Lögberg-Heimskringla - 22.05.1992, Blaðsíða 3

Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 22. maí 1992 • 3
Whose reality is it?, Continued from page 2
Hastrup is to be applauded for
tackling an under-scrutinized
period which until recently was ne-
glected by non-Icelandic historians in
favour of the Commonwealth and
nationalist eras. Nature and Policy
may be particularly useful as a com-
pendium of primary and secondary
sotu-ces germane to the period. Hastrup
is on the right track when she asserts
the primacy of the farm as unit of
By 1890, Icelanders were making
decisions about where to live. They
no longer thought about the one
separate place for all Icelanders, but
looked for the best place to provide a
secure living standard. The farmers
took the opportunity of getting better
land; others strove to obtain the best
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experience in pre-modern Iceland,
although she does not examine the
hierarchy of farms within a given sýsla
(district). Further, this primacy was
not a choice for the majority: labour
laws were intended to stop the estab-
lishment of fishing villages which would
have liberated many from the pater-
nalism of the farm. For scholars unfa-
miliar with Icelandic history, this is a
useful starting point. For those more
engaged in the social analysis of this
possible education, and many became
teachers. Soon all professions were
open to them.
The Icelanders became involved in
all aspects of community living, and
their marriage partners were now
often of non-Icelandic origin.
The result of this greater involve-
ment and mobility was that the Ice-
landers began the slow process of
integration. The joining of forces with
all other national groups has not led
to the loss of their cultural identity,
rather to opportunities for achieve-
ment.
Icelanders believed that they must
be involved in politics. This feeling
was firmly established in the need to
develop the “Laws and Regulations
of New Iceland”. The first Icelander
to be elected to the Manitoba Legis-
lature was Sigtryggur Jónasson. He
was elected in 1896. Since then there
have always been some Icelanders
society, the prolongation of romantic
nationalism and the implicit
exoticization of the “other” are to be
lamented.
In contrast, Island of Anthropology
has less to recommend it. Over half of
the sixteen collected essays are derived
from material available in Nature and
Policy and her Culture and History
in Medieval Iceland (Oxford 1985).
The remainder are minor essays with
significant empirical and analytical
problems. Two articles have justifi-
catory postscripts which respond to
critics (I sympathize with the confer-
ence-goers whose reaction to one pa-
elected to the Provincial govemment
or the Federal government. Many
Icelanders have had cabinet posts.
These include Thomas H. Johnson,
who was also an Acting Premier,
Dr. George Johnson, John
Christianson, Phillip Petursson, and
today, Eric Stefanson.
In 1969, there were five Icelanders
in the Legislature. Today, Icelanders
are proud to have a person of
Ice-landic descent, Hon. George
Johnson, serving as the Lieutenant
Govemor of Manitoba.
Margrjet Benedictsson took an
active part in the women’s suffrage
movement. Women got the right to
vote in 1916 in Manitoba.
In sports, history was made when
a hockey team, the Falcons, made
up almost entirely of players of Icelan-
dic descent, won the first Olympic
World Hockey Championship in 1920.
Svein Sigfussson was an outstanding
track and field athlete. The Leo Johnson
curling rink won the Macdonald Brier
in 1934. Three out of the four curlers
on that rink were of Icelandic descent.
Fred Ingaldson and Herbert Olafson
were great basketball players.
These examples in politics and sports
show the remarkable achievements by
those of Icelandic descent. The same
type of achievement records are evi-
dent in most other endeavours. The list
of people of Icelandic descent who
have achieved success is very long, and
indeed, grows longer every year.
per was “one of incomprehension”
(p.199)). Nowhere, however, are the
errors of fact noted by Iceland special-
ists addressed. Hastrup’s account of
male and female categories, for exam-
ple, has already drawn fire for its
over-interpretations.
Three papers on contemporary
Iceland best illustrate how the
analytical model overdetermines the
data. In order to fit reality to dualistic
structures of male/female, inside/
outside, and culture/nature, Hasfrup
gets basic facts wrong. Contrary to
what she says, the Icelandic sveit
(countryside) is not thought “Iceland
proper” but rather a taxpayers’ burden;
women do hunt, gather, and fish;
men tend cows and women tend
sheep without suffering categorical
displacement; verbúðir (fishworkers’
quarters) are not synonymous with
fishing villages, and Hastrup’s
collapsing of one into the other to
assert that the latter are “the wild”
beyond the social is misleading.
To explain male sexual advances
on her, she might consider that
pornographic magazines and movies
come from her native Denmark,
hence stereotypes about Danish
women. Nor does she report on how
such behaviour is discussed and
judged by Icelanders, both male and
female. Drunkenness is publicly
visible to foreigners in a way that
private sobriety is not, which leads
to frequently-heard stereotypes about
the “wildness” of Reykjavík. “Inside/
outside” dualisms should not be
used as the basis for examination of
drinking pattems, since they do not
fit so rigid and ultimately meaningless
a scheme.
Inexplicable things happen during
fieldwork (and life). But favouring
personal anecdote over ethnographic
detail raises the question of relevance.
For example, she appears to recom-
mend in “The Challenge of the Unreal,”
that anthropologists report on their en-
counters with huldufólk (hidden peo-
ple) to counter an otherwise dull capi-
talist society “where nothing much hap-
pens” and “people have not much to
tell and go about their routines in si-
lence” (p.287).
Hastrup’s descriptions of be-
haviour lack the plausibility she sees
as the basis for proof in non-
positivist anthropology. Her Ice-
landers are not self-reflexive; they
act out pre-determined cultural
scripts rather than actively engage in
creating their social world. Although
lacking in the grand explanatory
powers of “structures of the mind,”
considering Icelanders’ own
explanations would have rendered
her experiences more useful to
readers.
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Why I read L-H
Olga Skaftfeld
Being of Icelandic ancestry, I like to read
about other Icelanders. I also like to try and
read the page in Icelandic, and the comic strip.
It’s also informative about current affairs in
Iceland—which I visited once, and would like
to see again.