this paper in English. It may avoid the issues I’m pointing here. Two remarks on that point. First, as a Ph.D. student, you are up to some obligations. In France, it is mandatory to publish at least one paper in French in an A-rank journal to be able to defend your Ph.D. (and to be qualified to apply for permanent positions at university). Because this article is my first A-rank paper, I choose to do it in French precisely for this reason, as security. Second, and that’s a more personal reason, French is my native language. The main language of my BA, MA, and Ph.D. has been French. Thus, I’m much more comfortable and accurate in this language. I recognize that it’s not a perfect solution to let people access the products of research. Therefore, to ensure that readers have a more precise understanding of my work, I have decided to make my own abstract of the paper, which I hope will correct some misconceptions there may be about my work.





An understanding among others, slices of lifes among other

I deeply believe that this paper is certainly not «the» truth, but one possible understanding of the situation. This understanding is influenced by my personal history, how and where I grew up, and of course, it is connected to my training as a social geographer educated in a prestigious institution (École Normale Supérieure) in France. Consequently, it is possible that I haven’t seen certain things linked to how racialization is working: as I’ve been benefited from the position of being white (and be educated as such), and being educated from a prestigious institution, I’ve been accustomed to live with these privileges without always recognizing it as such: in school and uni, my culture was the norm, and we spoke my native language (even though I hadn’t all the codes because I’m from the countryside, but that’s another story); I never experienced to be looked strangely because of the shape of my eyes or the color of my skin. The fact that I can choose this topic for my Ph.D. (in a foreign country) is also a sign of this privilege: as a former student of the École Normale Supérieure, I was paid for studying (it is an amazing privilege in France where we don’t have SU). It allows me to save money to travel to Greenland and Denmark. My cultural references, my music, books, or movie tastes are also influenced by my education. And it would be naive to consider they had no impact on my research: I’ve become closer to people who have similar tastes, it was easier for me to know them and understand their stories.

So, what about the «objectivity» of this study, if one can provide a more or less «accurate» or «precise» understanding of the phenomenon? It is now often admitted that every research in social sciences is not «objective». Research is the product of personal decisions, and the person you are is also playing a role in the stories you’re able to listen to and meet when you’re doing your research. Feminists scholars are recognizing the role of subjectivity as I mentioned before. Sarah Harding, one of the many scholars of importance in this field, proposed to reconceptualize what objectivity means. She developed the idea of «strong objectivity», based on the recognition of the material lifestyle of researchers, their way of constructing knowledge, and their possible political involvements. Science is in no way free of preconceptions. Considering the importance of seeing who is speaking and from where, I also mentioned some personal elements here, as they are keys of understanding to position the analysis. In the same movement, I would suggest to the readers of this letter to see from where Mikael Hertig is translated.

This leads me to some concluding remarks, before going to my own abstract of this paper. Please don’t consider the lives of Greenlandic students in Denmark as limited to oppression and stigmatization. This paper is just one paper, and we can’t say everything in twenty pages. Stigmatization is only a small part of their stories. Mechanisms of racialization cannot be limited to stigmatization. As gender is not limited to sexist remarks or normative expectations (like it is expected to be strong if you’re a man) race is not only produced through daily life and interactions (please see the abstract to understand why and how I use this concept). More, reducing their life to stigmatization and resistance against the stigma would only homogenize them in a similar condition – and let their stories appear as totally guided by the stigma. It’s more complicated, and situations are also different from individuals to individuals, depending on where and how they grew up.

In the following abstract, I will keep the quotes as they are in my interviews (I’m interviewing in English) and as they are in the French original version, in the sense to let some spaces for the student’s voices. The extracts are all anonymized, so I’m using a (false) name in the abstract for practical writing reasons only. The references quoted originally in French are my own translation. I would also like to invite you to check the article’s original bibliography and figures.

Original reference

If you need to quote the paper, please use the original reference as bellow. The text is in open access.

Contact

Pease feel free to send me remarks, questions or anything.

Marine Duc – PhD Fellow at Université Bordeaux-Montaigne / Join Research Center Passages (UMR 5319) of CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research)

Marine.duc@cnrs.fr

Translated abstract (with original quotes)

Introduction

Coming from Greenland and going to Denmark for studying means being confronted with a social location change. Indeed, when they move, the students are facing a context where being white is coded as normal, namely, that nordicness is impliedly associated with whiteness. For the students, it translates daily by multifaceted stigmatization, not necessarily based on names, accent, or skin color, but also on a degrading picture of their space of origin which further reflects on the individuals.

