Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Page 51

EINAFERÐ VÓRU MENN
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fínding it necessary to get their private house
or apartment before marriage and children.
Alone in the house, making dinner and
washing clothes himself, is an unusual sit-
uation for a cowboy, and most likely, if the
case, a desperate and completely unintended
result of an unpredictable path of life. Most
of their time is enjoyed together with fam-
ily and a close group of friends from early
childhood. The cowboys, even if they are
some kind of action-seekers, favour stabil-
ity and routine and avoid involvement in too
many activities with strangers and foreign-
ers. The same party with the same people is
repeated week after week - and it is not con-
sidered as failure to actively reproduce this
predictable leisure life cycle.
Weekend parties and drinking, essential
activities in many young cowboys’ lifestyle,
is the main event gathering the friends and
the topic discussed most intensely during the
rest of the week. This reminds of the life of
boys and men in Niemi’s novel on a North-
ern Swedish rural community (Niemi,
2000). Everyday life symbolises just a break
between climax: weekends. Monday to Fri-
day is boring working time - nothing else is
expected to happen. Friday and Saturday
nights cowboys drink in small groups at
home, then go out to the local disco or pub
to meet friends and seek women. Sunday’s
agenda is, for many party-people, sleeping,
football and, possibly, church attendance.
Many cowboys are from religious families
and live a kind of double life, being both
macho drinking fisherman and Lutheran
protestant with the Bible under the pillow.
The machismo of the cowboys is not con-
sidered scandalous in local community, be-
cause the cowboys, as mentioned, are in gen-
eral quite traditional and locally-oriented
men without any ambition or wish to make
a revolt in local community.
Atlantic cowboys are quite conservative
culturally and detest the urban youth’s ‘fem-
inine’ styles and values. The cowboys be-
lieve that they are the true representatives
of an authentic Faroese masculinity lost by
others. The urban youth is, according to the
cowboys, a weak, feminine, ridicule and
unauthentic (artifícial) group of men.
Some of the cowboys are explicitly anti-
intellectual, disliking people with any kind
of higher education or ambitions of taking
higher education. Reading and studying are,
according to many cowboys, non-masculine
waist of time giving people strange ideas and
useless visionary reflections. Reading and
writing are passive non-physical activities
threatening the identity, nature and virility
of‘real’ men. Some radical cowboys are also
sexist, homophobic and racist, full of con-
tempt and hostility towards society’s mi-
nority and marginal groups. These attitudes
- anchored both in a macho físherman (and
American cowboy) style and value-conser-
vative protestant ethics - reminds of the
British working-class boys presented in the
sociologist Paul Willis’ acclaimed book
Learningto labour{\911). Willis’ Tads’ and
the Faroese cowboys do not tolerate indi-
vidualist behaviour not fítting their narrow
perception of boys and manliness. Many
cowboys have a quite exclusive and cate-
gorical defmition of‘real’ men, consciously
differentiating values, lifestyles and body
language into contrasting male and female
domains. You cannot have both or none -