Are Islanders Insular? A Personal View^*

* I would like to thank the editors for their islandic inspiration in writing this article, and Denis Cosgrove and the anonymous peer reviewer for their insightful comments, which particularly helped me to draw this article to its concluding departure.

Abstract

I use my personal experience as an islander doing fieldwork among islanders in the West Indies to explore the meaning of “insularity.” I then expand on that personal experience by drawing on literary sources, particularly Homer's the Odyssey and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both of which express an island worldview. The island worldview is contrasted and compared with the continental worldview on the basis of differing modes of navigation and cartography and differing modes of orientation as defined by cognitive psychologists.

• egocentricity
• Greece
• insularity
• Ithaca
• Nantucket
• Nevis
• portolan cartography
• Saint John (U.S. Virgin Islands)
• Staten Island

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth R. Olwig

Dr. Olwig is a professor of landscape planning at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SE‐230 53 Alnarp, Sweden.