The goal of this article is to focus on how the region of origin is integrated into the racialization dynamics lived and negotiated by students coming from Greenland to study. We need first to go back to what racialization means to avoid misunderstandings. The French scholar Sarah Mazouz defines it as such: “a socially constructed process of categorization which defines a group as others in a hierarchized relationship” (Mazouz, 2017: 15). The concept is coming from the studies of race. Let us be clear: by no means do we recognize race as a biological fact. Scholars, but also anti-racists activists use the concept of race as a social construct, to understand the power relations in societies, such as gender/sex, or social class. It is also more and more used in the Scandinavian scholarship[4]. However, I think that using the concept of “racialization” instead of race gather several heuristic advantages:

  • First, it allows us to focus on the production of difference, as a process (instead of a status); and consequently, to not consider individuals or groups as passive. Racialization is a negotiated dynamic.

  • More, there is a conceptual blur around the concept of race. To name but a few, “race” is connected too often in the public debate with a biological conception of it. There is also a trend to read “race” in a dualistic view, in the opposition between white and black, and to focus mainly on the “black”. White people are of course also racialized, they are not “out” of the system. They are positioned as dominant in this system.

  • Finally, concentrating on the categorization process instead of the category itself allows us to analyze how different parameters are at stake in the social location of groups and individuals. Here, I will center the analysis more specifically on social class and race (and less on gender) because I can’t develop all in 20 pages.

For analyzing of how the place of origin is a part of racialization dynamics lived by the Greenlandic students in Denmark, I will lean on the concept of “territorial stigma” developed by Loïc Wacquant (2007). To understand how the place of origin is a part of the racialization process, we first need to recall the centrality of place in the production of the social status of indigenous peoples (Kobayashi and De Leeuw, 2010). The material dimension of the land is much valorized in indigenous scholarship (dispossession of resources and land, marginalization through lack of infrastructures …), but we can’t forget that a more symbolic dimension is also at stake. Interactions and daily experiences are also to consider where we try to understand the power dynamics, as the Kwagu’ł scholar Sarah Hunt is recalling us: “indigeneity is also lived, practiced and relational” (2014: 3). I will follow this approach here, more focused on experiences and daily life. Starting from the “minoritized experiences” is also a way to highlight the heterogeneity of situations and to visibilize resistance against the structures (Chassain et al., 2016) that defines indigenous people as such.

I will use here the stories shared by the students during an on-going PhD-research. For this paper, I will build on more or less than forty interviews with students coming from different Greenlandic towns and villages and studying (or have studied) mainly in the Copenhagen metropolitan area.





1.    The category “indigenous peoples” in front of fieldwork: complexifying the relation between indigeneity, nationality and land.

In this first part, I’m explaining the theoretical framework of this paper. We first need to give some context, as I am trying to avoid using “indigenous peoples” as a given category, as a lot research do.  Taking interest in the “territorial stigma” allows us to understand indigeneity as a produced social condition, a tensioned social location in power relationships.

1.1.         Between Greenland and Denmark, the complexified indignity

In Denmark, the relation with colonial history and memory is marked with the narrative of a “Nordic Exceptionalism” (Loftsdottir and Jensen, 2016), also called “Danish Exceptionalism” (Petterson, 2016; Rud, 2017). This understanding embraces the idea that Denmark has occupied a peripherical position in the colonial and imperial European history. More specifically, it translates into an invisibilisation of colonial violence through the idea of “benevolent colonialism” (Petterson, 2016) and the refusal to recognize the state and administration implication in colonialism (Keskinen et al., 2016). However, the government of Denmark is recognizing since 1996 the presence of only one indigenous group on its administrative territory, following a recommendation from the Greenlandic Home Rule “the Inuit of Greenland”[5]. The country has also hosted different organizations acting for recognizing Indigenous peoples’ rights (see the figure in the original text) – which is explaining a halftone picture of recognition.

