Crisis and Coloniality at Europe's Margins

Front matter

CRISIS AND COLONIALITY AT EUROPE' 5 MARGINS

Creating Exotic Iceland

INAVAVANAVAVIVRVAS/ VÀ

Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of figures x1 Introduction 1 PARTI Before the crash 15

1 The trickster in the north: in the world of colonizers and colonized 17 2 The Colonial Exhibition in Tivoli: racism and colonial others 30 3 The desire to become modern: forging of the Icelandic subject 46 4 The big bite: the economic miracle in Iceland 64 5 Warehouse of cultural scenarios: creating the new

Icelandic character 74

Introduction

I move slowly toward the intersection, cars jammed ahead and behind. I need the slow pace because I am on my mobile trying to understand what my husband is saying. Over the phone, his words are clear, but what he is saying is incomprehensible. He explains that he is at the bank surrounded by a crowd, all doing the same thing: trying to withdraw as much money as possible, because — as he puts it — “there is no way of knowing what will happen.”

“What do you mean?" I ask, “What can happen?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Even while trying to avoid the question, his words reveal a future of uncertainty where even the most absurd things can happen. It is as if the phone is not only connecting us through space, but also bringing us toward a radically different envisioning of the future.

I say the unspeakable, which would have been ridiculous just a month before: “Could the bank go bankrupt? Is that what you mean?” I remind myself of the tiresome monologue I’ve had to listen over the last few weeks; that he just knows that things will go wrong, there are so many similarities to the boom period preceding the US crash in 1929 and other crashes he knows from history. He works in a bank, so he should know. But he’s been warning of this for a while and besides, he could be wrong. After all, everyone else working at the banks seems to think things are fine.

“I don't know, but it is really crazy here,” he continues. “Really surrealistic. I have to talk to you later.” He hangs up and the image that lingers my mind is not the US in 1929, which he has so often mentioned, but Niger.

In Niamey, where I spent a part of the two years in Niger doing my dissertation research, I remember people taking out plastic bags full of money from the bank — a sign of a so-called third-world country, where the banks were weak and where business was transacted between individuals with real money in their hands. Somewhere in the shadows of my own mind, a plastic bag full of money in the hands of respectable businessmen at the bank probably signified the country’s backwardness — after all, my mind had been shaped not only by my theoretical engagement in anthropology, but also by racialized European discourses of modernity and Africa's incompatibility with it. Only much later did I realize that I was far from the only one who slipped into this feeling: that Iceland was becoming almost like a non-Western country as it neared economic collapse. My research in Niger, focusing on a small group of WoDaaBe pastoral nomads, had included an analyzed globalized imagery of racism and exoticism that the WoDaaBe were embedded in. When I moved back to Iceland in the late 1990s, I had attempted to understand racism and the imagination of Africa historically in Iceland, moving closer and closer to a more critical understanding that images of Africa in Iceland were not really about Africa but more about Iceland’s position in the world of nations. In a sense I was moving away from the understanding of how racism had shaped people living in the African continent toward understanding the importance of whiteness and coloniality in shaping what it meant to be European — and what it meant to be Icelandic in the world of nations. Simultaneously, it was also becoming clearer to me how these subjects that seemed perhaps distant, Niger and Iceland, were part of the same reality in the sense of being part of the same larger historical processes. While reading about colonial imaginary and racism in Africa, I had observed more and more in my own society that the then ongoing economic boom was described in highly nationalistic and masculine terms; I was struck with the parallels this had with how Icelandic scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had discussed Africa where they focused largely on European explorers. Both sets of discourses seemed to revolve very strongly around membership in the wider global and European community and as such were highly entangled with a conversation with Europe's colonial history. Colonial imaginary and global hierarchies of different bodies and societies were not just things of the past but all around me as I would be reminded over and over again as things started to unfold.

My husband was right. A few days later, three of Iceland's major commercial banks became technically bankrupt, marking the beginning of an extensive financial crisis that would last for years to come. Iceland’s ‘fall’ in October 2008 was abrupt, and most people did not realize what was about to happen until they were already living it. The crash was not only harsh economically; it also involved a deep crisis of national identity and selfhood. It led to new and old questions relating to Iceland’s status as a European country and the dynamic formation of national identity rooted in past historical processes — concerns which were, in fact, never far away during the boom.

