PhD student Birgitte Rigtrup-Lindemann is zooming inn on the Inuit home in Kalaallit Nunaat.
Birgitte has made an important start on collecting data for the INDHOME project through ethnographic fieldwork in Kalaallit Nunaat. The fieldwork is ongoing over the course of a year where Birgitte conducts several long-term stays at different places in Kalaallit Nunaat.
During the month of March, Birgitte has been temporarily living in Nuuk with her family. From here, she has had the opportunity to get closer to everyday life in West Greenland and has been invited into small and large homes to talk about home and everyday life.
Talking about home in a home provides a unique insight into everyday life and the opportunity to shed light on some of the small details and everyday activities that we are often unaware of, but which can be important and central for your culture. When Birgitte visits the project participants, the opportunity arises to do interviews while moving around inside of the house or in the local environment and talk based on shared observations. During an interview, for example, the opportunity arises to delve into food recipes or talk about a song playing on the radio. Food and music are examples of important topics that can arise from small details that are often overlooked when communicating from a distance.
By staying in Kalaallit Nunaat, Birgitte not only has the opportunity to conduct interviews at home, she also has the opportunity to be an active participant in everyday life in the Greenlandic towns and settlements she is staying in.
By actively taking part in everyday life, common references are created that are based on everyday surroundings and activities. For example food shopping, happenings in the bus, observations in the local area, conversations with a local taxi driver or childhood stories from the local hairdresser – all experiences and observations that help form a picture of everyday life for kalaallit today. These experiences take on an extra level as Birgitte brought her family along on her first stay in March.
Traveling and living in a place together with your family creates different experiences and opportunities than when you travel alone as a researcher. Experiences that in turn create relationships and recognition for the families that Birgitte has visited during her stay.
An important part of Birgitte’s stay in Kalaallit Nunaat is to improve her language skills. Language is an incredibly important part of our culture. We carry our culture in language, in our pronunciation, in dialects, in words and in the silence when we communicate without words. And we also lose a part of our culture when we lose language. Learning Kalaallisut and meeting Kalaallit through language has therefore been a central and important part of the project for Birgitte.
If you would like to participate in the project by contributing personal knowledge and if you have cultural and historical roots in Kalaallit Nunaat, you are very welcome to contact Birgitte via the following form:
https://nettskjema.no/a/431728
