Pacing Modernity

<h3>Abstract</h3> In this article, I ask what it means for Greenland’s telecommunication infrastructure to be the result of a rapid modernization process. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies and the temporal turn in anthropology, I highlight the production of “infrastructural time” (Appel 2018) to underscore the relationship between spatial and temporal dimensions when Greenland’s infrastructure is imagined, built and practiced in a (post)colonial context. Through archival research, ethnographic interviews, and fieldwork, I show how the construction of a comprehensive telecommunication infrastructure in Greenland after World War II produced competing temporalities characterized by haste and pause, which linger on and intersect with Greenland’s existing infrastructures. When examining these temporalities in Greenland’s modernization process, it seems that coloniality is not allied with a particular tempo but that both haste and pause can be part of the colonial project to keep the center in control.