Cod Society: The Technopolitics of Modern Greenland

Abstract

This chapter examines the consequences of the Danish Greenland Commission’s grand modernization scheme for the decades after World War II, emphasizing the links established between the extraction of natural resources, new technologies, and social change in the Commission’s report of 1950. The author focuses on two interwoven contexts: the introduction of industrial cod fishing, and the incipient urbanization and concentration in the Arctic. Drawing on the notion of technopolitics, he offers an understanding of the modernization of Greenland as a shift from one technopolitical configuration to another: the emerging “cod society” employed certain kinds of technology to restructure the postcolonial relationships between Greenland, Denmark, and the rest of the world, to introduce a modern welfare state, and to reconfigure the relation of humans and environment.