Iceland: Elves or Economics?
As a riveting piece of writing, you can barely fault the article on Iceland after the credit crunch in the April edition of Vanity Fair. Michael Lewis’ feature contains anecdotes of drama and pathos, an account of a testy interview with outgoing Prime Minister Geir Haarde, as well as nuggets of wisdom unearthed before and after the crash. It’s a recommended read.
Skaters in Reykjavik in winter (Photo: Stuck in Customs. Creative Commons.)
But I worry that Lewis, in his lucid account of what went wrong in one of the richest countries on the planet, has indulged in a little amateur anthropology along the way. Take this passage, for instance, on gender relations:
“I note a slight tension at any table where Icelandic men and Icelandic women are both present. The male exhibits the global male tendency not to talk to the females—or, rather, not to include them in the conversation—unless there is some obvious sexual motive. But that’s not the problem, exactly. Watching Icelandic men and women together is like watching toddlers. They don’t play together but in parallel; they overlap even less organically than men and women in other developed countries, which is really saying something….”
And elsewhere, a passage that could have been cited as evidence of colonial arrogance in Edward Said’s Orientalism – a direct comparison of Icelanders to wild beasts:
“We assume [Icelanders] are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken.”
Haukadalur, Iceland (Photo: taivasalla. Creative Commons)
I wonder if this tendency to describe the Icelanders as somehow “other” or “exotic” is a way (conscious or unconscious) to make VF‘s mainly American readership feel slightly better about their own economic predicament: “yes, we’re in the shit, but look at that naïve bunch of fisherfolk from a quaint country we’ve barely heard of – at least we weren’t as foolish as them”.
Lewis’ exploration of the arcana of Icelandic culture reaches its apotheosis in his account of how Alcoa needed to certify its building site in Iceland “elf-free” in 2004 before it could commence construction of an aluminium smelter. A picturesque episode, but not substantiated or sourced.
Despite a long Google search, I can’t find any reference on the web to this event, except for Lewis’ own article. Even Wikipedia’s article on Huldufólk uses Vanity Fair as its source. Lewis was probably told this story in good faith, but this is how urban myths are born.
Of course, New Zealand has also been the scene of sniggering over the supernatural – in 2002 parts of the world media picked up on a story about a taniwha (a river-dwelling monster/spirit) that stopped work on a major highway project. The real event, as recounted in this report, was a more prosaic story of relations between a local community and a government department.
Near Akureyi (Photo: Stuck in Customs. Creative Commons)
When Michael Lewis writes about the recent economic history of Iceland, he tells a clear and compelling story. His précis of H. Scott Gordon’s 1954 treatise on the economics of fisheries is actually fascinating. His interviews with British, Icelandic and American economists are enlightening and pertinent. I just wish he’d left the elves and wild vikings out of it.
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