Researchers have consequently tried to understand how the relationship between the Nation-State and indigenous peoples is changing. This relation is at the core of understanding indigeneity. Some are noticing a refusal of using the category “indigenous peoples” because of its connection to colonial power (Grydehøj et al., 2018), or strategic and punctual use of it (Sowa, 2013), or a change of public discourse on indigeneity, from a vocabulary of resistance to a narrative of independent governance sliding to ethnonationalism (Thisted, 2017). Some are questioning the match between international law criteria for “defining” indigenous peoples and the current situation of Greenlanders (Mortensen and Barten, 2017), at a risk of reproducing a normative analysis. Indeed, these changes can’t make us forget the historicity of colonization in Greenland and its social, economic, and political consequences. The daily life of individuals is still impacted by it: with the same citizenship and despite the transfer of competencies, coming from Greenland and being identified as it, means to be positioned in a minoritized location in a Danish state where whiteness is coded as the norm.

1.2.         Readings of the self: positioning oneself in the (post)colonial social space

In this part, I’m trying to give a quick overview of how the students I’ve met are identifying themselves, to show how complicated it is to use the category of “indigenous peoples” as given. There is a large heterogeneity of understandings: some are presenting themselves as “Inuk from Greenland”, but sometimes, the category is just evocating different contexts: “I think that when I heard the word indigenous, I kind of combine it with, aboriginals, or, natives, and how a small population is in their own home”. It is also combined paradoxically with a national identification: “I grew up in an indigenous country (…) so I definitely recognize myself as an indigenous people”. A few are rejecting the category more directly, but without depoliticizing their belonging to a social group, which is reorganized around national binarities. Social privilege is thus not directly associated with a color, but with nationality and a language (Kalaallisut/Danish).

This diversity of identification could be linked with the heterogeneity of the group I’ve met. Mainly enrolled in educational institutions and living in the Copenhagen region where housing prices are particularly high (Næss-Schmidt et al., 2018), they are also coming from the main Greenlandic towns. They are also numerous who come from mixed families, which can provide some advantages in their educational path. Despite these advantages, they often have non-linear paths in education and are often the first of their families to reach higher education. Even if this is not the subject of this paper, it is important to note that these elements could, of course, have an effect on their self-identification. But the diversity of identifications must not conceal the similarity of the stereotypes they are facing, and that constitute the cement of a shared minoritized experience, which is grounded on a downgraded and downgraded picture of the region they are coming from.

1.3.         Indigeneity as a tensioning social location

I’ve shown before that it is complicated to use the category “indigenous peoples” both as a given and as a category of analysis. Born in the 70s, it has been constructed more as a category of political action, without strictly defining “who” is indigenous – which can lead to exclusion or essentialization (Daes, 1996). The term is not fully accepted by scholars, because of this ambivalence between a political category and an analytical one (Morin, 2011). Thus, some researchers are proposing to move beyond this binarity. Instead of using “indigenous peoples” as a conceptual tool, they suggest using the concept of indigeneity. Inspired by feminists scholars, by critical race studies and theories of settler colonialism, they use the concept of indigeneity as a way to analyze its production: “indigeneity is hence a positioning, a relational reading and a producing of difference and subjectivity” (Radcliffe, 2017: 2). Defined as “the socio-spatial processes and practices whereby Indigenous people and places are determined as distinct (ontologically, epistemologically, culturally, in sovereignty) to dominant universals” (Radcliffe, 2017: 1), indigeneity is thus constructed within interactions and it can’t be separated from its context of production: “the concept signals the need to carefully parse the conditions under which this positioning emerges and how it becomes articulated with positionings of settler, nation-states, development, whiteness” (Radcliffe, 2017: 2). Finally, instead of thinking indigeneity as a category of practice and political action, the idea is to consider indigeneity as a social relation of power, meaning as “a tension crossing the social field and producing material and symbolical issues, around which groups with antagonist interests are constituted” (Kergoat, 2012: 17). It seems that this approach is particularly relevant for us, in a context where the uses and recognition of the category of indigenous peoples are not fixed, whereas asymmetrical relations are still there.

Understanding indigeneity as a social relation of power requires the reconsideration of the place of space within the constitution of social positionings. Indeed, land and resources spoliation and forced migration are at the core of indigeneity production: for the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, it is the colonization itself that created indigenous peoples (Smith, 1999). However, we can’t essentialize this link to the land, in a context of higher mobility: the lived spaces are of course not limited to reservations or rural/coastal areas (Kobayashi et De Leeuw, 2010: Comat, 2012; Cameron et al., 2014; De Leeuw, 2014; Hunt, 2014; Radcliffe, 2018). Instead of focusing on “the territory” or “the land”, Sarah de Leeuw is inviting us to change the gaze of analysis, to focus more on how indigeneity is embodied and negotiated at the individual’s scale.  

