This Brown Bag seminar will be in two parts. The first part consists of a talk. The second part will screen an ethnographic short film. Participants may attend one, the other, or both parts.

11:00-12:00 Talk:

Piniariarneq: Collaboration as method in the mapping of landscape use
This talk discusses Piniariarneq (West Greenlandic for hunting trip); the name of a GPS tracking App we, alongside biologists helped develop in an interdisciplinary endeavour to map Greenlandic hunters’ use of a rapidly changing ice-sea-landscape. In 2015 we introduced the GPS to 21 hunters in northwest Greenland, who agreed to track their hunting routes and register animal observations and catches for 12 months. Over time, the app developed into a “method”; a collaborative intervention, which was actively bent by the different partners of the project to serve their respective purposes.

We will discuss how Piniariarneq as a method both challenged existing imaginaries, and gave rise to new modes of knowledge production around present and future living in the High Arctic, and open up for a discussion about how anthropological efforts can help expand the registers through which grand narratives about ecosystems are being constructed.

13:00-14:30 Short film (26 minutes) + Q&A:

Piniariarneq (hunting trip) is a shortfilm recorded by 17 occupational hunters in Avanersuaq (northwest Greenland). In May 2015 hunters from Qaanaaq and Savissivik agreed to participate in a 12 month long interdisciplinary collaborative project mapping their hunting routes and seasonal use of the landscape. Using handheld GPSes the hunters tracked their routes and registered animals they observed or caught. In addition to this, they took photographs and recorded video footage of their activities. In contrast to the many films and photographic books, seen through the lens of outsiders whose aim it is to portray a so-called "vanishing culture", this shortfilm reveals hunting as a livelihood from the hunters' own perspective. The shortfilm gives the viewer a rare glimpse into hunting scenes at different times during the annual hunting cycle, and underscores how the hunting endeavour is underpinned by specific skills and techniques, and is integral to everyday
life in Avanersuaq today.