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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... modern “Nordic enigma”: “Our concern should be to see whether the Nordic world is indeed distinctive, whether it differs significantly from a world called Europe, or another called America. Beyond that, we need to see whether the five ...
... modern Faroese culture struck me in a rather different way in the village where I began doing fieldwork the next year. For one of the first things I was told (and told repeatedly) was the story of how the village had been founded in ...
... modern literary and historical works. Here I review in a comparative light the main social, economic, and political factors shaping the creation of a formal sense of cultural continuity during changing times; and I look briefly at how ...
... modern development of Faroese culture with the islands' Viking discovery, because as this heroic legacy has been recalled in modern times and as it was shared with other nations of the North, it proved a crucial element in the process ...
... (modern Trondheim). The bishops were chosen, mostly from among their own number, by the canons of the cathedral minster in Bergen. Except perhaps for Hilarius, who held office in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the ...
Tartalomjegyzék
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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 |