The Textual Life of Savants: Ethnography, Iceland, and the Linguistic Turn

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.