Based on these analyses, using the concept of “territorial stigma” developed by Loïc Wacquant seems quite efficient to understand how the region of origin is operating in racialization processes and consequently participate in the making of indigeneity. Initially coming from urban sociology to understand how some neighborhoods participate in social disqualification, it is also largely inspired by Goffmanian sociology. While the stigma is “an attribute which discredits profoundly” (Goffman, 1975: 13) on groups and individuals, its spatialized version has “cousin properties of bodily stigmas, moral and tribal” (Wacquant, 2007: 19). Henceforth, we see well that the peculiarity of racialization processes that are building indigeneity gives a specific place to space. I will focus here on one dimension of this link: the supposed association between biological, social characteristics of a group and spatial representations. This point allows us to capture the persistence of a minoritized condition through racial micro-aggressions (Sue et al., 2007; Clark et al., 2014) despite the progressive social climbing of a part of the Greenlandic population.





2.    The abilities, the primitiveness and the pathological: daily categorizations and territorial stigma

After the exposition of my theoretical framework and the research context in the first part, this second part is dedicated to an analysis of the stigma. I’m going back to how the stigma is a process of making difference. I’m identifying three regimes (like three ways) of difference-making through stigmatization: the abilities, the primitiveness, and the pathological.

2.1. Too white to be Greenlandic: social location, normative expectations and visibility

All the students I’m met have been at least once assigned to a collective stereotypical identity. They all have different ways to live this assignation, depending on the studies they are following, their gender, or social origins. The traits of being from Greenland are systematically associated with an expected skin color, lower educational background, and disadvantaged social background. This homogenized view is not limited to a specific context (work or university). However, it’s interesting to note that the stigmatization is taking specific forms depending on the context. A business master student related some reactions to her background while she was introducing her path in a Folkesskole:

“They have this study trip to other Folkeskolen, to meet with other kids in Denmark, and then, I’ve got this remark when they said: oh, I didn’t know that the Greenlanders was so smart. Like, stuff like that.” (March 2019)

In this example, we see well how racialization is working. It is articulated with social class dynamics (like it would be impossible for a Greenlander to have a master’s degree) and with forms of biologism, meaning “a trend to base the interpretation or the explanation of social phenomena on biological factors” (Lemerle, 2016). Sometimes this process is crossing another classification phenomenon based on different racial stereotypes, like Regine - a math student- told me:

“Sometimes they kind of think that I am Asian, so they have this positive prejudice about that because then they kind of think that I am better in Maths than I am. It’s so funny because I actually talk to a girl and she thought that I was Asian … and then she … kind of … change her attitude towards me, when she finds out that I was Greenlandic, and then she kind of … in a pitiful voice asking me: oh, is it not too hard to study Mathematics? So, she went from oh! She looks Asian she must be very good at Maths, to, oh, she must be very bad at Maths because she is Greenlandic!” (May 2019)

Here, racialization is operating specifically in different contexts. Racialization is constructing here some individuals as more competent as others within the educational context without being limited to a binary hierarchy Qalluunaat/Inuit or Greenlander/Danish. Other stereotypes associated with other minorities – here the “model minority” of being high-performing in work and education, often associated with people with Asian origins (Kao et al., 2013; Ichou, 2013). In this interaction, it’s finally the possibility that Regine is at her place in a selective education that is questioned.

In these examples, we see well that racialization is not only based on skin color[6]. They cross social class, but also representations of the place of origin. The students I have met are also relating that unveiling the place of origin is playing a peculiar role in minorization , rather than the only phenotypical characteristics. The identity assignation can also rely on confusion with other minorities or even sometimes with the white majority. Being a student, or having a light skin color can thus provoke a gap with the normative expectations they are facing. While they describe how they are permanently taken back to their identity of being Greenlandic, they are also paradoxically suspected: some are too white for being Greenlandic, too few marginalized to be able to claim this belonging. A student was reporting how correcting the teacher who can’t pronounce his name acting as discreditable information:

“Oh, you are Greenlandic. Then you are, blabla (…) it’s very negative, like, alcohol, or suicide, it’s like only the negative things of Greenland. Or, that it’s such a great nature. Or, you don’t look that Greenlandic, why are you so white-skinned. And it’s like, you can’t be really Greenlandic because of that.” (March 2019)

Thus, the negative experience of being stigmatized can be doubled. It is articulating both the negation of belonging and the imposition of negative social traits. So now, we have seen one way to produce difference through stigmatization: the abilities. Let’s develop the content of this stigma to illustrate the other two regimes of difference-making: the primitiveness and the pathological.

