Images of Contemporary Iceland

I am currently reading Gisli Palsson's book, Images of Contemporary Iceland: Everyday Lives and Global Context. It is really putting things into perspective for me. I wish I had read this before my trip! Because I anticipate having many, many more notes, here's what I have already:

• The dualism of mind and body - The world of nature and culture. We can learn to see as others do by putting ourselves in their places. Do people inhabit different worlds to the extent that they differ? (5)
• G.H. Mead suggests that people construct self-identities from their positions within a continuous field of ongoing relationships, each position defining a unique point of view within the process. If instead of expanding to include others we include only those who share the same vantage points, we create boundaries (7)
• Moral and sometimes romantic constructions by foreigners become part of the cognitive and political environment of fishers as much as the fish in the sea they engage as part of their economic environment. (7)
• Icelanders stage their ethnicity for summer tourists and practice at Christmastime, reminding themselves, preparing. (7)
• What have tourists done the the Icelandic National Identity? How do Icelanders react?
• Contrast/Parallel? I have been told I am shy all my life. I therefore have fallen into this role as the soft spoken shy girl. Always. I looked forward to my time spent in Iceland because I could practice this role of being the shy, soft spoken girl. I could also challenge myself to go against that which I am told is my identity. What attracted me to Iceland for all these years? Am I that similar to Iceland? Do I feel what she feels?
• The issues of whaling places Iceland in a global context - not as an individual island. (9)
• "West Islanders" Icelanders who emigrated to the US or Canada whose images of Iceland were formed before today's current Iceland. Visits home shift views? (10)
  
• National Identities are shaped by what they are not. (10)
• Laxness book Salkavalka - gender roles - fiction - 1930's (11)
• Disguise the economic and social realities of gender discrimination in Iceland (12)
• Reread the middle paragraph on page 13!!!
• The whole generation since 1944 has grown up embroiled in industrial fishing, a new historiography is emerging (14)
• The image of unique and unbearable misery, endured and survived in the unique island of fire and ice is an exaggerated construct of the nationalist ideology of independence - reinforced by the tourist industry. (16)
• The current nationalist image projected to the outside fails to capture the everyday realities of Icelanders. (16)
• Concrete dimensions of person in action on an island in the middle of the North Atlantic (21)
• 1.3% of export earnings are from whale meat - not defended as traditional because whaling originated in this century. "Cynically bending or breaking laws for profit" Rationality opposed to romanticism. (26-27)
• "There is nothing more inhumane about whaling than the killing of other animals." (29)
• The majority of Icelanders have come to think of the whaling issue as central to the well-being of their entire nation rather than simply some of its citizens. (35)
• Supposed special affinity between Icelanders and the harsh norther sea which endows them with a respectful view of nature... (36)
• ...Nationalism serves as a vehicle for obscuring more complex messages regarding social, political, and economical issues (36)