Finding their place: islands as locus and focus

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to discuss aspects of the relation between islands, ‘islandness’, and representations of islands. ¹ The starting point is the striking contrast between the immense diversity of islands in the world on the one hand, and the standardized genre of ‘the island’ on the other. This contrast provokes ontological and methodological questions pertinent to the field of island studies, emanating out of a number of dichotomies central to the field, such as ‘real’ versus metaphoric, manifest versus latent, and locus versus focus. Here, I will reflect upon the relation between physical islands and islands ‘of the mind’, first by addressing the role of islands in my own academic branch, ethnology, and then by discussing some implications of the ‘cognitive turn’ in ethnology for its primary object of study. After a brief discussion of a variation of the problem known among anthropologists as the ‘locus-focus debate’, I turn to a discussion of the ‘real versus metaphoric deployment of islands’ in island studies. In the last section I return to the key issue of my own studies of islands: how to grapple with the homogeneity of ‘the island’ and the overwhelming diversity of islands.

Introducing the problem

Consider to begin with the overwhelming number of islands in the world. A recent calculation points to some 680 billion, including 8,800,000 ‘islets’ (with an area of from 100 m² to 10 km²) and 672,000,000 ‘rocks’ (with an area from one square foot to 100 m²). ² All of them are different.

In contrast, the representations of islands in, say, tourist brochures, are all but different. Which of all these islands are described here? ³

A first answer is that the examples are, in turn, from tourist brochures of Saaremaa (Estonia); Gotland (Sweden); the Stockholm Archipelago (Sweden); Bornholm (Denmark) and Prince Edward Island (Canada). The second answer is that they could have been from just about any island tourist office. ⁴ They are examples of a generic island speech, a uniform, globalized discourse that seems to hover rather freely over the islands it is supposed to refer to.

And herein lies the problem. In the representations of islands in tourist brochures, in novels, music, pictures, films, or in academic literature, what of the overwhelming diversity of islands, of islanders, of island lives? Godfrey Baldacchino has described the field of island studies as ‘grappling with uncovering the patterning of uniformity in a sea of revealing diversity, as well as with revealing the diversity persisting in an age of encroaching uniformity’. ⁵ As a Swedish ethnologist, currently working on a project dealing with cultural representations and imagined futures of islands in the Baltic Sea, this is precisely my predicament, grappling with the homogenized and standardized genre of ‘the island’ on the one hand, and the immense diversity of islands on the other.

This brings up fundamental questions about the relations between the discourses about islands and islands as physical spaces, between islands as metaphors (or models) and as lived realities. As representations are the focus of my study, the question becomes: what about the island as locus? Does it really matter which island you choose to study, when you in any case will end up dealing with just about any island? As Lisa Fletcher cogently points out, the ‘weak point in the epistemology and methodology of island studies since its emergence in the early 1990’s has been (and continues to be) in its attempt to reconcile a commitment to studying the facts of islands and island life with an interest in their representation’. ⁶ In essence, the underlying problem, the relationship between form and matter, a variation of a problem discussed already by Aristotle, raises the fundamental ontological question about what constitutes reality. To paraphrase Aristotle’s argument: if there is a reality where things like islands objectively exist, what then to make of the picture or idea of the same islands that we make in our minds? ⁷ Poignant to the field of island studies are also the methodological implications: if islands are to be studied as representations, images, ideas, what to make of all the islands as physical places? And perhaps even more pertinent to this fieldworking ethnologist/ethnographer: what to make of the diversity per se? By which analytical means and strategies can the immense diversity of islands be preserved and represented in ethnology and island studies?

Islands in ethnology: from manifest to latent

In Sweden, as in the Nordic countries at large, ethnology has gone through an explosive development. Born in the 19th century, the subject became institutionalized in academia in the 1920s as ‘folk life research’; studies of the folklore and material culture of the vanishing peasant society of the last two to three centuries. During a turbulent phase in the 1960s and 1970s, the subject was transformed to ethnology, a close relative of anthropology and cultural studies, dealing with studies of contemporary culture in the broadest possible sense.

