Images of Contemporary Iceland
Iceland tends to present an image of a homogenous island population with a long and well-recorded history—an apparently ideal subject for anthropologists looking for neat boundaries, a self-contained culture, and a natural laboratory. Vigorously and refreshingly, the eleven essays in Images of Contemporary Iceland challenge this notion of the cultural and historical island with reference to ethnography and theory, emphasizing instead the flow of cultural constructs in a global world.
Focusing on Iceland's shifting, continually manufactured present, not its stereotypical past, the contributors in this spirited volume look at the changing images of Iceland as well as at the forces critical for this change: the chaotic flow of images and identities in the global context, cultural constructions of gender and landscape, the politics of custom and history, and the plurality of viewpoints. In these essays we hear the multiple voices of ages, gender, class, and locale as they move through the landscapes of domestic violence, environmentalists, nationalists, tourists, fish-processing plants, presidential politics, and electronic media.
Collectively, the essayists in Images of Contemporary Iceland emphasize the importance of moving from text to life, to ethnography, assessing the lived experiences of real people. Calling for a reorientation of anthropology, they recreate the concept of culture itself and reveal Iceland not as an isolated natural laboratory but as one vantage point in the shifting streams of events and images.