Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Page 104

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VILLAGE-DWELLING
“taking care of’ (Heidegger, 2000: 33-54),
and if we should stay with Heidegger for a
moment, this should mean that a home that
isn’t taken care of is not an authentic home.
Semiotically there is therefore some reason
in drawing up a continuum on the “most au-
thentic home”:
“Childhood-home > Selfbuilt home > Bought
home > Rented home”
This continuum expresses that the child-
hood-home is more authentic than the self-
built home, which is more authentic than the
bought home etc. When moving out of the
parents’ house the selfbuilt home is clearly
characterized as the first priority, but cir-
cumstances may force one to buy a house
instead - which is “good enough” - or even
to accept living in a rented home, which is
definitely not an acceptable pennanent so-
lution for an ambitious young rural family.
In a strange way the rented home signals that
one is permanently thinking of “moving
away” and that one is therefore less loyal
towards one’s community. Owning one’s
own home is in deed a quite place-tying
practice - if we were to follow the concepts
presented above. Thereby the demand for
home-ownership could easily be seen as a
demand for settlers to become place-tied;
to “settle”.
The generational shift - i.e. growing up
and entering parenthood - is one of the
major identity-projects of Faroese rural
youth, but another important identity-pro-
ject is the reflexive restructuration of the lo-
cale - e.g. village. This does not necessar-
ily mean that the locale has to be extended
geographically, even if this is very much the
case in the Faroes today - especially through
commuting, but that e.g. the village needs
to be re-understood and re-thought, follow-
ing a notion similar to the “rural restructur-
ing” as presented in e.g. Marsden et al■
(1993).
The most common re-thinking of the vil-
lage is that it shifts from a production-unity
to a “coherent set of dwelling-relevant fea-
tures”. Another possible re-thinking of the
village is to de-construct the village and re-
think it as a larger unity - or locale. In the
introduction I presented this as a “stretch”
of the locale made possible by automobil-
ity. But stretching locales has always been
an issue, limited only by the available mo-
bility-technologies. Historically most of the
economic booms in the Faroes have resulted
in (or have been a result of?) a construction
of regional towns, where the most important
cases are Klaksvík that was originally four
small agricultural villages (Guttesen, 1996:
52-55; Nielung, 1968: 175-83); Tvøroyri,
that is a unity of all the small villages around
the Trongisvág-fírth (Jóan Pauli Joensen in
Guttesen, 1996: 92-3; Nielung, 1968: 174-
5) and Runavík that is a unity of several of
the small villages around the eastem side of
the Skála-firth (Finnsson, 2005). Later we
have also seen conglomerations of villages
in Hvannasund (Bærenholdt, 1991; Jørgen
Ole Bærenholdt in Guttesen, 1996: 56-9),
around Sundalagið (Guttesen, 1996: 66-7)
and in Gøta (Kristiansen, 2005). In this last
case there has obviously been a clear shift
from the old village-identity based on one
of the three markatals-villages towards a
united identity for Gøta as a whole. Today
young people hardly speak about respec-