However broad, ‘island studies’ is still not a recognized field of inquiry in Swedish, Scandinavian or Nordic ethnology at large. There are some ethnological studies about islands and island life, as well as a number of studies situated on islands. ⁸ This should not be surprising, considering the very large number of islands in Swedish speaking areas, well over 250,000, ⁹ and that the first Swedish professor in ethnology, Nils Lithberg, was an islander, from Gotland. Yet, you could not, and still cannot, speak of a Swedish ‘island ethnology’. Even though Sweden most likely is the second only to Canada largest island-nation in the world, its national self-image is thoroughly continental. At best, islands have been used as conveniently well-defined geographical spaces, microcosms, laboratories or platforms for studies of material culture, folk belief, ritual, narratives, revival, religiosity, story-telling, and later on also for studies of play, experience industry, heritage politics, gender, locality, ethnicity and identity, issues that together make up a core of Swedish ethnology in the late 20th century. But, in most cases the island as such is not considered, nor is the diversity of islands in the vast Swedish-speaking archipelagos or island-scapes. To most ethnologists the island is a mere locus, not the focus of study, and as locus it is generalized to the extent that it becomes substitutable to just about any other place.

However, from another angle islands have played a decisive role in the formation of Scandinavian ethnology. From the first studies in Swedish ethnology, such as ‘Värend och virdarne’, ¹⁰ an exemplary study about a region in south Sweden and its population published already in the 1860s, through studies in the 1920s to the 1950s of villages, folk music, narratives, beliefs and other forms of folk culture, and to the studies of local communities and ethnic groups of the 1970s and 1980s, there is a remarkable resemblance between notions of ‘folk/local/ethnic culture’ and the figure of ‘the island’. ¹¹ As noted by Godfrey Baldacchino, ‘islands are prototypical ethno-scapes’, and as such ‘spearhead the study of the production of locality’. ¹² Among the common traits that make up the idea of ‘the island’, he finds ‘geographical boundedness, historical distinctiveness, biotic diversity and endemism, linguistic nuances, cultural specifics, innovative governance practices and ‘pseudo-development’ strategies’. ¹³ In effect, a whole set of central concepts in Scandinavian ethnology are precisely just that, constructed as prototypical ethno-scapes, islands of sorts, bounded, archaic and endemic. There are, to begin with, the favoured concepts of traditional Scandinavian folk life research, such as by (village), bygd (district), socken (parish), landskap (region), and reliktområde (relict area). And then there are also the core concepts of a more contemporary ethnology, from ‘local community’ and ‘ethnic group’, to ‘nation’ and ‘culture’.

What these concepts share with the figure of ‘the island’ is the idea of culture as a consequence of place, an aspect of geography. The association of ‘folk’ and ‘culture’ with the bounded and remote, archaic and endemic, have made islands and islanders, islandness and insularity, not only typical, but prototypical, even constitutive to the ‘mythical geography’ of the modern western world, ¹⁴ and to the mapping of its centres and peripheries, as well as to the mapping of cultural belongings. ¹⁵ A case could even be made for the idea of ‘folk culture’ being a translation or transposition of a common and widespread figure already at hand: ‘the island’. My argument is thus that the figure of ‘the island‘ has been, and still is, constitutive to ethnology, theoretically, methodologically and empirically, due to its importance as an exemplar in the Kuhnian sense, an unproblematized point of departure for a large number of studies of folk culture. ¹⁶ No wonder, then, if villages, regions, provinces and later ethnic groups and cultures, have been cast as islands in a foreign sea, and if their inhabitants have been cast as prototypical ‘traditional’ islanders, bounded, remote, endemic and archaic.

