Food, national identity and tourism in Greenland

ABSTRACT

This article explores the dynamic relationship between food, national identity and tourism in the context of Greenland, showing how food contributes to identity development and how in turn identity communication fuels tourism attraction and gastrodiplomacy. In the following, we first offer a review of current literature on national food identity and introduce Greenland, an Arctic nation moving toward independence from the kingdom of Denmark, as an interesting and understudied field of study. Drawing on four case narratives, we describe different food tourism situations which illustrate four examples of Greenlandic food practices. In our analysis of Greenlandic food experiences, we show the coexistence of different Greenlandic food practices in the tourism offer: food as traditional, as natural, as hybrid and as innovative. In our conclusion, we come back to the issue of national identity, discussing the role of tourism in maintaining and constructing food identities in Greenland.

KEYWORDS:

• Food culture
• food tourism
• gastronomy
• Greenland
• identity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the EU-Northern Periphery Arctic program for financing the project “ARCTISEN. Culturally Sensitive Tourism in the Arctic” enabling research trips enabling the gathering of material for different parts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the EU-Northern Periphery Arctic program [ARCTISEN].