2.2.         Two regimes of difference making: from primitiveness to pathological

When they are describing the stereotypes, the students are often mentioning the representations of their place of origin. Greenland is painted as a place without towns neither villages (but where everyone is knowing everyone), giving a picture of wilderness, exotic, where some of the elements are out of contexts, like igloos – a type of habitat with a little historical presence (Petersen, 2003). Some have been asked whether they go to school “riding polar bears” or even though some common goods were available in Greenland, such as biscuits. These schemes are based on a positivist understanding of development where the place of origin seems to be associated with a historical precedent; through a time-space compressing device, as Sofie reported:

“Sofie: there is a fellow student of mine, that learn from Folkeskolen, from teachers here in Denmark, that, eh … we have this … mands prøve. Like, a male test… for young boys, how do they become male, like, if they are men enough. Eh … and then, that test was like, you kill a seal, and then take the skin off, and then take the skin directly, and wear it. And … we don’t do that. And then the teacher said that they were also bathing in the seal blood, and then I was like: I never, never never, in my life, learn about that thing, we don’t do that in Greenland. But this is what they thought at school, some of them at least.
M: oh … it sounds like…
Sofie: Making us savages. Exactly.” (March 2019)

We see here how the educational institution is playing a role in racialization dynamics and how gender is fully integrated into the making of race. The myth of localized practices (hunting ritual on the shore) is thus performing savage and primitive masculinity. Female bodies are not away from this normative process of sexualization: some students related how they had been described as “too beautiful” to be Greenlandic women.

While this primitiveness regime is often taken as ignorance of their interlocutors, the second regime of difference-making is often taken more negatively by the students because it can relate to familiar social ills. However, as Loïc Wacquant is reminding us, the specificity of the territorial stigma is not to be based on the level of truth, but on the level of social disadvantage: “the fact that these places may be dilapidated and dangerous, and made from poor people, minorities and strangers makes finally little difference: the prejudicial believe that they are is enough to trigger socially harmful consequences” (Wacquant, 2007: 2). Ivalu was telling me this story that happened in her workplace:

“I feel like I won’t say privileged, but sometimes I feel like …a bit … I like the way that I’m not looking like Greenlandic people, because, I know how a lot of people experienced discrimination because they are from Greenland. Well, I don’t look like a Greenlandic person … I’m not, like, you know, I don’t have dark hair and … eyes, or, …darker skin (…). We had a Christmas party, here at my work (…) And, I wasn’t drinking that much, and he came, and he like, he came with a shot of something, and he said: Ivalu, drink this, you are from Greenland, you could take it! Like, you are from Greenland, why, eh, why aren’t you drunk? (…) In Greenland there is a lot of troubles, like, problems, with alcoholism, and social problems, like abuses and things like that … and they only see that. But, it’s not just what we are, it is not who I am. Like I’m not … I’m not coming from an abusive family, or an alcoholic family or …it’s a lot more than that. And I also get this: are you also coming from Greenland? Are you really? And I’m like: what? You don’t look Greenlandic. They have to, like, who’s Danish in your family? Is your father Danish, is your mother Danish? And, I’m like no! (…) it’s just such a big part of my life, that it’s difficult to find a way to call it, if it is, racism, or, stereotype, stigma, or … it’s just normal”.
(March 2019)

Here Greenland is made as a pathological space, where the characteristics are transmitted to individuals: being violated or coming from an alcoholic family. The social disrepute is articulating several modalities, from the idea of “moral vice” (Goffman, 1975), particularly meet during sociability time and coming from other students of colleagues (alcoholism, and crystallized within the saying grøenlænderstiv),  to the idea of a “tribe vice” (Goffman, 1975), here mainly based on phenotypical features. Ivalu is explaining that she can hide some discrediting attributes because she has white skin. Here, the territorial stigma is more working through notoriety than through visibility: it is because her colleague knows about her origin that she can be stigmatized.