The apparent disinterest, even neglect, of the place as such in ethnological studies, and of the inherent diversity of places, can be explained by the construction of the ethnological discipline, of its research goals and strategies. The central goal of Scandinavian ethnology has from the very beginning been to explore ‘människan som kulturvarelse’, which perhaps best translates as ‘mankind as cultural being’. However, the road to this goal has changed. Traditional folklife researchers and contemporary ethnologists share an interest in the everyday lives of ordinary people. But while the traditional folklife researchers turned to the physical context and the material world, contemporary ethnologists have turned to the world of ideas and language. ¹⁷

From early on Scandinavian ethnologists developed an active interest if not in diversity as such, so at least in variation. ‘Cultural variation’ became a central catch-word among Scandinavian ethnologists, a development which the interest in material culture, as well as the theoretical models and analytical methods, opened for. According to the diffusionistic theoretical models of the period, the variations were to be mapped and explained with reference to their geographic distribution. In this way the diversity/variation of the studied phenomena became constitutive of the scientific project and at least partly represented in the resulting studies.

With the introduction of a cognitive notion of culture and a phenomenological epistemology in the 1960s and 1970s, the interest moved from artefacts, customs and folklore to ideas and perceptions, rules, values and symbols. ¹⁸ Now, by close examination of the manifest, concrete, local, distinctive and unique, and by the use of a number of distancing techniques, such as classification, systematization and description, ethnologists were to produce a bird’s eye view that should allow them to reach the latent, abstract and general level, to which then the ethnologists’ key analytical concepts were to be ascribed, such as ‘meaning’, ‘symbol’ ‘structure’, ‘function’, or ‘culture’.

The cognitive turn in Scandinavian ethnology was largely inspired by anthropology. The founding cornerstone was the idea that behind the world’s stunning complexity and diversity, the skilled analyst will find a small number of common principles or structures at a very high level of generalization. This way of visualizing the world, as a latent coherent whole, a ‘culture’, hidden under, over, or behind a manifest jumble is a symbolic generalization (again in the Kuhnian sense) that became the ontological foundation of much ethnological research during the discipline’s expansive period in the last part of the last century. ¹⁹

Cultural research is possible only with a notion of something ‘cultural’. ²⁰ But again, this something called ‘cultural’ can be understood in only so many ways. Among the problematic consequences of this particular way of understanding ‘man as cultural being’, in this context one particular stands out as the more important: the implicit hierachization that follows from the dichotomization of the world into a manifest and a latent level. In practice it is not difficult to see that the manifest level more often than not becomes treated as a secondary ‘surface’ that the ethnologist has to penetrate to reach the primary underlying object of study, a world of latent structures, functions or meanings. As the studies become more analytically focused on cultural processes and underlying meanings, and as the way of representing such results need more of imaginative writing than of maps and detailed descriptions of material culture, the variations within the studied phenomena become less accentuated and represented.

A consequence of such an implicit hierarchization is that it appears as though the manifest material world stands in the way, and that the ethnologist risks getting stuck or lost in the diversity and complexity of the physical world. Another notable consequence is a principal difference between ‘ordinary people’, so deeply embedded in their life-worlds that they are incapable of grasping what is going on behind or around them, and the experts and researchers that are presumably equipped with this capacity. This brings about not only issues of ethics and politics of representation, but also of the relation between such representations and the represented phenomenon, and, fundamentally, of how the diversity of the phenomenon is to be understood. To come back to my island studies case – if the views and holdings of ordinary people are understood as principally secondary to the researcher’s analytical concepts and models – what then becomes of the voices and perspectives of all the islanders out there?

Islands as locus or focus

‘The locus of study is not the object of study’, Clifford Geertz summarized the anthropological order of things in his famous essay ‘Thick description’ published 1973. ²¹ Soon this stance, together with the notion of ‘thick description’, became favoured also in Scandinavian ethnology. In short, this idea, a focal point of the ‘ethnological gaze’, and a founding idea of a methodology known in Scandinavia as ‘cultural analysis’, ²² could be summarized as: wherever you go to study things cultural, go beyond the manifest and reach for the latent, for culture itself. However problematized in recent decades from many perspectives – folkloristics, postcolonial theory, discourse theory, gender studies – it remains a founding cornerstone of much Scandinavian ethnology. And, it must be admitted, it has been a most productive one, both in terms of quantity and quality.

