Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Page 100

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VILLAGE-DWELLING
the imagination of “the-village-as-it-is-
supposed-to-be”. The actual “lived” village
is not necessarily identical to the imagined
village, i.e. the “perceived” and the “con-
ceived” village - for completing the spatial
triade of Henri Lefebvre (1991: 33-46).
“The village” has in a strange way be-
come a myth, but a myth that is co-present
in the contemporary reality, and therefore an
aesthetic part of reality. What is important
to state, is that even though “the village” can
no longer be analyzed as a clearly demar-
cated entity, it is nevertheless semiotically
demarcated in contrast to other villages -
or in contrast to other “non-villageous”
spaces such as the outfield (“hagi”) and the
sea (“hav”). The village is in other words
very related to concepts like “home” and
“security”.
But even if “the village” as a concept still
exists in people’s minds, it is important to
state that the real villages of the Faroes are
developing very differently in these years:
First there are the villages of the periphery
that are supposedly being extincted within
a few decades, or at best will be transformed
into part-time residential areas or vacational-
areas, and thereby in many ways function
as “heterotopias” or “places of otherness”
(as e.g. in Foucault, 1986: 22-27), or places
where escaping the modern is possible to a
certain degree.
Second there are villages that still con-
tain a lot of activity in both the agricultural,
industrial and service-sector and can there-
fore fairly be regarded as communities of
their own.
Third there are villages that are having
success in attracting settlers because of their
relative proximity to other (“urban”) places,
but that are largely emptied out of indus-
tries and services. These villages I prefer to
refer to as “sleeping-villages” and they are
fully dependent on their inhabitants travel-
ling to other places in order to work and con-
sume. The Faroese folklorist Eyðun An-
dreassen has put it this way:
“In the very past years [i.e. in the eighties] there
has been a new tendency, as some of the villages
that are situated in the immediate proximity of
a larger village or town starts to grow. People
settle in the home-village instead of moving and
new [i.e. foreign] settlers move in that are
otherwise not tied to the place. This is among
others because of fair taxation, a more simple
bureaucracy in the municipal administration,
easy access to goods of the nature and the sea
and cheaper building-plots, which by the way
can be a scarcity in the larger plotting-
municipalities; a problem that the small village
can solve for the time being.” (Andreassen,
1992: 287-288, translated from Danish into
English; my comments in parantheses)
This passage was written in the beginning
of the nineties, and now - in 2006 - we see
that this practice of people moving out to the
proximate villages, but still interacting with
the urban areas, has stretched its locale to
cover most of the Faroese mainland. A lo-
cale is “[a]physical region involvedaspart
ofthe setting of interaction, having definite
boundaries which help to concentrata
interaction in one way or another”. (Gid-
dens, 1984: 375, see also 118-24, 164-5)-
When a locale is stretched, this also means
that interactions is less concentrated than id
traditional communities as e.g. the old
Faroese villages.
An interesting fact is that the third type