In Place: Spatial and Social Order in a Faeroe Islands Community [Paperback]

Dennis Gaffin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1995

As one of the Scandinavian nations, the Faeroe Islands can prove instructive to the study of regionalism and multi-ethnicity in European culture areas. In this first published ethnography about the people of the Faeroe Islands, Gaffin focuses on ecology and "place." Having settled in for a year of fieldwork in 1983, he and his wife became part of the friendly and public lives of this remote setting, with its natural beauty and its honorable and egalitarian social traditions. In repeat visits he learns more and more of the places and the people whose very names come from these hard cliffs and shallow soil, these long centuries of singing and cooperating, the wry wit and the understated social codes. Relatively unknown to Western society, the Faeroe Islands provide an important case study in the contemporary combination of traditional home-based subsistence techniques such as fowling, whaling, and shepherding with a modern international commercial fishing economy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc (November 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0881338796
• ISBN-13: 978-0881338799
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #157,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An anthropologist explores daily village life, February 3, 2002

By 

saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Place: Spatial and Social Order in a Faeroe Islands Community (Paperback)

Dennis Gaffin, an American anthropologist, spent a year studying the phenomenon of social control in an outlying Faeroese village. The resulting book is a surprisingly readable first-person narrative, not a turgid, theoretical work like so much academic writing. Gaffin's book is a description of how a small Faroese village functions - what people do for a living, their worldview, and the forces through which social norms are enforced. The topic of spatial order, to which the title refers, receives relatively little attention, with the exception that the author devotes a chapter to the issue of placenames. This book is principally about how a society pressures people to behave "properly" as defined in that culture.

I will long remember the description of how, in this isolated treeless village, every movement of every person is closely scrutinized and gossipped about. In such a close-knit, claustrophobic society with its geographic isolation, harsh weather, and suffocating social pressures, I'm amazed that more people don't turn into psychopaths or drunkards. Some readers might prefer Susanna Kaysen's "Far Afield," which covers the identical material in the form of a novel. However, I preferred Gaffin's non-fiction narrative to Kaysen's work of fiction.