The Anthropology of Christianity in the Faroe Islands. What the fringes of the Faroe Religious Configuration have to say about Christianity

Christophe Pons (1)

1 IDEMEC - Institut d'ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative

There are many good reasons for the anthropology of Christianity to stop in the Faroe Islands. The question might be asked thus: what has Christianity done to Faroese society, and how has Faroese culture made Christianity its own? The islands have an unusually high rate of believers and this gives them a singular Christian status, both among the secularized Scandinavian societies and abroad. As a Scandinavian society, the Faroe Islands are indicative of an historical matrix in the sense that it is easy to recognize their principal foundations. But as an island, the magnifying effect of insular society can also be useful for questioning the future of a society where Christianity takes up a lot of room. In the context of globalization, the Faroe Islands are probably as much heuristic as surprising—and largely underestimated—in the study of contemporary neo-evangelical Protestantism. Heirs of a colonial context that is still not fully clear, with a history of domination associated with a feeling of being for a long time on the very edge of the modern world, the Faroese people and their culture share some features with many other societies that have experienced the same feeling of being marginal peripheries of the world, and to have not participated in a world history centered on the West, the USA and Europe. It is important to keep this in mind if we are to understand why and how neo-evangelical Christianity may sometimes become an issue of exceptional magnitude. Except that, usually, the societies who nourish these feelings are located in the South and not in the North among Western people. Of course, we know that the topic does not rely on ethnic issues but on its relationship to history, to power and domination, and to cultural identities. Nevertheless, in this instance the Faroese anthropology of Christianity is discrete from the resistant North / South dichotomy.

Mots clés: Faroe Islands; Anthropology of Christianity; Calvinism; Lutheranism; Pentecostalism; Social organization; Church institutionalization

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Christophe Pons. The Anthropology of Christianity in the Faroe Islands. What the fringes of the Faroe Religious Configuration have to say about Christianity. Firouz Gaini. Among the Islanders of the North. An Anthropology of the Faroe Islands, Fróðskapur (Faroese University Press), pp.80-131, 2011, Among the Islanders of the North. An Anthropology of the Faroe Islands, 978-99918-65-34-8. ⟨halshs-01144350⟩