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On a chilly, overcast, late-June evening, a group of ten or fifteen gather on the island of Mykines to celebrate the festival season. With schnapps we wash down whale and seal meat, blubber, dried fish, mutton, and potatoes. Tomorrow, the first day of the folk festival will herald abundant rounds of hearty fare and chain dances in all their quirky, rhythmic, tantalizing glory. The mood is still buzzing from the pilot whale drive, or grindadráp[1], that happened last week across the strait in Bøur harbour. I glance over at Hans Meinhard, the twelve-year-old boy who is one of ten residents on this small island. I sense he is anxious to get back to playing World of Warcraft, but he hangs around a while longer. The night is young and the atmosphere is pregnant with impending song and dance.

The Faroe Islands, a subpolar archipelago nation of roughly 50,000 inhabitants scattered across seventeen volcanically and glacially formed islands in the North Atlantic (Fig.1), is recognized by outsiders for its unique language, sheep-spotted landscapes, turfed roofs, chain dance, and ballads. Less commonly evoked are its global enterprises, socialized services, high-tech communication networks and infrastructures, and influx of immigrants. There is little agriculture but plenty of other culinary resources, though most food is now imported. Why, then, does grindadráp persist, a centuries-old slaughter where villagers work in concert to drive entire pods of pilot whales to their death by spinal lance in a blood-soaked harbour in plain sight? How does modern performance of a contentious tradition, previously localized and unmarked but now an incendiary global spectacle, condition identity formation among those imbricated in a tempestuous clash of values?

This paper explores tensions between tradition and modernity in the Faroes. Using digital ethnography (Howard 2008; Blank 2012; Tolbert and Johnson 2019), it illustrates how opponents strategically employ sensational and moralizing discourse by thrusting the concepts of tradition and modernity into immutable and essentialized binary categories in a widespread effort to suppress an allegedly anachronistic activity. Confronted with a perceived leviathan, proponents retaliate by tactically framing grindadráp as intrinsic to Faroese identity and affirming commitment to a sustainable and non-commercial custom centred on ancient law, communalism, and food security. The murky tides of tradition and modernity ebb and flow into one another amidst the slaughter of cetaceans, hurling of insults, and politicization of values in this brutal tug of war between imagined heroes and imagined villains on behalf of their imagined communities.

I begin by introducing the Faroes and my experience living and working on one of the islands for four months in the summer of 2009. The Faroese nationalist movement and whaling history are highlighted, as well as some observable cultural features. Next, I review scholarship on tradition and modernity pertaining to hegemony, transmission, authenticity, and diverse economies (Bourdieu 1977; Glassie 1995; Clifford 2004; Briggs 1996; Gibson-Graham 2006), in order to contextualize current tensions in physical, institutional, and cyberspace. To illustrate how meanings and values concerning grindadráp are negotiated, I then examine debates on online forums and blogs and animate them with insights from an interview with Hans Meinhard, now a 24-year-old biology student and seasoned grindadráp participant. I conclude by speculating on possible intersections of cultural, economic, and ecological sustainability as they relate to the future of grindadráp.

“Maybe the last paradise on Planet Earth”

I recall disembarking at Mykines harbour in May of 2009 and trekking up a steep staircase onto an endless expanse of rolling green hills where the only audible sounds were squawks and bleats. Captivated by the rawness of its tones, shapes, and smells, it was not long before I learned that Mykines, the most westerly of the Faroe Islands (Fig. 2), was home to ten humans, five herding dogs, six ponies, a flock of hens, one thousand sheep, and hundreds of thousands of puffins, gannets, fulmars, and other seabirds.

Figure 1

Map of Northern Europe (Wikimedia)

Map of Northern Europe (Wikimedia)

-> See the list of figures

Figure 2

Map of Faroe Islands (orangesmile.com)

Map of Faroe Islands (orangesmile.com)

-> See the list of figures

To many Faroese, animals are sustenance and most men living in the outer islands[2] are accomplished herders and hunters. According to Hans Meinhard, land and sheep are ontologically coterminous in the Faroese worldview, with the majority of citizens owning some quantity of both (Í Eyðansstovu 2021). Historically, agriculture has played a minor role in the Faroes; high latitude and the North Atlantic Drift restrict crop diversification beyond barley, hay, potatoes, rhubarb, and a few brassicas (Edwards 2005; Brewington 2016). The mainstay of the traditional diet from the time of Norse settlement in the ninth century likely derived from local animal proteins supplemented by imported grains from mainland Europe (Brewington 2016). While livestock are not uncommon in the Faroes, apart from sheep, most domestically sourced meat is wild, including seabird, fish, seal, and cetaceans such as pilot whale (grind) and dolphin. Sheep rearing, fowling in the cliffs, and grindadráp remain the most prominent communal and sustenance-related activities in the outer islands[3].