Among the many problems this stance brings about, one seems especially pertinent in relation to my ethnological island studies project: if the locus of study, the place, and the people, their ideas and artefacts, all the complex phenomena that every researcher has to start with, is reduced merely to secondary tracers, a trampoline to jump away from to more abstract and presumably more important spheres, such as underlying structures, functions, or meanings, what then becomes of the overwhelming diversity of islands?

Looking back at his fieldwork in a black neighborhood in Washington DC in the late 1960s, Ulf Hannerz, a founding father of ‘urban anthropology’, reflects over the consequences of the methodology that followed from anthropology’s way of representing the field:

As I did my work in the Winston Street neighborhood, the city was only the locus of study, not its focus. Apart from the more general concern with cultural analysis, the more specific thematic interests which related most directly to my work were the ‘culture of poverty’ debate, questions of ethnicity and minority relations, sex roles and socialization, and Afro-American social and cultural history. I did not pay much concentrated attention to the facts that the Winston Street people were urbanites, and the particular city they were in also contained the White House and the Capitol. ²³

As Hannerz explains, his way of understanding and approaching Afro-American black culture made him oblivious to where the black community actually was situated. In effect, the place, one of the most important cities in the USA, became exchangeable to just about any other place, secondary only to a number of what Hannerz calls ‘thematic interests’, such as culture of poverty, ethnicity and sex roles. Hannerz’s response to this obvious methodological and theoretical impasse was to build on an urban anthropology that, rather than dealing with some segments of city life, was to devote itself to urbanism as such, concern itself with towns and cities as social forms, emphasize complexity, heterogeneity, differentiation, and deal ‘with this as a whole rather than evading it by dealing only with some smaller and more homogenous part of it’. ²⁴

Looking back at her fieldwork on the islands of Rügen and Usedom, in the south part of the Baltic Sea, German cultural anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus makes a similar reflection. She notices how anthropologists often treat islands merely as a locus, a territorially defined unit or a paradigm, rather than as an object of research per se. Using Anthony Cohen’s study of Whalsay, Shetland, as the example, ²⁵ she argues that ‘the island as focus’ thus vanishes from the traditional anthropological horizon. In the same vein as Hannerz, she advocates an anthropology with the island as focus, an anthropology of the island based on an anthropology on islands. ²⁶

For anthropologists like Hannnerz and Greverus, as indeed for many ethnologists, passing on from studies of certain particularities to broader cultural phenomena, such as from cities to urbanism, age groups to ageing, sex roles to gender, ethnic groups to ethnicity, multiple cultures to the organization of diversity, has meant an important and productive step forward. Also, island studies have developed along much the same route, from studies of specific island phenomena, or specific islands, to a broad field centering around islandness and insularity. ²⁷ Such a reformulation could well be an answer to my questions about how to come to grips with the relation between the standardized genre of ‘the island’ on the one hand and the immense diversity of islands on the other. But, however broad and multidisciplinary, an island studies field concerned with islandness or insularity will inevitably also have to somehow tackle the relations between manifest and latent, and between islands as locus and focus. And, in so doing, it will also have to find ways to represent the inherent diversity of a world of islands.

Real versus metaphoric

Of fundamental concern to island studies is of course what constitutes islands and islandness, a question that inevitably will lead to where the islands of study are located, in geography, discourse, or both. Much of the discussion builds on an undertheorized and broadly accepted dichotomization between manifest and latent , between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ understandings of islands, ²⁸ between metaphor and ‘the stuff of real geographical entities’, ²⁹ or between ‘geography’ and ‘literature’, an opposition that Fletcher finds partly ‘sustained by the deployment of a series of interrelated hierarchical pairs (physical/cultural, reality/romance, actual/virtual, fact/fiction, materiality/metaphor, image/word) in discussions of the physicality and culture of islands’. ³⁰

