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Cultural History of Islands

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Abstract

This chapter deals with sun islands, ur-islands and I-lands, presenting a cultural history of island dreams , exotic paradises and social-political utopias . A wealth of stereotypical island attributions or topoi that may even be contradictory have considerably contributed to developing images about islands throughout history. The geographical topos of island is a field of projection for fiction and fantasies embodied in classic ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ island ascriptions. From a geographical perspective, the topos of island is a living place and outpost of global networks in the literal and nonliteral sense.

Where the dreams have no end

Jerman Silvio, wooded Chardonnay, Friuli Venezia, IGT 1987

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Notes

  1. 1.

    pl. topoi  – from Greek τόπος topos ‘topic, commonplace’; see also Curtius (1953).

  2. 2.

    Mediterranean period ranging from about 800 BC to about 600 AD; the beginnings are sometimes set even earlier.

  3. 3.

    Old German has another word for island: ‘Eiland ’, a term no longer in common use today. This word is sometimes (wrongly) attributed to the metaphor of the island as a germ cell or idea of the very first beginning. The syllable ‘Ei’, however (meaning egg in German), does not represent egg but stands either for ‘Ein-Land’ (one land) or ‘Eigen-Land’ (own land), or the ‘ei’ can be linked to the Germanic ‘ahwo’, meaning ‘Aue’ (river meadow), which leads back to nhd. ‘wasserumflossenes land’ (land surrounded by water) (see Grimm and Grimm 1971: Sp. 105).

  4. 4.

    Monasteries were also explicitly important in power-political plays of the Eastern European colonisation . The Teutonic Order played a crucial role and their buildings were well-fortified outposts of power and dominance: ‘islands in defence’. From the sixteenth century onwards, religious mission was crucially important during the colonial European expansion overseas.

  5. 5.

    The term Utopia  – a Greek play on words based on οὐ τόπος (ou topos ) ‘no place’ and εὖ τόπος (eu topos) ‘good place’.

  6. 6.

    Turner’s criticism of the general colonial discourse should be considered here: ‘What is problematic with colonial discourse theory in general, is its lack of historical and local specificity: most discourse analyses focus on late 19th and early 20th century British colonialism and appear to assume that other (Western) colonial activities in the Americas or Asia or before the Victorian period were not very different. Following the broadened scope of postcolonial analysis to include all Western discourse on non-Western populations in general, the term ‘colonial discourse’ has come to imply a uniform global Western representation of the non-Western Other as well as the concomitant (post-)colonial imposition of a more or less coherent Western symbolic order on the Third World. In the end, colonial discourse theory thus risks to reify Western colonialism and to reinforce a dualist conception of colonialism’. (Turner 1995: 203)

  7. 7.

    Similar political revolutionary movements can be found in the Jamaican Rasta movement, Pan-Africanism, the Black Power movement and the Harlem Renaissance.

  8. 8.

    Ame no Minakanushi no Kami, Takamimusubi no Kami and Kamumimusubi no Mikoto.

  9. 9.

    The mandarin name of China is Middle Kingdom; the Chinese sign for China is 中國.

  10. 10.

    Whether Penglai is an island or a mountain is not unambiguously clarified, but either way the projection refers to a paradisiac topos of eternal good.

  11. 11.

    It is said that he has discovered Japan in the process.

  12. 12.

    Today there is a city called Penglai City (http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Myth/personspenglai.html).

  13. 13.

    Most of the tales speak of a river rather than an islands; see also film: A Tale of the Fountain of the Peach Blossom Spring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEJ-0SxADI8).

  14. 14.

    In the past, there have been occasions where small islands have indeed been used as laboratories for medical and military purposes. In most cases, this was (or continues to be) highly contentious. The Scottish island of Gruinard, for example, was used to study the effects of anthrax during the Second World War. Kantubek, a town on Vozrozhdeniya Island (Uzbekistan) in the Aral Sea, was used since the early 1930s by the former Soviet Union to test biological weapons. On Plum Island of New York, an animal disease centre was established in 1954 to study the effects of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. The island of Riems in the Baltic Sea houses one of the oldest virological research stations in the world. Here, research has been carried out on animal diseases such as BSE, foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever and most recently bird flu H5N1, throughout political regimes since 1910, including the Nazi period and the GDR. The research station still actively develops preventative and protective measures as well as veterinary vaccines.

  15. 15.

    V. Billig (2010) offers the following explanation: …‘the hermaphrodite nature of language itself, oscillating between reality and fantasy, which always invents its islands even where there aren’t any’ (Billig 2010: 23).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Beate M. W. Ratter

  2. Institute of Coastal Research, Helmholtz Zentrum Geesthacht, Geesthacht, Germany

    Beate M. W. Ratter

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Ratter, B.M.W. (2018). Cultural History of Islands. In: Geography of Small Islands. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63869-0_3

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