This book is about the rise and fall of the idea of Iceland as an important player in the world, enmeshed with ideas of proper European-ness and discourses of whiteness. Using the economic crisis in Iceland as a lens for a nuanced understanding of imagining the European subject in a broader European perspective, the book stresses how the analysis of the recent economic crisis has to take place within a wide frame of geopolitical relations. Iceland’s crisis affected Europeans countries in different ways and brought up old questions about relationships between European countries and Iceland’s designation as ‘European,’ as well as overlapping with racial geographies of power intrinsically linked to coloniality. While the book teases out these discourses in relation to Iceland, it uses them to reflect on broader issues of coloniality and identity in the European context.

The economic crash thus had to do with an interplay of desires and anxieties which have long formed part of the Icelandic internal discussion, including the desire to gain recognition from more powerful European nation-states and the anxieties of being associated with colonized and globally marginalized communities. This book investigates how contemporary ideas of crisis in Europe and beyond involve a particular reconfiguration of the past — the past, as Andreas Huyssen (2001) has underlined, providing an important resource in comprehending complex global interrelations in the present.

Iceland’s ambiguous placement within Europe is an important part of this past, as is reflected in its status up until 1944 as a Danish dependency while also belonging with the Nordic countries and Northern Europe and, being as such, associated with whiteness and a sense of ‘proper’ European-ness. As I will show, the representations of Iceland, which made the economic expansion meaningful at the time, must be seen as a part of larger narratives of being European within a world that has been long interconnected. Even though the book is concerned with questions of race and geographies of racism, it does not attempt to map out racism in Iceland, which I have done elsewhere. Rather, it tries to understand more broadly how racialization is part of everyday aspirations and understanding of the world, and thus how coloniality, as an “underlying logic” (Lee, Hongling and Mignolo 2015, 187), continues to be an important part of the present.

Critical whiteness at the margins of Europe

The central role of colonialism and imperialism in shaping European identities in the 19th century has been well established by scholars (Gilroy 1993; Dirks 1992). Postcolonial theories can, however, be criticized for often assuming a particular European subject, i.e. those European countries that held colonial possessions. Colonialism and imperialism have been theorized less often in relation to European countries that did not themselves have colonies or were in some sense peripheral to the building of colonial empires. The recent exploration of the term “coloniality” in the writings of Walter D. Mignolo (2007, 2011) and Arturo Escobar (2007) draws deep attention to modernity as intrinsically embedded with colonialism and thus coloniality as a lingering condition and ways to think about the world that extends beyond the end of formal colonial administration (Grosfoguel 2011). This theoretical focus, generally referred to as the decolonial perspective, places the modernization project firmly within the logic of colonialism, thus coloniality and consequently racism are embedded within the project of modernity (Grosfoguel 2011). Within anthropology, scholars such as Laura Ann Stoler have in fact long criticized postcolonial theories for being too “confident” in the sense of tending to overgeneralize the colonial experience (2008, 192), as demonstrated by her earlier call to better recognize how the dichotomy of the categories “colonized” and *colonizer" encompass diversity! (Stoler 1992, 321).

These studies emphasize the need to analyze the emergence of these categories historically and thus, as Audrey Horning puts it, to acknowledge colonialism as a “messy past” (Horning 2011, 68), and to call for a more detailed and contextual analysis (Smith 2003). Such voices thus argue for analyzing colonialism from points of view similar to the decolonizing perspectives, involving not only colonies and colonial subjects, but coloniality as saturating modernity and belonging also to those Europeans who were not necessarily involved in colonialism and imperialism in the same way as major colonial powers, such as the UK and France. Barbara Lüthi, Francesca Falk and Patricia Purtschert (2016) speak of such countries as “blank spaces in colonial history" (2016, 1). Gunlóg Fur (2006) points out that attempts to define outer edges of such categorization create marginal spaces, which involves a struggle of where the boundaries should be drawn; thus, in real life situations margins are “dislodged and recreated” (p. 494—495). To complicate matters further, the complex relationships between different parts of Europe were often characterized by a history of internal power dynamics taking forms similar to colonialism (Hechter 1999; Hipfl and Gronold 2011).

