The Faroe Islands: Interpretations of HistoryUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2014. júl. 15. - 280 oldal Stranded in a stormy corner of the North Atlantic midway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands are part of "the unknown Western Europe"—a region of recent economic development and subnational peoples facing uncertain futures. This book tells the remarkable story of the Faroes' cultural survival since their Viking settlement in the early ninth century. At first an unruly little republic, the islands soon became tributary to Norway, dwindled into a Danish-Norwegian mercantilist fiefdom, and in 1816 were made a Danish province. Today, however, they are an internally self-governing Danish dependency, with a prosperous export fishery and a rich intellectual life carried out in the local language, Faroese. Jonathan Wylie, an anthropologist who has done extensive field work in the Faroes, creates here a vivid picture of everyday life and affairs of state over the centuries, using sources ranging from folkloric texts to parliamentary minutes and from census data to travelers' tales. He argues that the Faroes' long economic stagnation preserved an archaic way of life that was seriously threatened by their economic renaissance in the nineteenth century, especially as this was accompanied by a closer political incorporation into Denmark. The Faroese accommodated increasingly profound social change by selectively restating their literary and historical heritage. Their success depended on domesticating a Danish ideology glorifying "folkish" ways and so claiming a nationality separate from Denmark's. The book concludes by comparing the Faroes' nationality-without-nationhood to the contrasting situations of their closest neighbors, Iceland and Shetland. The Faroe Islands is an important contribution to Scandinavian as well as regional and ethnic studies and to the growing literature combining the insights and techniques of anthropology and history. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, it will also appeal to scholars in other fields and to anyone intrigued by the lands and peoples of the North. |
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1 - 5 találat összesen 64 találatból.
... economic, or political isolates. Nonetheless, the Dutch anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain (Boissevain and Friedl 1975:11) has complained: “Trained on literature dealing with comparatively slowly changing, isolated, undifferentiated non ...
... economies after 1856, and the rise of evangelical and temperance movements a generation later. Surely it is no coincidence that these movements arose simultaneously with the deep-water fishery. I assume that the general problem, here as ...
... economy's ability to support the population. In Chapter 5 the scene shifts to Denmark, with which the Faroes became ... economic, and political factors shaping the creation of a formal sense of cultural continuity during changing times ...
... economy was a shambles. When the Estates met that year, commoners and clergy wanted to break the power of the nobility by requiring that noblemen pay taxes and by making the kingship hereditary. Hitherto the king had been elected by the ...
... economic growth and the rise of a native middle class. The Faroese remained free peasants, whose way of life changed little until the nineteenth century. This was not just a matter of oppression from abroad, although that was 22 NORSE ...
Tartalomjegyzék
1 | |
7 | |
Toward a National Culture in an Odd Danish Province | 65 |
Specters and Illusions | 173 |
Governance and Governors | 199 |
Notes | 205 |
References | 231 |
Index | 249 |