My job on Mykines was to ensure the smooth running of the island’s guesthouse, restaurant, and visitor centre. The summer attracts many bird enthusiasts, adventurers, writers, artists, and admirers of the Faroese “traditional way of life.” Indeed, several people I encountered are subscribers to the Facebook group, “Faroe Islands: Maybe the last paradise on Planet Earth,” including Hans Meinhard and his younger sister Ronja, who cite it as their hometown. An annual folk festival cycles through the outer islands in June and July, beckoning dozens of temporary homeowners, most of whom spend the rest of the year in Tórshavn or Denmark. It is common at these large gatherings for cultural expressions such as the chain dance, ballad recitations, storytelling, traditional costume, and folk music performances to be proudly articulated among both attendees and performers.

There has been a growing nationalist movement in the Faroe Islands since the second half of the nineteenth century, spurred by northern European romantic nationalism and centred largely on preserving Faroese language and culture (Wylie and Margolin 1981; Wylie 1987; Debes 1995; Nauerby 1996; Knudsen 2010; Simonsen 2016; Fielding 2018). Many Faroese are fond of recapitulating for visitors some of their unique attributes, chief among them their language, derived from idioms spoken by Norse settlers in the mid-ninth century (Wylie and Margolin 1981) and with 75,000 to 80,000 speakers today (Føroya Landsstýri 2019). Despite a 1536 proscription on its use in church and school by Denmark, spoken Faroese survived via transmission in ballad, folktale, legend, and vernacular speech (Debes 1995). In the mid-nineteenth century, a modern orthography was established by Lutheran minister and folklorist Venceslaus Ulricus Hammersheimb. Only after the proscription was abolished in 1938 were Danish and Faroese granted equal status in official institutions, a mandate that continues today (Knudsen 2010). In the 1960s, the Faroese national University, Fróðskaparsetur Føroya, was established with Faroese as the default language of instruction in each of its five colleges (Í Eyðansstovu 2021).

Although its legitimacy is increasingly questioned within and outside of the Faroes, grindadráp (Fig.3) remains a significant marker of Faroeseness (Fielding 2018). It is common knowledge that the earliest recorded drive took place in 1587 and that meticulous and consistent records have been kept since 1709, making grindadráp the longest recorded whaling practice anywhere in the world (Gaffin 1996). The drive may predate permanent settlement, having been introduced by Norsemen in the eighth century (Dahl 1970). A 1298 legal document, Seyðabrævið (The Sheep Letter), and archaeological evidence confirm that not only were pilot whales slaughtered in the Faroes since at least the 13th century, there were also clear rules pertaining to the distribution of whale meat and blubber that remain largely unchanged (Joensen 2009). Joensen does note, however, that when official whaling regulations were updated in 1832, it was mandated that a larger proportion of the catch be allocated to participants in the whale drive than to the landowners. Today, the catch is distributed among residents near the authorized whaling bay in which the drive occurs[4], of which there are currently 23 (Føroya Landsstýri 2017)[5]. While the catch has fluctuated over the centuries, over the past 20 years it has hovered at around 600 grind per year (ibid.).

The average grind provides 36 kilograms of meat and 240 kilograms of blubber, enough to render 27 liters of whale oil (Dickinson and Sanger 2005). The blubber from six grind produces around a barrel of oil. Faroese veterinarian Jústines Olsen[6] describes how, historically, blubber was rendered for its oil for lamps, fires, and medicinal purposes, while skins were processed for fishing line and rope. Stomachs were fashioned into floats and other body parts were employed in shoemaking (Olsen 1999). Whereas whale products in 1840 comprised nearly 20% of total Faroese exports (Nauerby 1996), today consumption is limited to meat and blubber, primarily for sustenance.

Figure 3

Grindadráp is a village-wide affair (Photo by Sea Shepherd/Eliza Muirhead)

Grindadráp is a village-wide affair (Photo by Sea Shepherd/Eliza Muirhead)

-> See the list of figures

The pilot whale drive has been a recurring motif in art, including public murals, with Sámal Joensen-Mikines’s depictions of grindadráp (Fig. 4), the nation’s most iconic. The Faroese literary tradition has portrayed the drive ornately, as have folktales, legends, and ballads, most famously the 1835 whaling ballad, grindavísan (Wylie and Margolin 1981). The grindadansur, or grind-dance, historically provided space for warmth, mental respite, and physical relaxation prior to the butchering and distribution of the whales the following morning (ibid.). While this precise dance is no longer performed, celebrations habitually occur (Bulbeck and Bowdler 2008). Indeed, grindadráp is seen by many Faroese as a high point of the year with great cause for rejoicing. Employees and students are usually granted time off to participate in the drive and subsequent festivities (Í Eyðansstovu 2021).