What I want to stress here is how the placement and self-perception of being on the margins — recognizing the margins as historically constituted and shifting — means a particular type of liminality or ambiguity. I have found it useful to think of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis of myths, where the figure of the trickster is conceived as a mediator situated "halfway between two polar terms," retaining “something of that duality — namely an ambiguous and equivocal character" (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 226). The idea of the trickster implies that focusing on what does not ‘fit’ can in fact clearly illuminate the dualistic positions which Lévi-Strauss assumes are intrinsic to human thought and organization.

The Lévi-Strauss analogue of the trickster 1s useful when reflecting on Iceland's position in the 19th- and early 20th-century environment. Iceland was a colony under Danish rule. It was not, however, a colony in the same sense as African colonies under European rule, many of which were brutally subjugated with violence, dehumanizing practices and massacres constituting a part of people's everyday lives (see for example Franey 2003). Simultaneously, Icelandic people participated in colonized practices, both through their participation in settler colonialism in the Americas (Brydon 2001; Eyford 2006; Bertram 2018; Eyporsdottir and Loftsdóttir 2016) and through reproducing racism against colonized people.

Icelanders had conceptualized themselves as a distinct group of people for some time — a sentiment which was then articulated in particular ways within nationalistic ideas that became important in Iceland during the 19th century. Icelandic intellectuals often felt misunderstood and ridiculed by the Danes. When nationalist ideologies swept through Europe, it was relatively easy for Icelandic students in Copenhagen to frame their own sense of being Icelandic within the larger conception where nations were seen as the inherently true form of human organization. Throughout much of its history, Iceland was one of the poorest countries in Europe, and its inhabitants were often viewed by elites and intellectuals elsewhere in Europe as little better than the ‘savages’ living in other parts of the world. For the Icelandic elite, this perception was extremely painful, especially at the time when Iceland was seeking its full independence.

Explorations of how coloniality was lived and executed at the margins of Europe can be seen as a part of the deeper and more nuanced analysis of colonialism for which Stoler and others have called for. Such analysis involves a deeper exploration of the messiness of colonial categories and attention to the salience of dualistic thinking in Western history, where the question was to be either civilized or not. Focusing on the margins of Europe is thus not only important in order to understand the construction of margins but also to deepen the understanding of the “project” of Europe. Europe, after all, as stressed by Sandra Ponzanesi, is ambivalent “both as a concept and as a project” (2016, 159).

Colonialism has generally not been perceived as a part of the history of those European countries that did not own colonies (Purtschert 2015; Rastas 2005; Hübinette and Lundstróm 2011). Nationalistic narratives in the Nordic countries generally exhibit a strong dismissal of Nordic involvement in colonialism (Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012a; Palmberg 2001). When acknowledged, Nordic colonialism has often been seen as gentler than other colonialism, ignoring diverse and the often intense involvement of Nordic countries in the colonial project (Naum and Nordin 2013). Lars Jensen and I (2012) have found the concept ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ useful in capturing how this refusal to acknowledge Nordic involvement in colonialism constitutes a part of larger discourses that position Nordic countries as more peaceful and gentle. As is the case with other European countries that lacked colonies (Hipfl and Gronold 2011; Lüthi, Falk and Purtschert 2016; Loftsdóttir and Hipfl 2012), it is often stressed in various contexts that due to the lack of their colonial involvement, the Nordic countries do not share the burden of racism with other European countries. Racism is thus seen as nonexistent in the present due to the imagination that these countries had no colonial past. In such an imagination, racism is also often reduced to hateful or aggressive acts between individuals.

This book affirms how Iceland actively participated in the reproduction of racist stereotypes of colonized people. At the same time, it primarily emphasizes how such categories and subjectivities form some strands in the material that weaves together people's innermost desires and longings, where coloniality 1s part of the world's wider social and historical structures, also of those who criticize racism. Racism is not only about bad people doing bad things. Racism involves racialization which structures how the world is perceived and acted upon, racialization referring to processes where race becomes meaningful in a particular context (Garner 2010, 19). Analyzing coloniality, as indicated earlier, reveals how racialized views continue to be embedded in various ways in current social and global structures and imagination of the world (see Grosfoguel 2011). Whiteness, as part of racialization, has historically been conflated with various markers of superiority (sometimes embedded in the terms ‘Nordic’ and ‘European’), and I especially benefit from recent interest in understanding whiteness as articulated in a European context.

