Title: 'Artifacts and Echoes: Potential and Challenges in Connecting Arctic Oral Testimonies to Land and Objects' - Introduction to the works of new faculty at Scandinavian
Speaker: Asta Mønsted, Dept. of Scandinavian Studies, UC Berkeley
About: Prof. Monsted's work seeks to challenge the Eurocentric historical narrative, which is deeply tied to colonialism and has resulted in the disempowerment of Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit) oral histories in favor of Western Christian perspectives. Monsted' research aligns with an academic approach that prioritizes Indigenous knowledge and narratives, exploring how they may be integrated with scholarly theories and methods.
In this talk, the oral testimonies of the Kalaallit will be juxtaposed with the archaeological record to demonstrate how these can offer new interpretations of Kalaallit objects and landscapes. In doing so, we explore how the archaeological discipline and oral tradition interact, challenging one another, while raising new questions for future research and its applied fields methods.
About the Speaker: Asta Monsted is a Danish-Greenlandic trained prehistoric archaeologist from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. At UCPH she took her BA, MA and PhD. She has worked for 10 years at the National Museum of Denmark, and been on field trips in Germany, Japan and several places in both Denmark and Greenland. Now she is a new faculty at the Department of Scandinavian Studies teaching the course 'Arctic Folklore and Mythology in Nordic Lands'.