Customer Reviews

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

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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.