Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

But meaningful progress occurs, too. Modernity comes in fits and starts. The National Solar Ger Electrification Program seeks to equip nomads with portable, renewable sources of electricity. In 2011, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee designated Naadam as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Among the many shifts that reflect the move away from the Communist past, I found it particularly charming that the Lenin Museum has been turned into a dinosaur museum.

GREENLAND

Inventing the Conversation

The Noonday Demon, 2001

Greenland is not terribly far from the United States or Europe, but few Americans or Europeans go there. In this place of transcendent beauty, a traditional way of life and modern technology are delicately balanced. If your country had to be colonized, you might choose Danish overlords. The Danes have invested heavily in infrastructure, medical care, and schooling. However, residents of the planet’s least densely populated nation speak Greenlandic, an Eskimo-Aleut tongue, as their first language and Danish as their second—which does not equip them particularly well for the global economy.

In a quest to examine diverse cultural constructions of depression, I visited the Inuit peoples of Greenland—in part because depression is pervasive among them, and in part because the culture’s attitudes toward it are distinctive. Depression affects as many as 80 percent of Greenlanders. How can one organize a society in which depression occurs so widely? Greenland is integrating the ways of an ancient society with the realities of the modern world, and transitional societies—African tribal communities that are being folded into larger nations, nomadic cultures that are being urbanized, subsistence farmers who are being incorporated into larger-scale agricultural production systems—often have high levels of depression. Even in the traditional context, however, depression has always been common among the Inuit, and the suicide rate has been high (though it dropped by nearly half with the introduction of television); in some areas, about one in three hundred people commits suicide each year. Some might say that this is God’s way of indicating to people that they shouldn’t live in such a forbidding place—yet most Inuit have not abandoned their ice-bound lives to migrate south. They have adapted to tolerate the difficulties of life within the Arctic Circle.

Before I went to Greenland, I had assumed that the primary issue there was seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is depression resulting from a lack of sunlight—a particularly acute vulnerability in a place where the sun barely makes its presence felt for a full three months. I had anticipated that everyone would dip in late autumn and begin to improve in February. That is not the case. The prime suicide month in Greenland is May, and though foreigners who move to the northern part of Greenland get depressed during the long periods of darkness, the Inuit have adapted over the years to seasonal shifts in light. Springtime is an instigator of suicide in many societies. “The richer, softer and more delectable nature becomes,” the essayist A. Alvarez has written, “the deeper that internal winter seems, and the wider and more intolerable the abyss which separates the inner world from the outer.” In Greenland, where the springtime shift is twice as dramatic as in a more temperate zone, these are the cruelest months.

Life is hard in Greenland. The Danish government has instituted universal free health care, education, even unemployment benefits. The hospitals are spotless, and the prison in the capital city looks more like a bed-and-breakfast than an institution of punishment. But the forces of nature in Greenland are unfathomably harsh. One Inuit man who had traveled across Europe said to me, “We never made great art or built great buildings, the way other civilizations did. But for thousands of years, in this climate, we survived.” It struck me that this was quite possibly the greater achievement.