Anthropology, Islands, and the Search for Meaning in the Anthropocene

Part ethnography, part memoir, and part critical reflection on the Anthropocene, this book examines the ways that islands form and inform human experiences of the everyday and the extraordinary.

Utilizing carefully considered anthropological perspectives drawn from over a decade of anthropological fieldwork, the author employs islands as a complex set of lenses to examine the ways that we are intimately connected, separated, and divided from ourselves, one another, and the planet. Moving across time, place and disciplinary boundaries, this book traces a narrative route from the remote islands of Micronesia to the subarctic expanses of northern Iceland, all in service of gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural resonance of islands.

This book offers the reader a type of ideological travel guide, one that exchanges restaurant reviews and hotel recommendations for pathways of reflection and new modes of seeing and being in the world. It will be of interest to scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and readers from human geography, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and American studies.

Justin Armstrong is a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Anthropology at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His main research interests are experimental ethnography, ethnographic writing, abandoned places, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of islands. He conducts research in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Newfoundland, and Micronesia. He is the author of a novel, Wyomings (2018), along with a number of scholarly articles and book chapters.