Whale meat and blubber with boiled potatoes has long been considered the Faroese national dish (Fielding 2018). Fresh whale meat can be served as a steak (grindabúffur), or the meat, blubber, and potatoes can be boiled together in pan with salt. Slivers of blubber are a popular accompaniment to dried fish, a typical component of a kalt borð, a spread of cold dishes and cakes commonly served at special events (Svanberg 2021). Whale meat is preserved by salting or outdoor wind drying, which takes about eight weeks, although freezing is becoming increasingly common. The grind motif is ubiquitous, found in bank logos, boat decorations, and sports team mascots (Bulbeck and Bowdler 2008), and an ornamental grindaknívar, or slaughter knife, is displayed on countless Faroese mantels.

Figure 4

Grindadráp 1942, oil painting by Sámal Joensen-Mikines (1906-1979)

Grindadráp 1942, oil painting by Sámal Joensen-Mikines (1906-1979)

-> See the list of figures

Alongside the Faroese language, chain dance, and ballads, grindadráp was romanticized by travel writers, locals, and onlookers as a symbol of heroic bravery in which man struggles with nature for subsistence, becoming intertwined with Faroese nationhood and manhood (Nauerby 1996). 19th century writings depicted it “as a picturesque element of a living folk culture on the periphery of modern society” (146) and “as something specifically Faroese” (154). It was not until the 1970s that a confluence of globalization, mass media, and environmental and animal welfare movements, for whom the imagined “super whale” became the symbol par excellence of the battle against inhumane environmental practices (Kalland 1993; Kerins 2010), altered international, mainstream perceptions of grindadráp and its practitioners, a notoriety to which the Faroese had not been accustomed[7].

Tradition and modernity

According to the official government website (www.faroeislands.fo), in the “Society” section, under the heading “Tradition and modernity side by side”:

Centuries of relative isolation from the outside world has resulted in the preservation of ancient traditions that to this day shape life in the Faroes. The unique mixture of tradition and modernisation makes the Faroe Islands stand out amongst other nations, creating a population with a very strong identity – where teenagers still proudly wear the national dress on national holidays, while they also stay updated on Twitter and Snapchat, just like any other modern teen.

Føroya Landsstýri 2019

Putting aside its romantic nationalist prescription of identity onto the Faroese citizenry, much of the government’s description is superficially accurate. It is probable that many if not most young citizens publicly don a traditional garment on national holidays, and it is equally likely that they use smartphone apps to interact with society[8]. A pertinent question is whether it is adequate to juxtapose “tradition” and “modernity” as bounded and contradictory concepts, even when expressed in a “unique mixture.” Similarly, it is apt to ask whether these cultural constructions are a nationalist attempt to erase or obscure in-group difference and simultaneously to exclude outsiders through a proclamation of singularity. More to the point, how is the primordialization of a specific tradition mobilized in the face of external opposition through discourse and social action and what are the implications for modern Faroese identity and society?

The majority of folklore scholarship over the past half century articulated tradition and modernity as essential and binary concepts in a tenuous dialectical co-constitution that allowed for the shifting of poles (Bauman and Briggs 2003). They recognized elements such as industrialization, capitalism and consumer culture, the bureaucratic nation-state, and gender liberalization (Hall et al. 1996) as hallmarks of modern cultures and tended romantically or nostalgically to locate manifestations of allegedly traditional values therein. Some folklorists moved beyond face-to-face transmission to discern traditional elements in the newly developing, ultramodern, and mass-mediated conduits of communication such as radio, television, and electronic mail (Dégh 1994), while others assumed the role of “motif spotting,” locating folkloric motifs in works of popular culture such as comic books, B-movies, and supermarket tabloids (Schechter 1988). Central to these inquiries is the search for evidence of the traditional, substantive form itself, ever present but frequently cloaked in modern clothing. A task of enumerating the myriad traditional elements of grindadráp within modern Faroese society would likely have enticed such scholarship[9].