‘The island’ is indeed a common metaphorical genre. John Gillis argues that western culture not only thinks about islands, but thinks with them. He finds that the island is a master metaphor capable of representing a multitude of things and that ‘islands of the mind continue to be extraordinarily valuable symbolic resources’. ³¹ Dodds and Royle argue in a similar vein that ‘the metaphorical meanings and analogies attached to islands have transformed modern understandings of human societies’. ³² Pete Hay opines that the island in artistic production is a favourite metaphor, to the extent that the ‘realness’ of an actual island is an irrelevance, even an inconvenience. ³³ He suggests that ‘the metaphoric deployment of “island” is, in fact, so enduring, all-pervading and commonplace that a case could reasonably be made for it as the central metaphor within Western discourse’. ³⁴ Hay further believes that there are a number of reasons why island studies should ‘look sceptically upon literary and cultural studies perspectives that dismiss the physicality of islands while promoting the relevance of metaphorical abstractions’. ³⁵ Island metaphors, he claims, not only misrepresent the politics of island identity, but also render the realness of island lives irrelevant: ‘So powerful is the metaphorical idea of the island that it can be deployed in the absence of even the slightest reference to the reality of islands’. ³⁶

The island as a common metaphorical genre, even a master metaphor within western discourse, raises a number of issues, of which one of the most compelling is what place there is for the diversity of islands and islanders in a world where ‘the island’ is a standardized genre, a common figure of speech, a tool to think with, or a trampoline to jump off from, into a world of generalized abstractions.

Yet another line of questions, however, starts with whether the figure of ‘the island’ is a metaphor at all, and if so, of what kind. Metaphor as the master among tropes has a long history in the West, starting perhaps with Aristotle. Since then, the focus on metaphor has remained strong, so strong that it, according to Paul Friedrich, has led to an ‘uncritical or totalizing metamorphilia or metaphormania’. ³⁷ He argues that if we stay within Aristotle’s model of metaphor, we will have to include any transfer of names, involve any sort of analogy, or any substance or quality, cause or effect, synecdoche or metonymy, which ultimately will lead us to an all-inclusive category, so comprehensive that it becomes ‘almost equivalent to thought, mind, or imagination’, as in the adage ‘every model is a metaphor of reality’. ³⁸ Following Friedrich, the quest might not be to save ‘the real world’ from metaphor, or from its even wider adverb ‘metaphorical’, but to save metaphor from a raging metaphormania, that will eventually lead to a blandness and meaninglessness, when all tropes become metaphor.

The real versus metaphoric discussion in island studies may have something to gain by focusing ‘more on the entirety of the tropes in dynamic relation as a congeries of figures with predicative and performative possibilities than upon the sole, so called master trope of metaphor’. ³⁹ After all, metaphor is just one among a number of tropes, a fraction of the total repertoire of tropes. ⁴⁰ Among tropes that build on analogy are metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, simile, and as tools for understanding they may all work differently. ⁴¹ ‘Metaphor’ commonly means saying one thing while intending another. Other classical definitions include ‘an interaction between different fields of association’; ⁴² ‘a spark between latent and manifest denotations’; ⁴³ ‘a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another by being spoken of as if it were the same’; ⁴⁴ and ‘a mapping from some source domain to some target domain’, and ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’. ⁴⁵ More constrained and useful meanings of metaphor, Friedrich suggests, include: ‘a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another by being spoken of as if it were the same’ and ‘implicitly and novelly equating things that are just different enough’. ⁴⁶

Anthropologists, and ethnologists, have long been interested in metaphor as a figurative device with a capacity to produce what it describes, by ‘defining situations and grounding our sense of what is to be taken as real and objective and, therefore, entitled . . . to have real consequences’. ⁴⁷ A good example is Greg Dening. In his work on the Marquesas, widely read among island studies scholars, he argues that there are two radically different ways of looking at society that ground and premise scientific endeavour. One is to construct a model from generalized perceptions of the observer or the actor, the other is to approach societies through metaphor. While both model and metaphor are transpositions, readings of experience, and products of consciousness, their ‘distinction lies in the fact that metaphors are understood and models are imposed. Metaphors enlarge within a closed system; models belong to an observer’s perceptions’. ⁴⁸

