Abstract

 Excerpted From: Saana Hansen, The Price of Suffering? Monetary Compensation Claims for the Danish State's Postcolonial Child Displacement in Greenland, 48 PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 1 (November, 2025) (3 Footnotes/References) (Full Document)

Significant attention among activists, policymakers, and lawyers is directed to the importance of addressing historical injustices previously ignored or denied. Calls for apologies and reconciliation--from war victims to the descendants of slaves, from citizens of formerly colonized nations to Indigenous peoples globally--are also gaining scholarly attention ( Similarly, domestic and international criminal trials and civil actions, public memorials, truth and reconciliation commissions, and public apologies have become standard mechanisms of “transitional justice.” The central task of “truth and reconciliation” committees lies in addressing historical injustices and drafting recommendations to address past wrongdoings and victims' suffering and the forms of reparations provided. Reparations refer to actions or processes that seek to “repair, make amends, or compensate for gross violations of fundamental human rights” . These may include money, land, apologies, public memorials and museums, changes in laws or political institutions, enhanced educational opportunities, and rehabilitation.

Transitional justice, public apologies, and reparations constitute a rich area of anthropological and socio-legal scholarship. Existing studies on compensation have increased our understanding of its political significance as well as its potential to intensify rather than alleviate suffering, such as in cases where an award amount is so small that it symbolizes disrespect or when payment serves to end further demands for truth and justice . Furthermore, monetary reparation touches on broader dilemmas of justice, questions such as “Whose interests count, who decides who counts, whose voices get heard”. Anthropological and social scientific scholarship on human rights, violence, and suffering has highlighted limitations to legal frameworks in addressing less eventful forms of suffering and deeper structural issues Yet, very few ethnographic studies have specifically focused on monetary compensation and its production. While anthropologists such as Anna Bohlin and Susan Slyomovics have examined the diversity of meanings compensation may take, contemporary debate does not touch on the actual process by which compensation claims are drafted nor the ways in which painful experiences are measured and monetized. However, in her seminal sociological study of the shifting value of a child and childhood in early twentieth-century America, Viviana Zelizer examined how the value of children shifted from that of an economically productive member of a family to a sacralized, “priceless” child with an increased sentimental value. She studied how--in these new conditions--courts struggled to determine compensation for the accidental deaths of children, no longer valued after their lost labor and services.

Building on this scholarship, I aim to provide an ethnographic account of monetary repair, its meanings and production, and the ways suffering is quantified in the contemporary “age of reconciliation”. I draw on ethnographic material on reconciliation, public apology, and reparation in the context of forced child removals from Greenland to Denmark. I focus on the legal claim-making processes of two Inuit women, Juliane and Niviaq, who are involved in two separate child removal processes and subsequent compensation claims. I also draw on various documents, including compensation claims, a summons, and interviews with two legal practitioners.

First, I introduce the child displacement processes that affected Niviaq and Juliane and their subsequent compensation claims, placing them within the history of Danish modernization interventions in Greenland and emerging efforts to acknowledge past wrongdoings. Next, I examine how human suffering and loss are translated into powerful monetary compensation claims by legal experts, thereby determining what constitutes economically worthy suffering. I argue that human rights serve as the key standard for measuring monetary compensation in the context of forced child displacement. Then, I analyze how human rights violations are priced in the absence of clear-cut mathematical models. I show how compensation claims can mobilize payments for individuals for nonpecuniary damages through a human rights framework. However, doing so also individualizes suffering and silences other lived experiences and the complex production of harms that remain uncounted and, therefore, economically worthless. Finally, I explore the material and symbolic significance of compensation, teasing out why both the state and the claimants might, despite its limitations, prioritize monetary compensation over other forms of reconciliation, such as an apology.

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Many disciplines have crucially sharpened our understanding of multiple important elements of transitional justice: the legal discipline provided an understanding of individual responsibility; sociologists, philosophers, and historians have provided a complex picture of how wrongdoings are embedded in broader social and political structures. Here, I have attempted to provide an ethnographic account of the role of monetary compensation for both victims of Denmark's past modernization and the Danification politics in Greenland and the Danish state. Building on Zelizer's work on the shifting value of children, I have empirically explored how the value of suffering is measured in producing compensation, what forms of suffering can be compensated, and why both the victim and the wrongdoer--or its political descendant--might prefer out-of-court settled compensation before court ruling and other forms of repair.

I have argued that human rights constitute the key yardstick for measuring monetary compensation in the context of forced child displacement. Drawing upon Das's (2006) work on the differentiation between actual and eventual forms of violence, I highlighted the ambiguity between actual life and law--that is, how the “legal” focuses on spectacular, eventful forms of violence, leaving unnoticed the less eventful, less clear-cut forms of violence that do not fit into the human rights framework, which builds on principles of proof of evidence pointing to causality between a wrongful act and its outcome. Given the limitations provided by the legal system and due to its focus on eventful forms of suffering, compensation might not necessarily be the best measure of repair to redress, for instance, the duration of forced displacement and insecurities related to not knowing what happened to oneself, which remain unaddressed.

Of course, monetary repair can never fully replace a wrong, and repairing damages goes well beyond cash. Nevertheless, herein I also demonstrated that compensation claims do other things beyond bringing monetary payments to victims. Through background investigations that monetary claims require and with the publicity they might garner, such claim-making processes equally provide a means by which people--individually and collectively--can become aware of formerly unspoken injustices. Yet, what legal experts and judges might consider “legally correct” might differ from what claimants perceive as morally and politically just; monetary reparation can present a first official recognition of one's history and provide new vocabulary for considering the past. Once public, they can also pressure the state to recognize “declarations of shame” and demand more comprehensive reconciliation processes, which have largely remained beyond the public's view. In so doing, the primary concern of monetary repair might not be the money itself but the recognition of the wrongdoings it symbolizes.