Foundational works by sociologists Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Erving Goffman (1959; 1983) on the mechanisms by which individual agency has the potential to assert itself in social interaction paved the way for the performance turn in folklore. The main focus shifted away from spotting individual traditions toward the discursive processes wrapped up in social performances that very often amount to hegemonic struggles over identities, values, and norms in the context of tradition and modernity. For instance, Bourdieu contrived two discursive fields inhabiting any social interaction, the opinion field and the doxic field, doxa being the condition in which a community continually reproduces a culturally constructed world “seen as a self-evident and natural order” (1977: 166). The boundary between these two fields is the space where agency is potentially realized. It is thus vulnerable to manipulation by a dominant power, which seeks to primordialize “the naturalization of its own arbitrariness” (184) and is the inevitable site of hegemonic struggle. As we shall see, many Faroese have grappled at this boundary in an attempt to define what grindadráp means to their cultural identity when confronted by strong opposition to an established doxic order.

Similarly, Goffman saw the struggle for power transpire within a face-to-face domain he called the “interaction order,” where institutional and individual agency come into contact and attempt to assert or maintain control of the space. Apart from describing how these micro-interactive realities influence the macro-structure of society (Goffman 1959), he recognized, like Bourdieu, the potential for normative behaviour to realign itself to reflect values promulgated by dominant powers (Goffman 1983). Iddo Tavory and Gary Alan Fine (2020) build upon the interaction order by proposing a theory of disruption that pushes back on the tendency in sociology to problematize disruption as an obstacle to be overcome, pointing rather to the deeper potential for intersubjective meaning making and strengthening of relationships. Considering disruption in the context of anti-whaling campaigns as opening up a space to articulate new perspectives, this paper examines how disinterested Faroese become mobilized in the wake of disruption to assert their national identity proudly while engaging in a battle for sovereignty over a primordial practice.

Folklore has increasingly looked to performance of informal culture as fundamental to the transmission of tradition, beginning perhaps most famously with works by Roger Abraham (1968) on rhetorical strategies employed in vernacular speech to gain social capital and Richard Bauman (1975) on verbal art as performance, each interested primarily in language as a medium for conveying and accruing artistic and social power. Other performance scholars chose to extend their inquiry to nonverbal communication. Deborah Kapchan (1994), for example, examines the articulation of complex identities through song and dance performance by socially marginal female members of Moroccan society. With the rising popularity of digital performative spaces, Robert Glenn Howard (2008; 2012) identifies “growing webs of network-based folk culture” (2008: 192) in the ubiquitous vernacular web. He sees these spaces as inevitable outcrops of participatory media, even within platforms that appear to serve the interests of institutions over communities. It is increasingly common to conduct ethnographies and other methodologies entirely in digital spaces (Tolbert and Johnson 2019), particularly in the last couple of years due to face-to-face restrictions from the Covid-19 pandemic, the present study included.

With his iconic poeticism, Henry Glassie (1995) describes history as an “engagement of wills…interaction among traditions, each fraught with value, all driving toward their several visions of the future” (177) and tradition as “distinct styles of volitional, temporal action” (178). His use of the terms progress, stability, and revival illustrates how traditions unfold. Progress is what Glassie refers to as modernization, where “the individualistic, the material, and the international claim attention and drive the planner” and it is “noisy and conspicuous” (id.:188). Stability is enacted through rituals, values, and customs as it silently persists, “running quietly at the edge of thought” (ibid.). Revival is “built of recursive work as people plunder the past to confect new things” (188-89), a radical move to delink from hegemonic institutions and oppressors. Glassie’s description of disparate planes whose collisions incite conflict evokes both Bourdieu’s discursive fields and Goffman’s interaction order, particularly when considering the manifold possibilities of such an encounter that is between traditionalizing and modernizing agendas. But it also reifies the abstract concepts of tradition and modernity, which brings us back to the original conundrum from the government statement. Who is using these terms and to what political ends?

Some scholars complicate the very notions of tradition and modernity by pointing to the concepts’ colonial roots. For example, James Blaut (1994) explains how “tunnel history” informs the mythic “colonizer’s model of the world” wherein dynamic inventions and innovations have originated exclusively in the West and everything else is passive, inert, and traditional. His revision sees modernity as contradictory, layered, and multidirectional, leading James Clifford (2004) to suggest expressive cultures historically dubbed “local traditions” may be more fruitfully described as “conservative/inventive ingredients” of a so-called “aprogressive modernity” (155). “Living traditions must be selectively pure: mixing, matching, remembering, forgetting, sustaining, transforming their senses of communal continuity” (156). Michael Watts (1992) avers that local notions of tradition and custom offer symbolic material around which societies “rework and refashion the modernizations of capitalist transformations” (15). The Faroese undoubtedly use this approach when confronted by opposition to grindadráp, as a face-saving tactic (Goffman 1959) before the international gaze and as a means of achieving stability of tradition.

