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

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.