Feminist theories of intersectionality (Collins 2015; Yuval-Davis 2006; Valentine 2007; Phoenix and Pattynama 2006) have been crucial in showing that race is entangled with other identities and identifications. Drawing on such a perspective, Philomena Essed and Sandra Trienekens see whiteness within the European context as a floating concept" coded within notions of national identity, Western superiority and civilization (2008, 68, see also Gullestad 2002). Ramon Grosfoguel, Laura Oso and Anastasia Christou (2015) define racism as a “global hierarchy of human superiority and inferiority" that is produced politically, culturally and economically (p. 636). This definition allows for taking into account how whiteness becomes meaningful through its intersection with other identifications. Notions of ‘whiteness’ must therefore, to some extent, take different forms by becoming embedded in different histories and local traditions (Hartigan 2010; Harrison 1998), while simultaneously recognizing how the current and past global mediascape has not respected imaginary boundaries between states and regions (Appadurai 1996). I stress that ‘whiteness’ is, furthermore, always seen as having been produced under a “special set of social and material circumstances” (Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003, 9), while also being entangled within larger global discourses of difference and power. Whiteness is important in the Nordic context because ‘Nordic’ often assumes a white subject, as we see often in discourses of equality in the Nordic countries, both in terms of gender equality and equality in terms of immigrants and native populations (Gullestad 2002).

Postcolonial studies and whiteness studies may be said to have the common goal of destabilizing the idea of ‘the West’ or Europe as the main point of reference. Postcolonial studies point out how the European as the knowing subject was created in the colonial encounter, while whiteness studies seek to disrupt the invisibility of whiteness in the context of the terms Europe or Westerner. While the anthropological tradition has long aimed to criticize Western societies as the normative society (Marcus and Fisher 1999), the analysis of whiteness and racism in Europe remained for a long time peripheral within anthropology. What I see as valuable in anthropology is the discipline’s self-criticism and self-awareness in acknowledging its own troublesome roots in colonialism. Anthropology, furthermore, not only seeks to deconstruct and critically address the world around us, but also seeks deeper insights into why particular notions are meaningful and powerful, which involves understanding how meaning is constructed by those involved. Analysis of texts alone is certainly important, but this approach usually can neither capture the flesh and blood of the individuals behind the texts nor how particular acts and representations become salient to them in their particular historical environment. To better understand how racism ‘endures’ in the present (Amin 2010, 4), we have to analyze the different manifestations of racialization in the present where racism is not only seen as consisting of hateful acts but embedded in structural relationships between people and their everyday encounters and social surroundings.

Iceland, the postcolonial country

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to Iceland’s involvement in colonial ideologies. Critical post colonial perspectives are, however, present in the analysis of some anthropologists of Iceland early on (for example the works of anthropologists Ann Brydon, Gisli Pálsson, Sigríóur Duna Kristmundsdottir and Inga Dora Björnsdóttir). Postcolonial perspectives were not necessarily or always central to their analysis; rather, such perspectives were embedded in their recognition that Iceland’s position as a Danish dependency played a major role in shaping Icelandic nationalism and gender concepts, as well as situating Iceland within international power relations. Only recently have Icelandic historians addressed Iceland’s history in relation to the colonial or postcolonial context. One reason for this may be that most Icelandic historians dismissed Iceland’s classification as a colony, leading to an absence of conversation about the idea (Ellenberger 2009, 99).

When I started working in Icelandic academia after completing my doctoral research in 2000 on WoDaaBe, my interest in Iceland was driven by my desire to understand what ‘Africa’ meant in Iceland. When analyzing late 19th- and early 20th-century images in Iceland from different mediums such as schoolbooks, newspapers and journals, it became apparent to me that these images were not really so much about Africa as about male Icelandic intellectuals struggling to understand Iceland’s position in the world of nations, and simultaneously trying to shape conceptions of Icelandic national identity and the country’s hierarchical position in the colonial world. After Iceland’s settlement in the ninth century, the period of commonwealth? had come to an abrupt end in 1262 with the subjection of the country under Norway and then later under Denmark. Independence was gained in steps with Iceland becoming a sovereign state in a personal union with Denmark in 1918 and gaining full independence in 1944. At the time when I did this research, research on Icelandic nationalism strongly focused on positioning Icelandic nationalism within a wider criticism of nationalism in general, i.e. the earlier emphasis on nationalism as a primordial phenomenon. While the importance of this contextual focus should not be underestimated, it did not generally place the shaping of Icelandic nationalism within perspectives that recognize how European nationalism itself was shaped by racism and imperialism, which, as this book will show, were intrinsic to nation-building in Iceland.

