“this sunken land.” Literary writers mending and unsettling landscapes in Iceland

Drawing on material from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, this paper zooms in on two Icelandic writers, Andri Snær Magnason and Haukur Ingvarsson, and their works Dreamland ( Draumalandið, 2006) and Ecostentialism ( Vistarverur, 2018), respectively. These two works relate in different ways to the construction of the hydropower plant Kárahnjúkavirkjun in East Iceland. The hydropower plant was completed in 2006 despite mass protests and political controversy. Broader debates in Icelandic society at the time seemed to coalesce around this particular project. Through their writing, on a backdrop of radical societal change and crises, the two writers sought to reshape landscapes of rural Iceland. Inspired by anthropological studies of imagination, literature, and creativity, I aim to show with these two cases, how literary writing, as a certain creative technology, can unsettle and mend the actual and imaginary landscapes that human beings dwell in. I conclude with suggestions for how this study, using literary texts and “ethnographic biography” inspired by Michael Herzfeld, brings about new anthropological approaches to imagination and representation.