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 57 találatból.
... I have hurried past some well-studied events and periods and have treated others in an unconventional way. In Chapter 1, for example, I have failed to treat Faereyinga saga in depth, and in Chapter 5 I have stressed 4 THE FAROE ISLANDS.
... example, as do the political sociology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the operation of village economies after 1856, and the rise of evangelical and temperance movements a generation later. Surely it is no ...
... example, on the eve of the Reformation, the bailiff of Bergen, Jørgen Hansen, received the Faroes as a fief and was granted exclusive trading rights. He was succeeded in 1529 by the Hamburger Thomas Koppen. Koppen died in 1553, and for ...
... example, the theoretically less absolute monarchy of France under Louis XIV. Students of Danish history will rightly protest that this account of the period from 1523 to 1655 has overlooked the glories of Christian IV's reign; the ...
... example, when the Faroese protested that the merchant had refused to buy the few stockings they had, “though they had nothing else,” he answered that he was rejecting only those that “are worth little or nothing,” for “God knows that ...
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 |