Lögberg-Heimskringla - 22.05.1992, Blaðsíða 2

2 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 22. maí 1992
Whose reality
is it?
Nature and Policy in lceland
1400-1800.
By Kirsten Hastrup.
367 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Island of Anthropology:
Studies in Past and Present
lceland.
By Kirsten Hastrup.
339 pp. Odense: Odense University
Press
Review by Ann Brydon
In Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400-
1800, Danish anthropologist
Kirsten Hastrup argues that loss of
culture prompted the deterioration of
living conditions in Iceland during
the 400 years following the onset of
Norwegian (later Danish) rule in
1262-64. Subtitled an analysis of
history and mentality, the book
divides into four parts: “Perspectives,”
“The Social Experience,” “The
Human Condition,” and “Impli-
cations.” An introductory chapter
acknowledges influences from struc-
turalists, Annales historians, and
post-modern anthropologists.
Hastrup writes structural history
which seeks to delve below surface
appearances and reveal structures of
the Icelandic worldview, a task of
“recovering the deeper motivations
and meanings inherent in Icelandic
culture, and of dragging the latent out
of the manifest” (p.306). This work
claims to write from the “inside” of
Icelandic society, yet it is an inside
where individuals do not seem to
participate in, interpret, negotiate, or
even understand the circumstances
of their own existence.
Hastrup addresses Icelanders’ fail
ure to overcome natural hard-
ships and constrictive Danish policies.
Anthropologlst Ann Brydon is a post-doc-
toral research fellow at the University of Win-
nipeg. A book by Dr. Brydon on lcelandic
Nationalism and the whaling issue will appear
in late 1993.
She concludes that, because their
worldview was out of step with objec-
tive history, Icelanders were unable to
experience events as they occurred
since events are perceivable only
when a worldview can account for
them. Icelanders’ purported (but con-
tradicted, in a chapter on foreign
relations) lack of interaction with
other cultures meant that their being
hungry, cold, and exploited was only
knowable when compared to life
during the earlier Freestate period
(Hastrup’s use of this 19th-century
Danish-derived term rather than the
Icelandic “insider” category “Common-
wealth” is anomalous). She attributes
social disintegration during this era of
a tightening Danish trade monopoly
to the “dominant metaphors” of the
saga era, and “the ‘failure’ of the Ice-
landers to adjust their concepts to the
early modem reality” (p.9). Victims of
conservatism, Icelanders groped
through events they understood
only through an outmoded tax-
onomy: they “retreated to an imag-
inary time when history was ‘right’ ”
(p.286).
That Icelanders had been disarmed
by Danish authorities, that trading with
the British was punished by beatings,
that labour contracts and tenancy
laws entrapped most (but benefitted
some, hence their existence), and that
even a short length of rope was a
scarce item in an impoverished land,
are not given explanatory weight. In-
stead, Hastmp sees “nature” encroach-
ing on the social, dehumanizing
the majority of the population and
prompting them to stop fishing and
mending their fences, and to begin
committing incest: “reality itself was
discarded as anomalous because it
no longer fitted the old language”
(p.291).
Borrowing Braudel’s idea of
“mental prisons,” Hastrup argues
that “Icelanders were actually impris-
oned by their own mentality” (p.4).
Human agency is not absent, argues
the author, since individuals “own
the keys to their own prison” (ibid.).
Having separated “objective history”
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KIRSTEN HASTRUP
NATURE AND POLICY
IN ICELAND
1400—1800
An Anthropological Analysis ol’
History and Mentality
CI.ARF.NDON PRESS
'XFORD
from “subjective experience,” she
fails to account for how that experi-
ence is directly constituted in local
power structures and exploitative
colonial practices.
Hastrup’s discussion of witchcraft
illustrates this point. She de-
scribes several cases in fascinating
detail. She then focuses on extant
notions of occult knowledge in Ice-
land, and how they combined with
a European conceptualization of
witchcraft. Yet the analysis does not
clarify questions of intention nor
why men were almost always the
target of accusations. Contextual in-
formation which might connect
witchcraft accusations to the abuses
of administrative and priestly power
is minimal. We gain little insight into
how 17th- and 18th-century Danish
authorities and local Icelandic elites
used and manipulated witchcraft
accusations for personal ends. Curi-
ously, the author does not cite Eggert
Olafsson, an 18th-centuiy writer to
whom she refers frequently else-
where, who lamented the victim-
ization of the poor and vagrant for
purposes of property gain.
Hastrup discusses problems entailed
with interpreting historical sources
only briefly: “in the present work, the
normative sources and the general
system of concepts have not been
deemed inferior to the records of
‘actual’ life” (p.7). Vocabularies and
rhetorics are taken as taxonomies of
the Icelandic mind, regardless that
writers came from a self-interested
elite operating within specific religious
and legal colonial discourses.
Contlnued on page 3
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