This fundamental difference, Dening argues, carries a number of theoretical and methodological implications. The model is inherently schizoid, in that it belongs to two systems, the one that it describes, and the one that constructs it. Therefore, models are ‘always true and untrue, objective and relative, expressive of an unseen reality in one system and of a seen reality in another’. Metaphor, on the other hand, is an instrument of understanding within a system with intrinsic qualities: ‘Like myth, it is always true to that system, always objective, always expressive of known and seen realities’. ⁴⁹ Dening concludes that understanding others, from this perspective, can have two meanings:

It can mean entry into the experience of others in such a way that we share the metaphors that enlarge their experience. Or it can mean that we translate that experience into a model that has no actuality in the consciousness of those being observed but becomes the currency of communication amongst the observers. Indeed, within the closed set of the observer’s experience, the model becomes a metaphor, part of the paradigm that sets one group of observers apart from the other. ⁵⁰

Rather than dichotomizing real and metaphoric, Dening’s argument leads to the position that the realities of the world are expressed and experienced through language, through metaphor. Thus, singular phenomena, like islands, or complex wholes, like societies, can be understood by entering into a world of figures of thought, by sharing language, sharing metaphor.

With this in mind one may ask firstly if and when the metaphoric deployment of ‘the island’ is at all metaphoric, and, furthermore, if and when we are in fact dealing with models. To me it seems clear that the figure of ‘the island as culture’/‘culture as island’, as it has been deployed in a number of island studies, as in much Scandinavian ethnology, is not a metaphor, at least not in the more constrained sense, but rather a model. ⁵¹ Among basic traits of this ‘island as culture’-model there are a set of features that in the literature on islands are often described as the core of ‘islandness’ or ‘insularity’, such as:

By logic, to this list also belong the corresponding negative counterparts to these basic common traits: such as isolation, insularism, retardation, immovability, inbreeding . . .

There are many interesting, and some disturbing, implications of such an ‘island as culture’-model. One is that if islands are prototypical ‘cultures’, and islanders prototypical ‘folk’, then cultures are also ‘islands’ and its inhabitants ‘islanders’. While metaphors are principally unidirectional and work one-way only, models are transpositions that work both ways. Thus, if ‘culture’ is modeled upon ‘the island’, then we should not be surprised if studies of islands are modeled upon notions of ‘a culture’. ⁵² This would mean, then, that we not only could, but also should study insularity, islandness and other aspects of island culture in places that are not normally considered islands. A close reading of classical studies of local communities, villages, parishes and other islanded places may thus reveal insights in what it means to be insular, insights that might not otherwise be easily at hand. ‘Sprachinsel’, ‘language island’, has since early 19th century been used by linguists to denote small pockets of isolated, insulated, and often archaic languages in a sea of a dominating, different language. ⁵³ Human geographer Eric Clark has noted how his own island research brought him to islands in other environments than seas and oceans, such as city quarters in Malmö, in south Sweden. It is not by coincidence, he argues, that ‘insulae’ in roman architecture denotes quarters with more or less permeable borders to the outside. ⁵⁴

So, logically, as far as islandness and representations of islands are central foci of study in island studies, it might not only be fruitful to continue the path of anthropology and ethnology, where the locus of study is not the focus of study. It might also be strategically wise to choose a locus that is not a physical island at all, such as a city quarter, a suburb, a village, a virtual island, or even Langerhans insulin producing islets in the pancreas, for the islandness to stand out in sharper relief than on a ‘real’ island. And if so, paradoxically, a problem for island studies might be to focus too much on islands. Which again brings us back to the main question: where do all the islands go? If ‘the island’ constitutes a widespread model of culture and society, what about the physical realities of islands and islanders? Following such a path of reasoning, how will it be possible to represent the diversity of islands and islanders in the study of island cultures, islands as cultures and cultures as islands?

