Iceland is a part of the world. If this seems like an incredibly obvious point of fact, well… that’s because it is. But its obviousness is easily obscured and shunted aside if it doesn’t support the various implications of our actions. Chapter twelve of Mike Fortun’s Promising Genomics discusses Iceland and the rest of the world and how they are connected and separate and how the connections and the separations are not as firm or as flimsy as one might like for the sake of consistency if for nothing else. It is of a piece with the rest of the book in how it deals with what we know and what we think we know and how. At this point I’ve grown used to Fortun’s chiasmic reasoning and its usefulness has been amply demonstrated. “IcelandXWorld” deals with where Iceland ends and the world begins—as usual, it isn’t as simple as that statement.
Fortun begins the chapter with an interesting and instructive bit of history and geopolitics regarding fishing rights and territorial waters. Essentially to me it seemed to indicate that the idea of what Iceland was is not fixed. Iceland is not just the land or the people it is also the fish and where those fish are located whether that is three miles off the coast or two hundred. These expanding definitions are something that Iceland is willing to defend—the defenders in the Coast Guard even become national heroes in the defense of this new expanded definition of what constitutes Iceland. So, through out , Iceland has established and defended carefully demarcated boundaries but the necessity of contestation and establishment implies a degree of interconnectivity that cannot be ignored.
Later on in the chapter Fortun makes this point clearer when he returns to a discussion of Icelandic music and where it can be said to come from: the music is not just a product of some strange interaction of the people with an “otherworldly” landscape—the idea of describing something that actually is a part of the earth as not belonging to it is just another attempt to exoticize—the oddness of which makes it somehow unique but an example of how influences cross every boundary. Iceland is not isolated and otherworldly it is and has been part of a global community since before we used those two words to describe it. Any argument predicated on implying otherwise is just trying to create fissures between perceptions of reality.
First, quoting you: "“IcelandXWorld” deals with where Iceland ends and the world begins—as usual, it isn’t as simple as that statement." AND "...the necessity of contestation and establishment implies a degree of interconnectivity that cannot be ignored." These two selections fit well with the interconnectivity that characterizes the battle over databases, over ownership of deCODE, over the privacy boundary that some Icelanders wish to maintain between themselves and a genetic sampling of that same self. Influences do indeed cross boundaries.
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