Another relevant concept is authenticity. Grindadráp is being seriously contested as a viable tradition in the 21st century by opponents who highlight the Faroese dependence on modern technologies in order to devalue the performance as inauthentic. However, several scholars are questioning the concept’s utility. Clifford (2004), for instance, argues that no authentic culture, identity, or tradition exists as original, pure, uncorrupted, or fixed due to the continual processes of construction, reconstruction, invention, and reinvention. Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin (1984) conclude that “genuine and spurious […] are inappropriate [terms] when applied to social phenomena which never exist apart from our interpretations of them” (288). Apropos to grindadráp, Charles Briggs (1996) challenges the ecopolitical discursive strategy of juxtaposing images of a traditional past and a modern present on separate planes, thus governing their (in)commensurability by emphasizing rifts and denying links (449).

Finally, the practice of the free distribution of whale meat further complicates notions of modernity as intrinsic to capitalism. Seeking to delink modernity from colonial capitalism and building on the diverse economies framework developed by feminist geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham (Gibson-Graham 2006), Ragnheiður Bogadóttir and Elisabeth Olsen (2017) see the free distribution of whale meat as an already-existing noncapitalist practice with the potential “to foment new desires and foster new political possibilities” (508), corresponding to Gibson-Graham’s politics of the subject and politics of collective action, respectively. That Faroese civilians and bureaucrats alike are compelled to defend grindadráp by appealing to noncapitalist justifications that run counter to axiomatic underpinnings of healthy economic growth is cause enough to transcend opposition and critique in favour of building on an extant tradition.

In the next section, I examine how narratives pertaining to identity, meaning, and values with respect to grindadráp are framed in digital spaces. Qualitative data are taken from the social media websites Reddit and Twitter, as well as government sites and blog post comments. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a direct-action anti-poaching and marine conservation group, emerges as the leading international antagonist through the dissemination of press in the form of news articles, reality television, documentaries, and social media engagements. Responses by some Faroese and sympathizers are examined in which heritage and communalization are invoked, but also the equally forceful and often conflicting issues of science, self-sufficiency, and economic precarity. I include quotes by Hans Meinhard based on a two-hour Zoom interview in November 2021 and conclude with open-ended questions about traditional futures in the Faroes.

The Debate

Most Faroese first encountered resistance to a commonsense tradition in the 1970s, when orchestrated opposition by environmental and animal welfare groups launched the Faroe Islands onto the international stage, particularly in the West, alongside Iceland, Japan, and Indigenous hunting groups. Organizations like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace built some oppositional momentum around image-based campaigns (Robé 2015) decrying the inhumane slaughtering of whales, dolphins, and seals and calling for their unconditional protection by institutional bodies.

However, it was not until the 2014 Sea Shepherd campaign Operation GrindStop that a firestorm ushered in a new era of surveillance, threats, protests, court proceedings, and economic boycotts. Anti-whaling narratives often follow a unilinear evolutionary model that pits modernity against barbarism, framing the consumption of whale meat as essentially invalid behaviour when alternative options are available on the global market. With over 128,000 Twitter followers, Sea Shepherd’s founder Captain Paul Watson uses sensational us-vs-them, tribal language to incite rage against white, modern, privileged Europeans engaging in ritual slaughter, declaring:

[T]o any civilized observer from the outside, the Grind is one of the bloodiest, most cruel, and most savage traditions in the world […] the Grind is practically a religion. It is ritualized brutality and traditional torture, punctuated by public drunkenness. The…pilot whale[s]…are herded into bays, stabbed, speared, pelted with stones, slashed with outboard motor blades, and slowly and joyfully slaughtered. They die amidst the laughter of children and the drunken bellows of their hooligan fathers… Children rip the fetuses from the pregnant mothers and hold them up like trophies. Men hack through the necks of the struggling whales to sever the spinal cords... Today it is a sport […] an orgy of blood, providing entertainment and an outlet for aggression, an excuse to get together, drink, and indulge in a community festival.[10]

cited in Van Ginkel 2007: 15

Another common anti-whaling trope is the asseveration that modern grindadráp practice is inauthentic since motorboats are used in lieu of traditional rowing boats, as are modern modes of communication. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society conjure a definition of tradition that attempts to educate the Faroese populace about how their tradition is being seriously undermined:

