From Centre to Periphery Main Lines of North Atlantic Cultural Development from Medieval to Modern Times Bjarne Stoklund

From Centre to Periphery Main Lines of North Atlantic Cultural Development from Medieval to Modern Times Bjarne Stoklund Stoklund, Bjarne 1992: From Centre to Periphery. Main Lines of North Atlantic Cultural Development from Medieval to Modern Times. - Ethnologia Europaea 22: 51-65. Hitherto, most ethnological and anthropological research on society and culture in the North Atlantic islands has assumed, explicitly or implicitly, a very long, almost unbroken continuity ("the traditional community" or "the old peasant culture") which was superseded in the nineteenth century by a period of trans formation and modernization. This article argues that the history of the islands since their settlement in c. 700-900 has been marked by considerable changes in ecological and economic conditions, and that the small island communities cannot be studied as isolated entities, but should be analysed in terms of their shifting relationships with the rest of Europe. One main thesis is that their development can be described as a movement from an economically and culturally "central" position in the early middle ages through increasing marginalization to the "peripheral" status that was typical of these communities in the centuries of Absolutism. The article seeks to demonstrate that the changes in these centre periphery relations have been of great significance for the society and culture of the islands. Professor Bjarne Stoklund, Department of European Ethnology (University of Copenhagen), Brede Alle 69, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark. The North Atlantic island communities were Geographically, they were very varied, but established as part of the rapid Scandinavian they did have one thing in common: they all expansion in the last third of the first millen possessed resources that allowed them to con nium after the birth of Christ. The wave of tinue the farming culture that the emigrants emigration west from Norway began in the brought with them from their West Norwegian eighth century when settlers arrived in the homeland. It was based on agriculture with island groups lying along the sea route to Ire cattle and sheep farming as the most impor land: the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides. tant element, but supplemented by fishing and While these islands were already inhabited by hunting of various kinds. It was a seafaring Pictish and Gaelic tribes, the Norwegian emi culture, and its maritime expertise was not grants, if they went beyond them to more open only a precondition of the actual settlement; it seas, could find islands with more virgin terri was also the cultural factor that enabled the tory. In the ninth century they settled on the pioneer communities, despite distances of hun Faroes, and in 874, according to tradition, the dreds or even thousands of kilometres, to first landnam man came to Iceland. A century maintain contacts and form a relatively homo later emigrants from Iceland founded two set geneous Nordic culture in this extensive area. tlements in South West Greenland. During the high middles ages the pioneer Within a period of a few hundred years, communities came under the sovereignty of then, a number of independent Norwegian col the Norwegian Crown, and in 1380 they fol onies were created in the North Atlantic area. lowed Norway into the Union with Denmark. 4* 51 Parts of this "archipelago" were however lost in great divide in cultural research is between the transition from the middle ages to modern these scholars on the one hand and the func times: the Norse settlers in Greenland disap tionalists on the other. The functionalist cul peared from history, and the Scottish island tural researchers dissociated themselves from groups came under Scottish rule : the Orkneys the sometimes rather rash attempts to (re)con and Shetlands as a pledge to the Scottish struct the course of development, based more Crown in 1468-69, while the Hebrides had on speculation than documentation. Instead been lost to the "Norwegian realm" as early as they concentrated on the study of culture and 1280. In the post-medieval centuries Iceland society as functioning totalities; they described and the Faroes were governed from Copenha and analysed sociocultural systems at a given gen, and the two island communities remained time, and for good reasons that time was the under Danish rule when Norway was united present day or the period immediately before with Sweden by the Act of Union of 1815. it; for nothing else could be studied that way When the spotlight ofresearch turned to the with even a reasonable degree of certainty. North Atlantic island communities around the The period after about 1960 was typified in turn of the century, they were remote and pov North Atlantic studies as elsewhere by com erty-stricken possessions of the British and munity studies, carried out by both English Danish kingdoms. And the first things to at speaking anthropologists and Scandinavian tract cultural researchers were of course the ethnologists . The communities that were cho archaic features one could encounter here; the sen for such studies were in fact by preference "primitive", the "relics" provided the frame of in peripheral areas of Europe - so-called "tradi reference when researchers tried to recon tionalist" societies still more or less untouched struct their cultural development from an evo by "modernization" . This way the functional lutionist point of view. The archaeologist Aage ists - although their brief is quite different Roussell travelled all over the Scottish island from that of the cultural historians - in reality groups in the 1930s to find material to compare end up with a model almost indistinguishable with the farm sites he had excavated in Green from theirs. Both operate implicitly with a cru land. However, Roussell found much more cial turning-point somewhere in the nine than that; he found that the so-called "black teenth or twentieth century . Before this we houses" in the Hebrides could in reality be in have the "traditional society", "the old peasant terpreted as direct, living descendants of the society" or whatever it is called ; from this there Scandinavian Iron Age houses. They were rel is an almost unbroken line back through time. ics in the evolutionist sense (Roussell 1934). The turning-point marks a radical process of However, cultural research in the area be transformation or modernization, "the advent tween the wars was dominated more by the of the new age", the break-up of something diffusionists and their attempts to discover the ancient and firm-rooted. "routes" of culture. In the same year as Rous Of course such a model is not completely sell was travelling through the Hebrides, the wrong. Much of what could be observed at the Swedish ethnologist Ragnar Jirlow, in an arti end of the last century and the beginning of cle on "aspects of Faroese occupational cul this one, but which was doomed to yield to ture", submitted a textbook example of how "modernization", was in fact phenomena that such a diffusionist analysis could be done (Jir represented continuity throughout as much as low 1931), and about a decade later another a millennium. This is true, for example, of Swedish ethnologist , Ake Campbell, wrote many of the working methods used in North about "the meeting of Celtic and Nordic culture Atlantic occupational life. Yet it is question in the Hebrides" (Campbell 1943/44). able to assume that everything one encounters In reality evolutionists and diffusionists in the so-called traditional communities can agreed on the overall aim of cultural research: simply be projected backwards into the remote the reconstruction of the long lines of Eu past. What looks ancient or primitive is not ropean or global cultural development . So the necessarily so. And one does not need to deal 52 for very long with the history of the North cesses within a system which encompasses Atlantic area before realizing that this is a both centre and periphery. region where one should rather expect radical These and similar ideas have inspired the breaks than a long, unbroken development. American anthropologist Eric R. Wolf to reexa Historical study also makes it obvious that it is mine the classic anthropological field of study. not advisable to view these island communities The "primitive" peoples have been studied ei as isolated entities. It is not only in recent ther as representatives of older stages of global history that the North Atlantic islands have cultural development or as cultures that could been inextricably linked with the rest of the be viewed as isolated totalities. But the history world; this is just as true if one wants to under of such peoples is indissolubly bound up with stand the earlier phases of the cultural devel our own, says Wolf; their culture is not an opment of the area. isolated phenomenon, but must be analysed as If one wishes to view the North Atlantic cul a result of European expansion under the cap ture from these perspectives, there is inspira italist world system (Wolf 1982). tion to be found in the work of some recent scholars who share the following features: I do not intend in the following to apply Imma 1) they try to reinstate a wider historical per nuel Wallerstein's theoretical apparatus to the spective in the cultural and social sciences; and study of the North Atlantic area. But the three 2) they want to view social and cultural change scholars to whom I have referred may be of in a global context. I am thinking first and assistance in underscoring the need to use the foremost of the historian Fernand Braudel, the study of cultural variation in Europe to take sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and the an the long historical view, and to analyse the thropologist Eric R. Wolf. The first two have individual areas as elements in larger, econom worked in parallel throughout the eighties on ically interrelated wholes.

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