Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Page 108

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VILLAGE-DWELLING
conformity is most of all a positive quality
of the (imagined) place and not an existen-
tial quality of everyday life.
What is at stake here is the entire concept
of a village life-mode as proposed by e.g.
Bærenholdt (1991: e.g. 345) who has de-
fined four different village life-modes: “car-
ing-peasant” (omsorgsbonde), “físher-peas-
ant’’ (fiskerbonde), “fish-worker” (firkerar-
bejder) and “caring-wage-earner” (omsorgs-
lønarbejder). These life-forms were the-
matically typologized by empirical studies
in the distant village-conglomerate Hvan-
nasund/Norðdepil. I am heavily in doubt
whether these life-modes can be transposed
to the mobile reality of the mainland of
today, where the villages are automobilely
in access to the towns. When (or if) living
in the village is only differing from living
in the town from an aesthetic or/and a form-
ative point of view, but is functionally inte-
grated with the “surrounding” society (or so-
cieties), we should perhaps no longer keep
up the distinction between village and town,
that has been constituted as a major “social
faultline” in the Faroes for several decades.
The linguistic distinctions “town><village”,
“new><old”, “modernxtraditional”, “pro-
gressivexreactive” etc. that have been so
predominant in the Faroese society - as in
many other comparable societies - are per-
haps loosing their substantial counterparts.
There is no obvious reason why youth from
a rural village should necessarily be more
“conservative” than youth from the town. In
practice most youth does share a similar set
of cultural references, because of the na-
tionwidening of youth-culture (e.g. through
large festivals in stead of the old local fairs
and gatherings) and youth-education (as a
large part of the young generations are now
able to meet young people from other re-
gions on a daily base, creating new networks
that transcend the villages).
It seems to me quite clear that Faroese
youth to day has - in large - escaped from
the village-ties and is now acting on inter-
regional, national or even international
scales. If we accept the notion of the Faroese
mainland constituting a network-city in the
making, then the rural youth is in fact being
integrated into the general life-mode of this
network-city. Whether this should be seen
as a rural or an urban life-mode (as distin-
guished by Thomas Højrup, 1989: 65-72)
could be discussed for ages, but perhaps one
should rather abandon any such “rural>
<urban”-distinctions and accept that the
globalization is now reembedding the social
structures of societies, hereby integrating
most social contexts on a broader level.
From this point of view, living in a
Faroese village today should therefore rather
be seen as an aesthetic project, which allows
us to talk about a “rural life-style”, being
only one of many possible life-styles in the
of society. Living in the village is most ot
all a result of dwelling-preferences (a con-
cept borrowed from Ærø 2002). One choo-
ses to live in the village, because one wants
and/or likes to live in the village (aestheti-
cally); not because one has to (existentially)-
One is connected to the village; not tied to
the village. The village is a chosen (or imag-
ined) community; not a community of des-
tiny.
This does not mean that this chosen com-
munity is solely aesthetic or symbolic. Ac-