My first attempt to draw attention to Icelandic national identity construction in relation to colonial images and to ask how this related to Iceland’s position under Danish rule was a 2002 publication in Icelandic on Iceland’s participation in the then recent World's Fair Expo (Loftsdóttir 2002). The article had been rejected by another journal more than a year earlier — perhaps because the issue had little legitimacy in Iceland at the time.

Still, I remained convinced that understanding Iceland's engagement with colonial ideology and racism also required understanding Iceland’s position under Danish rule. While Iceland was probably not a colony in political terms, it can possibly be said to have been so economically or culturally (Ellenberger 2009, 13). As Gavin Lucas and Angelos Parigoris point out, the issue 1s not only whether we can use categories of politics or economics to classify particular countries as colonies; but also that we have to account for the “colonial experience" being a more "complex and dynamic process" than mere administration (2013, 93). Focusing on people's lived experiences also draws attention to how the issue of nationalism in Iceland was ultimately integrated into Iceland's position in a world of colonies and colonizers (Loftsdóttir 2002, 2008; Lucas and Parigoris 2013, 93). Claims to Iceland's independence could be strengthened by engaging with European colonial discourses, and to contrast Iceland as intrinsically different from other colonized countries. To me, however, the technical question of if and how

Iceland can be classified as a colony is ultimately not as interesting as the fact that during the late 19th century people in Iceland started to feel it necessary to claim that they were not colonial subjects.

Globalization, crisis and neoliberal subjects

The book's key pillar to understanding notions of European-ness and coloniality is a focus on the economic crisis of 2008 in Iceland. The economic crash of 2008, alongside Iceland's steady neoliberalization? from the mid-1990s (Sigurjónsson and Mixa 2011), and the crisis following it, are all a part of a global phenomenon. In Iceland, these processes were understood in deeply nationalistic terms which engaged with wider notions of coloniality, the Icelandic fascination with modernity, and Icelanders' own past as under Danish rule until the 20th century. Neoliberalization, as I will show, was important in transforming Icelandic society and I find important to understand more broadly how neoliberalization builds on, mobilizes and cuts across earlier colonial formations and their expression in the present. As Johan Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009) argue, the most important changes in ethnic identity in the age of globalization and neoliberalization are the double process of emphasizing ethnic essence and deeply commoditizing ethnic identities (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 1; see also Lavie and Swedenberg 1996, 5-6). The idea of ‘culture’ has consequently been increasingly commoditized and, as stressed by Henrietta Moore (2004), becomes the means “through which diversification is replicated through globalized processes, experiences and interconnections" (p. 78). This draws attention to the significance of neoliberalism in creating particular types of subjectivities. My discussion shows how a particular imagination of Icelandic subjects, rooted in the colonial past, becomes mobilized in quite a specific way in the new neoliberal environment in Iceland, and how the ‘dry’ issues of banks and investments during the boom took on a central role in generating an understanding of what it meant to ‘be Icelandic.’ By tapping into affective and meaningful nationalistic 1cons of being Icelandic — or what Appadurai (1996) has called “warehouse of cultural scenarios" — the neoliberal discourses in the early 2000s in Iceland became extremely difficult to criticize because such criticism became simultaneously criticism of national identity. This reworking of ideas of ethnic and cultural essence hints toward how neoliberalism thus intrinsically reworks ideas and categorizations that are embedded in colonial history and racism.

The reworking of ideas of ethnic and culture essence also took place during times of crisis? as the book shows in its second part where I stress crisis as a field of engagement, asking critically how the notion of crisis engages with being in the world, historical memories and past practices. Crisis disrupts the notions of linear time due to the unpredictability inherent in what constitutes a crisis (Knight 2012, 371), where people have a sense of diverging from a ‘normal’ time (Bryant 2016, 20). Long before neoliberalism became a dominant policy in the world, notable anthropological scholars such as Max Gluckman recognized how crisis can also become part of reproducing the social organization of society. As Gluckman stresses, rebellions do not necessarily draw attention to the oppressive structures of the system itself; rather, they can be part of a renewal of the “unity of the system” (1954, 3). Thus, as more recently elaborated in Naomi Klein’s (2007) analysis of reconstruction after crisis, existing power structures can reproduce and enforce themselves through economic crisis involving not only losses, but also opportunities for multinational corporations, companies and institutions. I argue, in the last part of this book, that this is exactly what happened in Iceland — how despite massive mobilization and calls for a ‘new’ Iceland, the system was not overthrown but rather reproduced.