In consideration of any “whaling tradition” it is important to bear in mind that such a tradition is the integrated body of a particular hunting gear, social organization, individual and collective skills, rules of capture, processing, distribution and utilization. If a fundamental part of this “body” is replaced by new technology, by definition this will have profound consequences for the “tradition” as a whole.

cited in Van Ginkel 2007: 14

The use of contemporary tools thus outs grindadráp for breaching tradition, which is discursively reduced to its materials, a framing which ignores associated and culturally significant beliefs, symbols, social structures, and practices (van Ginkel 2007: 29), and contributes to the circulation of what Uma Narayan describes as “cultural contexts as sealed rooms, impervious to change, with a homogeneous space ‘inside’ them, inhabited by ‘authentic insiders’ who all share a uniform and consistent account of their institutions and values” (1997: 33). The juxtaposition of popular and sensational images of Viking bloodlust through frequently encountered phrases and keywords with equally contrived images of a modern and sterile society amounts to an empirical denial of linkages and selective injunction of transgressions from another’s heritage (Briggs 1996).

Threats and violent language are other common anti-whaling tactics (Kerins 2010), kicked off by a 1990 letter-writing campaign directed at the prime minister’s office. One exemplary letter states: “If the atomic bomb is dropped I hope it is on the Faroe Islands, the rest of the civilized world won’t miss you. The worst of health may you all die soon” (Sanderson 1990: 196). Even some schoolchildren received a newspaper clipping with such bold statements as “You should all be killed” and “You should be bombed” (Sanderson 1994: 197). The Twitter hashtag #BoycottFaroeIslands is replete with comments by enraged outsiders, such as “This is sheer blood lust and entertainment for a mentally deprived nation stuck in the 16th century – nothing to do with subsistence.”[11]

Others use Twitter to deter tourists from visiting the Faroes, with comments like “What are these ‘people’ capable of?” #FaroeIslands #monsters #OpKillingBay #EU[12], “Who on earth would want to travel to this God forsaken land anyway? Shame on you and all who live there……..”[13], and “Please stop visiting the Faroe Islands until they have stopped the barbaric ‘tradition’ known as the Grindadrap”[14]. On the Faroe Islands subreddit[15], which is current with many different threads, the most trending topic is grindadráp. Name calling is as rampant on this platform as on others, with similarly dehumanizing and malicious rhetoric. Someone recently hurled an insult at “your disgusting population”[16] and another wrote, “Fuck you Faroe Islands, you interbred barbarians. Hope a volcanic eruption is in your near future.”[17]

However, an asset of the vernacular web is its inherent performativity and provision of space for anonymized dialogue (Buccitelli 2012). In August 2021, a Redditor posted an animated anti-grindadráp propaganda video, commenting in the subsequent thread that they disagreed with the “old excuse of ‘It’s based on culture & tradition’ as thousands of years back they couldn’t import food; now we can and they still continue to slaughter them.”[18] A respondent was quick to correct a perceived essentialization of national culture:

I’m Faroese. As we use diesel powered boats, jetskis, mobile phones and newly developed tools, this has nothing to do with culture or tradition. Getting food is essential, nothing else. The only traditional aspect I can point at, is how the food is being distributed after the whales have been killed. Further this is the very last communal hunt there is in Europe (I hope to stand corrected). Getting local food makes sense, harvesting sustainable makes sense. Getting together and making it happen makes sense. You’ll find that the only ones using “culture and tradition” are the nay-side. The yay-side is getting food on the table.[19]

Retorts such as this are overwhelmingly common in this debate, wherein Faroese proponents point to communalism and self-sufficiency as the two key aspects of the drive that motivate its continual transmission. Some are careful to point out that grindadráp is not being done for tradition, but rather that it is a food tradition that requires cultural work to be preserved. Max Weber (1976) theorized that the active maintenance of tradition often requires an understanding of its moral authority, which is commonly accomplished through sacralization. Comments by many Faroese suggest the communalism associated with grindadráp is widely agreed to be a sort of sacred act, undoubtedly bolstered by its persistence over centuries. Sacralization lends itself further to solidarity through shared action, echoing Rob van Ginkel’s assertion that “being Faroese is not an ontological state but is constituted through practice and experience” (2007: 34). What matters most is that they feel they are manifesting Faroeseness through sacred cultural work.