Finding a place? Real versus metaphoric

In a recent critical survey, Lisa Fletcher argues that, while ‘the major contributions to island studies have been very attentive to the binary oppositions which structure popular discourses about islands, they have been less alert to the dichotomies which organize their own thinking’. ⁵⁵ What Fletcher finds in island studies can be said also about much ethnology: a large part rotates around dichotomies and oppositions, a binary system writ large. Manifest versus latent, locus versus focus, real versus metaphoric are only a few among the many ways to analytically represent the relation between a physical world and a world ‘of the mind’. Dichotomies are powerful and indispensible devices for producing and organizing meaning. But they are also problematic, not so much because of the reduction of the world into a simple binary system of the either-or-type, as because of the implicit hierachization that follows, of the ‘up is more’/‘less is down’, or ‘good is up’/’bad is down’-type. ⁵⁶ In island studies the core of the debate seem to be about just that, the hierachization of the world into real and imagined, and thus where to go to find the ‘the island’, to the physical world or to the world of language, metaphor, discourse, representation.

A major dilemma in dealing with diversity is to find a language that does not predetermine what can and cannot be said. ⁵⁷ A common way to understand diversity in island studies, as indeed in Scandinavian ethnology, seems to be simply ‘much of something’, a large number of things more or less the same. Thereby, the meaning of diversity is reduced in advance to a small number of previously given categories, which turns diversity into a condition principally homologous to its contrastive counterpart, homogeneity. But then again, homogeneity and diversity are very different categories. Diversity is a radically different quality than just many different things of the same kind, and since diversity is a major characteristic of the phenomenon we call ‘island’, we must ask what room there is for this diversity in the concepts and dichotomies we apply. To allow for this diversity of islands, it is thus necessary to diversify the very idea of diversity by finding a language that makes it possible to study diversity as such, that permits several – diverse – ways of conceptualizing and organizing diversity. Steps in such a direction would be to critically re-think dichotomies that presuppose a pre-existing or over-arching order that apply to the whole in a singular form, such as manifest/latent, locus/focus, or real/metaphorical.

Ensnared by these binaries, the Scylla and Charybdis of island studies, the ethnologist asks where to go. How to approach the task of researching islands and the cultural representation of islands? On the one hand, there are propositions like Pete Hay’s. Departing from scepticism toward an uncritical deployment of ‘the island as metaphor’, he suggests a phenomenology of place as a possible coherent theoretical framing for island studies. He suggests that, if islands are special places, it is because ‘the characteristics that endow space with the shared meanings that transform them into places may be more pronounced, better articulated, and more effectively defended on islands than is usually the case elsewhere’. ⁵⁸ This position leads him to advocate a phenomenology that sees the construction of place meaning as arising from the ‘dialogue between the physicality of place and the interactions of people with it’. ⁵⁹

On the other hand, there are positions like Lisa Fletcher’s. She finds that the oppositions that underscore much of island studies gain their persuasive power ‘from an implicit agreement that studying the real world is a more meaningful and important pursuit than inquiry into the imagined world, and further that it is possible to have a privileged understanding of the real world’. ⁶⁰ She concludes that since a non-mediated experience of place is not possible, ‘scholarship can only ever apprehend the meaning of place through language’. ⁶¹ This leads her to propose ‘performative geographies’ as a possible theoretical frame for island studies. Performativity, she understands, following Judith Butler, as ‘that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names’. ⁶² According to Fletcher such a perspective ‘foregrounds an appreciation of the dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship between places and the ways in which they are depicted’, which leads her to believe that the notion of performative geographies ‘grants greater ontological significance to the space where the act takes place’. ⁶³

However different in their approaches and positions, Hay and Fletcher share at least one founding assumption of island studies, that islands are important both to think about, and to think with. And in the end, Hay’s ‘dialogue between the physicality of place and the interactions of people with it’, and Fletcher’s ‘dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship between places and the ways in which they are depicted’, might not be that different after all. Both belong to an old and well-established dualistic tradition that starts by separating the world in fundamentally different realms, and then goes on to debate their relation. Whether we opt for realism, like in Hay’s phenomenology of islands, or idealism, as in the case of Fletcher’s performative geographies, and whether we do this as a matter of academic tradition, ontological persuasion, or methodological strategy, we will inevitably have to deal with the dualism that these perspectives produce. And whatever choice we make, we will inevitably also have to address what is to me a critical problematique in island studies: how to grapple with the homogeneity of ‘the island’ together with the immense diversity of islands.