ABSTRACT
The ethnographer Mark Nuttall, in a study of attitudes to place and location among the Inuit of Greenland, makes the point that most Greenlanders identify closely with intimate and specifi c places rather than with the country as a nation or concept: ‘Landscape is used and understood in a local sense rather than understanding landscape from a national political and wider territorial perspective’ (1993, 75). Citing JN Entriken, Nuttall distinguishes between ‘location’ and ‘place’: location is ‘universalist’ and decentred, place is centred and ‘particularist’. Place is what individuals and communities relate to and is special because of the way ‘it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it is fl at or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid’ (1993, 77). Location can be an objective geographical entity; place a more subjective and intimate space. This intimate space is also ‘memory space’ and ‘thought space’ (1993, 77).
