Images of contemporary Iceland : everyday lives and global contexts / edited by Gisli Palsson and E. Paul Durrenberger.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Gísli Pálsson, 1949-

Durrenberger, E. Paul, 1943-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--Iceland.

Ethnology.

Iceland--Social life and customs.

Iceland.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 274 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, 1996.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Iceland tends to present an image of a homogeneous island population with a long and well-recorded history - an apparently ideal subject for anthropologists looking for neat boundaries, a self-contained culture, and a natural laboratory. Vigorously and refreshingly, the eleven essays in Images of Contemporary Iceland challenge this notion of the cultural and historical island with reference to ethnography and theory, emphasizing instead the flow of cultural constructs in a global world. Focusing on Iceland's shifting, continually manufactured present, not its stereotypical past, the contributors in this spirited volume look at the changing images of Iceland as well as at the forces critical for this change: the chaotic flow of images and identities in the global context, cultural constructions of gender and landscape, the politics of custom and history, and the plurality of viewpoints. In these essays we hear the multiple voices of age, gender, class, and locale as they move through the landscapes of domestic violence, environmentalists, nationalists, tourists, fish-processing plants, presidential politics, and electronic media.

Contents:

Contents; Preface; 1. Introduction; Part I. Contested Images of Nature; 2. Whale-Siting: Spatiality in Icelandic Nationalism; 3. A Sea of Images: Fishers, Whalers, and Environmentalists; 4. The Politics of Production: Enclosure, Equity, and Efficiency; Part II. Nation and Gender; 5. Housework and Wage Work: Gender in Icelandic Fishing Communities; 6. The Mountain Woman and the Presidency; 7. Motherhood, Patriarchy, and the Nation: Domestic Violence in Iceland; Part III. Nature and Nation; 8. Premodern and Modern Constructions of Population Regimes; 9. Every Icelander a Special Case

10. Literacy Identity and Literacy Practice 11. The Wandering Semioticians: Tourism and the Image of Modern Iceland; Contributors; References; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-265) and index.

ISBN:

9781587291777

1587291770

OCLC:

44964719