Scientific references are also commonly cited to assure conservation-minded opponents that pilot whales are not in fact endangered. With an estimated 344,248 pilot whales living in the North Atlantic (Pike et al. 2019) and an annual catch of 636 since 2000, opponents are informed that the drives amount to 0.002% of the population, constituting a sustainable harvest according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (Fielding 2021). The Faroese government’s website features an entire section dedicated to the sustainability of the practice in which it remarks how, despite a tenfold increase in the human population over the centuries, the pilot whale drive has remained fairly consistent (Føroya Landsstýri 2017).

Figure 5

Images like this one of children participating in grindadráp have been widely circulated on social media as evidence of the tradition’s barbarism

Images like this one of children participating in grindadráp have been widely circulated on social media as evidence of the tradition’s barbarism
Photo by Katie Currid, 2011

-> See the list of figures

Proponents also explain how very little of the whale is squandered and that whale meat and blubber trail only sheep, cattle, and fish in comprising the average Faroese diet. Western meat consumption, on the other hand, is seen as much less ethical and sustainable. For instance, they note that factory-farmed animals dwell in prisons, processed foods contribute to myriad health problems, and consumers are alienated from the killing and butchering of animals (Vialles 1994). When villainized for promoting the slaughter to their children (Figure 5), many Faroese counter that Western children are often wholly detached from the provenance of their meat. Even a 2014 government memorandum applauds the fact that Faroese children “grow up with an intimate knowledge and understanding of their natural environment,” to build awareness of the source of “the meat on their dinner plates” (Lögmansskrivstovan 2017: 5).

By far, the tradition’s most commonly invoked virtue is customary sharing, how the meat is distributed fairly among participants, often including the sick and elderly, and how fair distribution has been the regulated practice since grindadráp was first recorded in the 16th century. Interestingly, critics have regarded this non-commercial aspect of grindadráp as an “unnecessary indulgence” (Sanderson 1994: 198) irreconcilable with a cash economy, instantiating Katherine Gibson’s and Julie Graham’s notion of capitalocentrism, whereby noncapitalist activities are rendered invisible or undervalued (Gibson-Graham 2009). Hans Meinhard, however, agrees with his compatriots that collective distribution is the prime motivation for its perseverance:

I think that is certainly what makes it such a likeable tradition or community thing. Everybody can just get together and the amount you get doesn’t depend on how much you pay for it or what you do in life or whatever. You met up, you did your part, and everybody’s sort of equal. There have been some instances where people who do attend take their part and then after that sell their part, but that actually does get some resistance among the Faroese people. A lot of people think that it feels wrong to get financial profit out of it because it’s not a profit kind of thing for most people. It’s kind of like, “Ah, come on, man. If you wanted to sell whales, it would be better if you just didn’t meet up so the other people would just get more to their part.” It’s not illegal so if you met up you can do whatever you want. I think it would be sad if it became a very popular thing, a common thing. I think that also would damage the reputation of it. It would be a harder thing to defend.

Í Eyðansstovu 2021

Implicit in his words is the sanctity of the communalism inherent in the tradition, to the effect that profiting by selling whale is perceived as distastefully transgressive. Moreover, the tradition itself would be seriously jeopardized if profitmaking replaced sharing as the dominant economic relation involved. When asked why he thinks the Faroese are so passionate about defending grindadráp, Hans Meinhard indicates shared resentment toward a perceived affront to a primordial tradition, as well as the Faroese identity formation inherent in its practice:

People are really stubborn. They don’t want to change their ways just because some other people that don’t know tell you to because it’s better to do something else. People feel strongly about the ways that they have always done it and it’s a way of life that you are brought up in from a very young age so it’s a very fundamental part of people, part of their identity I would say... Actually, contrary to what [Sea Shepherd’s] goal was, the young Faroese people actually got more engaged with whale killing because it drove so much attention to the topic. It was like an outside force coming into the Faroes against us... Because it set us up as something threatened so you have to act defensively or something like that… When a threat appears, everybody groups up… It would feel very weird for most Faroese people if it was just stopped or illegal or something.

Í Eyðansstovu 2021

Various comments on blogposts relay a similar experience with regard to the irony of Sea Shepherd’s campaign garnering more domestic support for grindadráp, one commenter going so far as to compare them to the Taliban: “They come here to our country with hostile intents, they sabotage fishermen boats, break our laws, they destroy cars and worst of all they spread propaganda on the internet and they have a massive following and sent a hate mob our way”[20].

Certainly not all Faroese are unanimous in their support for the tradition. Some, including the Faroese branch of the organization Earthrace Conservation[21], point out that it is no longer essential for their survival and that whales possess extreme emotional intelligence and experience intense fear during the drive. A 2014 opinion poll indicates that around 12% of Faroese citizens believe the practice should be abandoned, their primary justifications being that it is unnecessary and that it damages the Faroese reputation (Bogadóttir and Olsen 2017).

