Textual Life of Savants

First Published in 1995. This book focuses on the role and significance of texts and textualism for anthropology and ethnography and, more specifically, the understanding of particular aspects of Icelandic society and history. The discussion is centred on a range of issues; moving between general social theory and ethnographic details, the immediate present and the distant past, language and production, fieldwork and the act of writing, texts (sagas, novels, and ethnographies) and real life. In each case, however, it draws attention to what may be called a pragmatist approach, a concern with action and agency as they constitute, and are constituted by, social life. Such an approach, I hold, is an important and timely remedy to current textualism, the trendy theoretical tradition often described as the linguistic turn. 1. Introduction; Part I From Life to Text; 2. The conventional metaphor of cultural translation; 3. The factual, the fictive and the fabulous: novel and ethnography; Part II Times, Lives and Medieval Texts; 4. Sagas, history, and social life; 5. The power of words and the context of witchcraft; Part III Lives, Texts and Modern Realities; 6. Fetishized language, symbolic capital, and social identity; 7. Beyond environmental Orientalism; 8. Conclusions: towards a theory of living discourse;