Looduse ja kultuuri kohtumised Islandil = The Encounters of Nature and Culture in Iceland

• Main Author: Kuldkepp, M
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Natural-cultural dichotomy; natural culture; Iceland; medieval; national romanticism; historical ecology
• Online Access: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10038600/1/Looduse_ja_kultuuri_kohtumised_Islandil.pdf; https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10038600/

The aim of the article is to challenge the conventional distinction between nature and culture, while simultaneously demonstrating the heuristic purpose of this distinction in certain contexts. An illustration is the link between Icelandic nature and culture, as Icelandic cultural history offers particularly good examples of how national culture has been largely constructed through the concept of nature, and the nature, in turn, has been dealt with either in purely ethnic categories or in one aspect of the national culture. Thus, the introduction of an ecological point of view in a problematic may require, firstly, to disassociate "nature and culture" insofar as they are both entangled in the mythical categories of national ideology, before it becomes possible to take a more comprehensive approach from the basis of new, more critical grounds. The article examines the impact of human activity on Icelandic nature, as well as how nature became a permanent and dominant part of Icelandic nationalist discourse in the 19th century. Iceland is an appropriately krestomatic focal point for the analysis of the relationship between culture and nature, both because the wildlife there is sufficiently fragile and insignificant, traces of human activity for a long time, and also because Icelandic cultural history is rarely well documented from the Middle Ages to the present day. There is no doubt that nature is one of the most commonly emerging factors both in Icelandic as well as in Icelandic aliens. With all this in mind, one can hope that the example of Iceland will also be able to draw conclusions regarding other (natural) crops as regards the third.