Doing fieldwork at home

The book is based on research in my own country — the environment into which I was born, where I grew up and to which I still feel a sense of belonging. The book is also shaped by my training as an anthropologist in the academic environment of the USA; by my two-year fieldwork experience in Niger focusing on issues relating to globalization and racialization; and my previous research in Iceland on nationalism and racialization. Even though the research for this book focuses on Iceland, it was not limited to one fixed location. I draw attention to discourses that are mobile across time and space, but many of my insights also derive from my mobility as an academic scholar when I traveled to diverse locations outside Iceland, such as to academic conferences and archives in other countries. As the text reflects, I find it crucial to see fieldwork as a research activity involving close engagement and diverse kinds of experiences, regardless of where it takes place. Judith Okely (1992) points out that experience is crucial in generating insights into the subject matter, and how by ignoring it we can trivialize the relationship between methodology and theories. Qualitative research, in contrast, is often based primarily on interviews in somewhat controlled settings (Holmes 2013). Even though anthropologists often do just that, they often base their work on all kinds of materials (Shah 2017). In fact, some anthropologists even claim that ethnographic fieldwork cannot really be classified as a type of qualitative research (LeCompte and Schensul 1999, 54; Harrison 2007). This argument highlights the ‘messiness’ of ethnographic research, where researchers use various types of data, their own insights and where subjectivity necessarily forms part of the process. I see, then, ethnographic research teaching us how the use of diverse methods helps to gain deeper insights into our subject matter (see also Wolcott 1999). This interest in Iceland is also personal. I was unavoidably involved in a very intimate way in my research. The economic boom and crisis affected my life and those around me in a profound way. Some parts of the text can thus be described as auto-ethnography, where I consciously pull together various bits and pieces from my own experience to enrich my analysis beyond the systematic data gathering in which I engaged. Anthony Cohen (1992, 226) emphasizes that we should investigate the methodological possibilities offered by our own subjectivities. Taking up his suggestion, Lejla Voloder (2008) stresses that auto-ethnographies need not be about the researcher as an individual; instead they can deepen the understanding of certain issues by using the researcher as a subject. In auto-ethnography, the author can thus try to work him- or herself into the text as a secondary character (Tedlock 1991, 81).

As feminist scholars have long emphasized, subjectivity is important in order to move away from the objective and positivistic representation of ‘others’ toward critically engaged scholarship, where the researcher speaks from within his or her own subjective position rather than for someone else (Mohanty 1991). Here I find it important to critically engage with the term ‘native’ anthropologists, where we acknowledge that the anthropologist does not only have nationality but also is categorized in terms of other social classifications such as race, gender and class (Narayan 1993). Furthermore, anthropology in this unstable category that we refer to as ‘home’ can also, as some scholars have stressed, be part of *decolonizing anthropology' (Jacobs-Huey 2002), and thus work toward dislodging cultural difference as a key principle in the ethnographic project (Bunzl 2004, 439, 440).

After an intensive ethnographic research in West Africa for my PhD, it was strangely humbling to do research about my own community where, as an anthropologist, I was pushed towards utilizing some of the same analytical questions I'd asked in Niger in my own society. This was especially thought-provoking at times when interest in Iceland as a subject was exploding — first after the economic crash, then with international media discussion glorifying popular protest and finally with massive tourism arising after 2010. All these events created an intense interest in Iceland as both a popular and scholarly subject (Johannesson 2012); Iceland was suddenly a hot topic for scholars in diverse fields. Prior to the crash, I hardly remember any students, scholars or journalists consulting with me when writing stories about Iceland or doing research connected with Iceland, but after the crash this changed significantly. Interestingly, my conversations with students, scholars and journalists from abroad doing research on Iceland in relation to my work at the University of Iceland simultaneously positioned me as an ‘expert’ and as a ‘research subject.’ While a part of my PhD had included looking critically at the process of othering through various textual presentations (Loftsdóttir 2008), it was different to confront them when I, and my own society, became the objects of inquiry.