Joanna Kodzik, Junior Professor at MIARC, is presenting a paper on the “Changing Arctic Epistemic Frontiers: Moravian Knowledge Production in Greenland, Labrador, and Alaska” at the conference organized by Department of Archaeology, Conservation & History (IAKH), University of Oslo, 22-24 April 2025.
This conference will explore the production and dissemination of geoscientific knowledge around the Arctic and Africa from a comparative perspective. It will examine how scholarly authority and politics of inclusion and exclusion contributed to frame these areas as uncharted scientific domains. Discussions will focus on how authority was established through publication practices, institutional affiliations, and fieldwork narratives, and will consider the role of scientific, intermediary, and Indigenous participants working at local, national, and international levels. The conference will also assess how framing these regions as ‘epistemic frontiers’ shaped both geoscientific concepts and geopolitical agendas.
The Moravian missionaries were the first German-speaking Protestants who established missionary stations in the high north, namely in Greenland in 1733 and Labrador in 1771, and provided new knowledge about these regions. In 1885 they had been commissioned to build a missionary station in Alaska in the Kuskokwim River valley. The missionaries used to settle far away from other missionary enterprises. That is why the Arctic regions where the Moravians created the Indigenous diaspora could be considered a “white spot” on the European mental map. This paper will examine the inclusion of Arctic space defined in the European scholarly discourse by an epistemic frontier into the ideas of the Moravian global religious community. This means the communication about the cultural contact framed in Moravians’ ideas of humanity and the relationship between humans and nature to both the Moravian congregation worldwide and economic and scientific authorities of the time. The paper will focus on the change of the "epistemic space" defined by European civilization and the idea of otherness to the religious construction of the high north (humans and nature). The comparison of Moravian’s knowledge production in the 18th (Greenland and Labrador) and 19th centuries (Alaska) will emphasize similarities and changes in the representations of Indigenous people and nature. These are to be depicted against the background of changing scientific discourses, the new legitimacy of communication, and the modern technological development of the Alaska mission still driven by the same religious ideas. While focusing on such changes, the question about secular or religious authority that determined missionary constructions of the “epistemic frontiers and spaces” at the end of the 19th century will also be highlighted.
Venue: Tøyen Manor House, Botanical Garden
Conference organized by Department of Archaeology, Conservation & History (IAKH), University of Oslo,
in cooperation with Commission History of Geography (IGU), Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI), International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences (IUGS), Natural History Museum, UiO, Roald Amundsen’s home, Uranienborg