In Ivalu’s story, we can also see how nationality is associated with color in an unspoken way. “Being Greenlandic” is, both for her and for her interlocutors, necessarily being non-white. It’s like national belonging was chromatically coded, and interiorized. The difficulty to say color (how she hesitates, how she is looking for the right word) is also significant of how race is invisibilized through this encoding. Danishness is schematically associated with whiteness while Greenlandicness is schematically associated with non-whiteness.

Finally, we see here how the territorial stigma is working interleaved with the “moral vice” and the “tribe vice”: it is the knowledge of the geographical origin that trigger the negative experience. We can thus refine the proposal of Loïc Wacquant to understand geographical mobility as a mitigator or a canceler of the territorial stigma. Even though he defines this reduction as proper to territorial stigma, we can see almost the contrary in the case of the Greenlandic students in Denmark. It is because the modalities of the difference-making are articulating several entangled parameters (social class, appearance, place of origin) that managing the effects of the stigma is complicated. We can thus see easily know how the place of origin is acting as a media in the production of a hierarchized difference: it allows a racialization that can’t be said.





3.      “Fuck, men! We are Europeanized elite eskimos”[7]: to be a student and negotiating the identification with pathological territories

In this last part of the paper, I’m focusing on the way people are dealing with the stigma imposed on them. The minoritized experience is not only a story of being passive. It is shaped by a learning process that consists in learning a set of strategies and practices that seek to limit the negative consequences of stigmatization. Focusing on the different ways people are dealing with the stigma shows also the thickness of subjectivities, and the diverse abilities to deal with it.

3.1.         Hiding from where you’re coming from?

I’ve noticed that the negotiation of stigma stamping is mainly individual, and it is highly dependent of the different conscientization of a minoritized condition. The first way of negotiating the stigma is to try to limit the flow of discrediting information or an unhealthy curiousness. It is especially operating in relation to the place of origin. In the interviews, a vocabulary of unveiling is often mobilized, for example « when you reveal that you are from Greenland », or « don’t say where I’m from ». Those narratives are also often going with dilemmas : « I remember, that I thought that I shouldn’t say that I am from Greenland, because I thought that people will look at me in a different way, or they will look at different at me but … I kind of accepted it ». We’re finding here what Loïc Wacquant has identified: the “territorial infamy” is working similarly of other kind of stigmas: it leads to dilemmas when it comes to manage the information linked to the stigma (Wacquant, 2007 : 19). Some strategies of presentation of the self are also trying to act on the attributes responsible of the disrepute: not buying alcohol alone, nor drinking Guld øl – which is deeply associated to Greenlanders- in parties, or not drinking at all. But of course, we can see how the negative representation of the place of origin is interweaving with another stigma is here used to distance territorial stigma. Thus, there is different abilities to played it out: whiteness of skin allows to control the visibility of other disqualifying traits.

3.2.         Contextualized stigmatization and the feeling of illegitimacy

Those different abilities to control the presentation of the self are taking a peculiar meaning according to the status of being a student. In fact, even though stigmatization is a daily phenomenon, the university context is a special place of unveiling. Some students fear that a symbol of the territorial stigma is unveiled in this context: language/accent, name, or educational level. It provokes a feeling of interiorization, especially felt at the beginning of the education. It is very close of the interiorization of the white gaze described by Franz Fanon (2015):

“F: I am at the bottom you know. Eh, because of my knowledge, because of my background … I feel like that. Like, I don’t really deserve the master’s degree. I don’t know, it may be because I’m from Greenland (…). I always feel like that I am not as good as the others.
M: because of that background?

 F: yeah. I’m not treated like a Greenlander. But I feel like. (…) I always compare myself to others, and especially Danish people, and, eh, when they, for example, have a presentation, they speak very fast, and they always seem that they know everything (…) And, eh, I always this limit, when I present something in English, or in Danish. And I always feel like I can … do it better, if I, eh, if I present something in Greenlandic (…) (if I speak) they will know that you are coming from … or, that you don't belong to the university level”  (May 2019)

We see here very well how the territorial stigma is dialoguing with the racialization process when it is coming to dent the self-esteem. The fear is specifically present among the students who don’t have Danish as a first language – so, more specifically among the middle class and working class. As we can see here, is never only one parameter to consider when reading the individual effects of stigmatization. More, the feeling here reported show well that the reactions to stigma are often tensioned between interiorization and resistance to oppression.