Contemporary pro-whaling narratives thus attribute meaning not only to its symbolic role in constructing Faroese national identity, but also subscribe to global discourses of sustainability and environmental stewardship. Grindadráp is lauded by the Faroese government as a sustainable, well-regulated, communal, and natural form of food provisioning (Føroya Landsstýri 2017). That catches are widely distributed with no monetary exchange is perceived as a valuable and attractive asset. Simultaneously, official discourses insist that the Faroese have the right to be both modern – engaging in growth-oriented market strategies to secure ever-increasing access to global resources – and traditional – having local control of local resources. While anti-whaling projects have sought to strengthen both affirmative and differential Faroese national identity (Singleton 2016), the former appears far more prevalent.

Conclusion

Newfoundland and Labrador supported a drive-style pilot whaling industry until a nationwide moratorium on commercial whaling was enacted in 1972. “Old Polina” and “Jack Was Every Inch a Sailor” are two folk songs about whaling, but unlike grindavísan, they betray more shame than pride in the tradition. It supplied oil to the global market and meat was generally discarded or used as feed in Newfoundland mink farms (Fielding 2007). Pilot whales, known locally as “potheads,” were overharvested, whale oil fell out of favour, and the practice was discontinued.

The Faroes exhibit a different relationship with the pilot whale drive. Many are firm about not calling it a hunt because of the semantic association with searching and stalking (Sanderson 1994). Rather, a whale is typically spotted either from shore or close to shore in a fishing boat[22]. Unlike in Norway and Japan, where whale hunting takes place in the open sea and out of the public eye, the Faroese do what they have always done: an organized slaughter of an entire pod in a crimson red harbour in broad daylight. No secrets are withheld and anyone may participate. They see grindadráp as a common property regime, and one that has not ended in “tragedy” as predicted by Garrett Hardin (1968).

Grindadráp is perceived not only as a source of nutrition or performance of manliness but as part of an “articulated bricolage” (van Ginkel 2007: 31), instrumental in identity construction. Rather than an immutable symbol of traditional Faroese culture, it is among a number of subsistence activities such as fowling, sheep-rearing, fishing for-use, bird egg harvesting, cow pasturing, knitting, and agriculture (Bogadóttir and Olsen 2017) that are in constant flux with ethical and environmental concerns. However, that flux is contained within a primordial discourse and a doxic order that, until the present, have largely foregone disruption. Only in the recent past have Faroese nationhood and traditionalism been indicted as inhumane, barbaric, and evil. Efforts by powerful Western institutions to occupy and control the agentive space between the opinion and doxic fields have been largely unsuccessful. To the contrary, the disruptions have awakened many young people to rally behind its preservation.

Finally, it is remarkable, from a diverse economies perspective, to see an already-existing noncapitalist practice being fervently proclaimed by the vast majority of an otherwise capitalist-growth-oriented body politic and populace alike in the face of relentless and overpowering antagonism. For many Faroese, procuring food from the land and sea as their ancestors did and passing on that knowledge to their children is more valuable than purchasing imported meats from the grocery store. They acknowledge what is at stake – the wrath of prospective tourists and outside investors, risk of boycotts, humiliation in the global media and by celebrities[23], etc. – but appear more intent on pragmatically engaging in dialogue and imparting their critical perspectives than in succumbing to those oppressive forces.

Future projects might look at how immigrants are engaging with this tradition. Are they willing to embrace its primordiality and accept the risk of ostracism as they too march “toward their several visions of the future,” join the chorus of scorn, or embody new possibilities altogether? It also remains to be seen whether the global crisis of biomagnification of methylmercury, PCBs, and other toxins will inflict health risks too dire to sustain the practice, or how climate change will impact food security (Weihe and Joensen 2012; Fielding 2018). Already, a shrinking Atlantic puffin population, due not to overharvesting but to their primary food source, sand eels, being depleted (Í Eyðansstovu 2021), induced the Faroese to ban the practice in Mykines a decade ago, foreclosing a well-regulated sustenance activity and rich local source of nutrition[24]. Yet, in the spirit of folklore, as old traditions are interwoven and reworked in present contexts, individual and collective agency may manage to mitigate toxins, replenish fish stocks, or replace whaling with other forms of commoning, ensuring that discourses around ritualized brutality in the Faroes continue to enrage, engage, and beguile.