Thomas King

E. Paul Durrenberger

Those who are involved with fishing and fisheries resource management—including fishermen, their communities, production, processing, distribution, and marketing industries, and various government and non-governmental organizations—confront the contradictions arising from the appropriation, allocation, and distribution of fisheries and marine resources in a variety of ways. The authors call into question the assumptions of policy prescriptions to common resource problems by examining the experiences of people and societies confronted with and adapting to these resource appropriation, allocation, and distribution problems. They suggest that tragedies of resource depletion and institutional failure to deal with them are not characteristic of human nature, but rather are by products of particular cultural practices, institutions, and assumptions. The detailed, empirical ethnographic study of these relationships holds great potential for informing those who are making future policy decisions as well as contributing to the theories of human behavior and cooperation to solve such problems.

Power, Policy, and Practice

State and Community in Fisheries Management

Gísli Pálsson

These papers on the anthropology of Iceland were presented at a conference in Iowa City, Iowa in May 1987, and include historical and archaeological studies, the position of women in society and a chapter on Icelandic-Canadians in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Anthropology of Iceland

Gisli Palsson

The Anthropology of Iceland presents the first perspectives on Icelandic anthropology from both Icelandic and foreign anthropologists. The thirteen essays in this volume are divided into four themes: ideology and action; kinship and gender; culture, class, and ethnicity; and the Commonwealth period of circa 930 to 1220, which saw the flowering of sagas. Insider and outsider viewpoints on such topics as the Icelandic women's movement, the transformation of the fishing industry, the idea of mystical power in modern Iceland, and archaeological research in Iceland merge to form an international, comparative discourse. Individually and collectively, by bringing the insights of anthropology to bear on Iceland, the native and foreign authors of this volume carry Iceland into the realm of modern anthropology, advancing our understanding of the island's people and the practice of anthropology.

Everyday Lives and Global Contexts

Images of Contemporary Iceland

Gambling Debt is a game-changing contribution to the discussion of economic crises and neoliberal financial systems and strategies. Iceland’s 2008 financial collapse was the first case in a series of meltdowns, a warning of danger in the global order. This full-scale anthropology of financialization and the economic crisis broadly discusses this momentous bubble and burst and places it in theoretical, anthropological, and global historical context through descriptions of the complex developments leading to it and the larger social and cultural implications and consequences. Chapters from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, economists, and key local participants focus on the neoliberal policies—mainly the privatization of banks and fishery resources—that concentrated wealth among a select few, skewed the distribution of capital in a way that Iceland had never experienced before, and plunged the country into a full-scale economic crisis. Gambling Debt significantly raises the level of understanding and debate on the issues relevant to financial crises, painting a portrait of the meltdown from many points of view—from bankers to schoolchildren, from fishers in coastal villages to the urban poor and immigrants, and from artists to philosophers and other intellectuals. This book is for anyone interested in financial troubles and neoliberal politics as well as students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, economics, philosophy, political science, business, and ethics. Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Gambling Debt

Dorothy Durrenberger

The fulfilment of a prophetic dream takes a young man from his troubled teenage years in medieval Iceland to his death in a duel with his love rival in a foreign land. Thorsteinn, son of the prominent Egill Skalla-Grimsson, also of saga fame, dreams two men will fight and die over his daughter, and that she will marry a third man. When his father forbids the headstrong Gunnlaugur from traveling to foreign lands, he takes refuge with Thorsteinn, where he studies law and becomes close to his daughter, Helga the fair. At eighteen, the stubborn and proud Gunnlaugur betroths himself to Helga and arranges with her father for her to wait for him for three years while he is away. While abroad, Gunnlaugur gets in and out of trouble with various kings and gains a reputation as both a poet and a warrior. With a show of arrogance at the court of the Swedish king, he makes an enemy of another Icelandic poet, Hrafn, who had befriended him. Having sworn to disgrace Gunnlaugur, Hrafn returns to Iceland to ask for Helga in marriage as the three years she was to wait have passed. Delayed in his travels, Gunnlaugur returns the day of the wedding but can not stop it. Gunnlaugur challenges Hrafn to the last duel ever fought in Iceland, but kinsmen and friends of both prevent the fight. The two travel to Sweden where they meet and fight. Both die as foretold in Thorsteinn's dream. Dreaming of Gunnlaugur, Helga dies in the arms of her second husband, a third poet, as the dream foretold. There the saga ends. In addition to the translation of the saga, this book contains an anthropological analysis of the saga and saga writing in medieval Iceland. Beyond relating events, this saga, like others of its genre, is an expression of the totemic system of the primitive society that produced it, a stratified society without the institutions of a state. The analysis of the saga shows its richly textured patterns of opposition and similarity, its complex analogical logic, and its fascinating mirror-image arrangement of events centering around the fatal insults between Gunnlaugur and Hrafn in Sweden. Since the saga is a product of a totemic society, the authors preserve that dimension in their translation. Rather than trying to smooth over the work to "elevate" it to modern standards of the novel, they preserve the texture of oppositions, similarities, and analogies that make the saga what it is.

The Saga of Gunnlaugur Snake's Tongue

Suzan Erem

American labor leaders are constantly developing new programs to revive the union movement. What happens when these plans collide with the daily lives of front-line union staff and members? This book examines the often conflicting interests of key players in the trenches of a national effort to bring back the American labor movement. Brutally honest, funny, never dull, this anthropological ethnography shows the daily struggles of union members today to bring about positive change and hold together their urban labor union in an era of globalization, outsourcing, and deindustrialization. A union activist and an anthropologist (the authors) pair up to offer insideoutside views of labor unions and of how anthropological fieldwork is done. Explaining, coaching, and warning Paul of hazards, Suzan, the communications director for the Local, provides inside views and details of day-to-day interactions. Paul, the anthropologist, provides outside analytical views that related Suzan's experiences and his own observations to the wider view anthropology offers through ethnography, holism, and comparativism. The result is a story of one dynamic union local, one anthropological study, and the lit fuse that connects them until the end.

E. Paul Durrenberger

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