3.3.         Distancing through social status

Third, the last strategy of stigma managing I've met is related to the social status of the student. In other words, being a student is giving some tools to actively distance the effect of stigmatization (in comparison with other Greenlanders). Sometimes, the prestige of the status is used to build a positive relationship with the self. But more, being a student, and more specifically at university is conferring a legitimate academic knowledge, sometimes used to erase the negative charge of the geographical origin. The heterogeneity of people met (in terms of education and social background) is spilled over the way the stigma is lived. Indeed, I’ve noticed that minimizing the stigmatization is more common among students in natural and formal sciences, and more specifically among men. In that case, stigmatization is forwarded to the ignorance register. Downgrading visions are thus seen as “jokes”.

But for students in social sciences and humanities, the academic institution is playing a different role. It is not rare that discovering certain authors (Goffman, Foucault, Baldwin) in courses are becoming the ground for building a counter-story through conscientization of power relations. For them, the academic productions are often linked to identity matters. They are sometimes used to unload the stigma or make the stigmatization more visible: writing a press paper, building teaching materials, or even working on the linkage between primitiveness and Greenland:

“There is a Danish photographer, and he had an exhibition in Qaanaaq, about people from North Greenland. The photographer has been there a few times, and, taking pictures of bears and dog sled, and ice, it’s very beautiful pictures. But, I wanna know how another nationality shows another, in art forms. And, if there is any eh …. misperceptions. It was a very, very primitive way of showing people, even if we are in modern times, like, only pictures of bears, like, there is no modernity. (…) I choose the subject, it’s because, when we started in Art History, it’s only about European artists, from Italy, from Germany, and Denmark. It has never been about Greenland. And, I have seen art from Greenland in my life, but, I don’t know the history. So, I was like, maybe I could write about Greenland, and go back to the roots, kind of, and not only dealing with Europeans. (…) then a classmate mentioned this exhibition, so, I took a look, and, it was very dynamic pictures, with blood and polar bears … but I was like, oh, again, showing the primitive peoples of Greenland, why never the modern? (…) so maybe I can write about that, about, other cultures only want to show the primitive side of Greenland. Like, they feed the primitive side about Greenland, all the time, and not the modern times”.
(April 2019)

Then, acquiring symbolic capital is facilitating the stigmatization critique and the building of a positive relationship to the self. However, it does not make us forgot the role of academia in the racialization process, where language, nation, skin color, and geographical origin are deeply entangled.

Conclusion

In that paper I’ve shown how the representations of the place of origin of the Greenlandic Students in Denmark are integrated into racialization dynamics. Starting from the experiences (instead of pre-defining who is indigenous and who is not) allows us to highlight that the racialized difference-making at stake is entangled with other power relations, such as gender and social class. Considering how the stigmatization is working also gives us insights about how a national and chromatic order is daily performed within the student life. This point needs to be further explored, in order to understand better the entanglements of indigeneity and race, and to leads us towards a more comprehensive look over systemic racism.

 

[1] DARMON, Muriel. La socialisation: domaines et approches. Armand Colin, 2010.

[2] HARDING, Sandra G. (ed.). Feminism and methodology: Social science issues. Indiana University Press, 1987.

[3] LOUIS, Renee Pualani. Can you hear us now? Voices from the margin: Using indigenous methodologies in geographic research. Geographical research, 2007, vol. 45, no 2, p. 130-139.

[4] This part is not originally developed in the article, but you can check this book for a more comprehensive overview :  HERVIK, Peter (ed.). Racialization, racism, and anti-racism in the Nordic countries. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

[5] Bekendtgørelse af ILO-konvention nr. 169 af 28. juni 1989 vedrørende oprindelige folk og stammefolk i selvstændige stater, available here.

[6] Other scholars have also shown that racialization is not only operating through skin color, as they can also be based on the accent or religion (Miles, 1983; Dorlin, 2009).

[7] From an interview with a student (March 2018). He was joking by reversing the stigma about the double normativity he was facing. On one side, a group of peers considering him as became « too Danish » through studying in Denmark, and in the other side, being confronted with racializing tropes.

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