A Bibliography for Ethnographic Research on Iceland

Abstract

What differentiates ethnographic field research in a Western European community from that done in a non-literate and non-Western community is the fact that the Western community is neither untouched, pristine or unknown but has been studied previously. The fiction of an ethnographic present remains so, and is neither an aid to description nor an acceptable perspective within which to perceive the field data collected during the research. The question of social change becomes a historical question. A community which possesses a one thousand year tradition of literacy is a community of the book. Oral traditions, day to day activities, and strategies of work rest upon a commonly known past, one made up of long estab lished institutional alignments and laws which are taken into account by members of the present community. The enormous amount of data avail able in this part of the world necessitates a long period of post field ges tation by the ethnographer before intellectual coherence is achieved in the end product, the published monograph on the community. F.E.B.-P.