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3 - Dehumanizing the uprooted: lessons from Iceland in the Little Ice Age

from Part I - Lessons from history: time, scale, and causality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2012

Kirsten Hastrup
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
Karen Fog Olwig
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
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Summary

Abstract

The North Atlantic island communities were hit particularly hard when the Little Ice Age encroached upon them in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The islanders had settled during the warm medieval period and had established well-functioning societies. In Iceland this had resulted also in the creation of a remarkable literary canon.

When the climate changed, Icelandic society became unsettled – literally and metaphorically. The original pattern of independent farmsteads, containing both owners and farmhands, broke asunder. With decreasing production, the farms could support fewer people, and an increasing number of people became vagrants in a landscape of scarce opportunities. Within Icelandic society, as established by the settlements and as enforced through consecutive laws, vagrancy was illegal, however. The uprooted were victims of hard times, but they were also increasingly seen as a threat to the social order by the settled members of society. History shows how the vagrants (flakkarar) were gradually dehumanized, sometimes even demonized, as they struggled to find a foothold in a hostile environment.

The general idea of this chapter is to discuss how categorization infiltrates and possibly aggravates the plight of people who are uprooted in the wake of climate change. This also calls for a careful reconsideration of causality in history.

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Chapter
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Climate Change and Human Mobility
Challenges to the Social Sciences
, pp. 58 - 78
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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