Fishing for Modernity: How Material Relationships can Mediate Tensions in an Immigrant Community, The Case of the Icelandic Emigration to Canada in the late Nineteenth Century

摘要

In the late nineteenth century, a high percentage of the Icelandic population emigrated to North America. In this article I bring to the fore two interrelated sites of tension in the emigrants’ lives centered on the concepts of ethnicity and modernity. I will suggest that an analysis on how these tensions were mediated through material practices may be a fruitful way to provide a new understanding of the processes of emigration and cultural change, which aids movement away from dichotomous categories that have dominated previous research into the period.