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Island Youth in Waiting: Adolescence, Waithood, and Future-making in the Faroe Islands

Firouz Gaini (University of the Faroe Islands, Faroe Islands)

The Social Construction of Adolescence in Contemporaneity

ISBN: 978-1-80117-449-7, eISBN: 978-1-80117-448-0

ISSN: 1537-4661

Publication date: 31 July 2023

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Abstract

This chapter explores the multifaceted present-day social and cultural constructions of adolescence in a Nordic Atlantic society, the Faroe Islands. Based on young people’s perspectives and narratives, this chapter delves into the transition from youthhood to adulthood in the context of a small-scale, family-oriented society in shift. Drawing on sociological theoretical writing about “waiting” and “waithood” in relation to the (often temporally extended or delayed) transition from adolescence to full adulthood in a globalizing world, as well as social anthropological studies of future-making, my aim is to outline the new futural orientations of contemporary adolescence with focus on aspirations for work and family life. Young people, the chapter argues, are waiting and navigating in a society with multiple parallel temporalities: When to marry? When to get children? When to earn your own money and have your own home? These and many other questions define waithood in contemporary society, which is characterized by an increasingly precarious avenue toward promising futures resonating the socially accepted ways of performing adulthood. In the Faroe Islands, an island society with roughly 54,000 inhabitants, young people’s waiting is very often also a question of staying or leaving, that is, mobility and migration strategies. The waiting entails pace as a strategy for the future (Eisenstein, 2021). Adolescent islanders aim to “hit the right pace” in their future imaginaries. This chapter contributes to sociological discussions on the social construction of adolescence with focus on the meaning of time and temporalities. It relies on empirical material from extensive qualitative studies in the Faroe Islands.

Keywords

Citation

Gaini, F. (2023), "Island Youth in Waiting: Adolescence, Waithood, and Future-making in the Faroe Islands", Isidório, M.S. and Bass, L.E. (Ed.) The Social Construction of Adolescence in Contemporaneity (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 31), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 107-122. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120230000031008

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023 Firouz Gaini

Introduction

To “grow up” – adolescere – is rarely experienced as a frictionless social maturation and painless bodily transformation anywhere across the globe, yet most girls and boys venture the tricky childhood-to-adulthood transition with fairly satisfying results. They become adults with lifestyles and values reflecting dominant images of adulthood in their society. Adolescence can be illustrated as a prolonged and elastic rite de passage, with all the cultural and psychosocial uncertainties and ambiguities associated with its phase of liminality, when society neither categorizes the individual citizen in question as a child nor as an adult, but rather emphasizes his risky betwixt and between qualities (van Gennep, 1960). Young people, says James (cited in Valentine et al., 1998, p. 5), are defined by boundaries of exclusion telling what they are not (or not yet), hence reducing them to persons in the process of “becoming” adults rather than respecting them as “being” in their own right. In this chapter, I will examine and analyze young people’s roles and positions in society through a temporal lens exploring the relation between the present and the future in their everyday life practices. Many present-day young people experience a puzzling everyday struggle of navigation and orientation between, on the one side, the social demands of accelerating processes of decision-making and planning generating a constant sense of busyness, and, on the other side, the opportunity to decelerate and situate themselves in waiting situations, as a form of Eriksonian psychosocial (identity) moratorium, for experimentation “with their sense of purpose and identity” (Cuzzocrea, 2019, p. 569). Some young people, or rather the so-called “emerging adults,” regard adult life and obligations as “closing doors” terminating the “wide-open possibilities” of adolescence (Arnett cited in Cuzzocrea, 2019, p. 570). For others, for example, the youth generation in many African countries, representing young people being stuck in a stalemate of waithood (prolonged period of suspension between childhood and adulthood), full adulthood is the promised land of opportunities “as fully-fledged members of society” (Honwama, 2014, p. 2429).

Adolescence is in many ways, as Hall argues, a time of “storm and stress” (Hall cited in Aitken, 2019, p. 11). The unruly youth needs to be tamed, was Hall’s message a century ago, but today the youth lives in a very unruly and chaotic world, and the millennial generation of the Global North seems to move inwards to locate “itself through instant communications, social media, and digital technologies” (Aitken, 2019, p. 11). Growing up is also a universal question of youthful change: intergenerational conflicts about alternative futures for society. For the millennial generation, the dreams of the future have largely gone from macro-utopias to micro-utopias, from long-term to short-term visions of a better world. Young people invest in hope in their everyday lives, because it is something making them feel that they are “going somewhere” in their lives (Hage, 2009). It is, logically, difficult to prepare for the future in precarious times, yet young people seem to be generally “reflexively realistic about their future” (Threadgold, 2020, p. 690). In their everyday struggle, young people make strategies “to deal with the present and engage with the future” (Threadgold, 2018, p. 209). We are also witnessing young people’s revitalized political activism, opposition and protest across the globe in the twenty-first century, for example as regards environmental protection and structural intergenerational inequalities. These trends display the need to give a “voice to the agency of young people” in order to understand the values and dreams of a new generation in a globalizing world (Valentine, 2019, p. 30). Young people’s future thinking and work of maintaining hope (Cook & Cuervo, 2019) is closely linked to waiting-temporalities in relation to the capacity of coping with complex everyday lives (King cited in Cuzzocrea, 2019, p. 573). Coping with waithood is an everyday reality among disadvantaged young people, in the Global South as well as in the Global North, struggling to handle urgent needs rather than to create long-term strategies (Honwana, 2006). Waithood forces young people to make choices; making decisions helping them “define their relationships towards work, family, and intimacy,” says Honwana (2014, p. 2438). Hence, young people’s waiting is a “passive activity” (Crapanzano, 1985) as well as an “active passivity” (Hage, 2009). Active waithood also stresses the youth generation’s future-oriented struggle and efforts to create change and to succeed in society (McLean, 2021).

Waiting is an integral part of life (Bandak & Janeja, 2019, p. 1), and “time may pass too slowly or too quickly”, generating feelings of discontinuity or temporal turbulence (Frederiksen & Dalsgård, 2014, pp. 2–3). When young people feel that society’s time/tempo is unreachable, their sense of agency might thenceforth be challenged (Frederiksen & Dalsgård, 2014). Young people are waiting in hope or despair; in solitude or together; patiently or restlessly; as routine or exception. Waiting is associated with emotional temporal tropes of delaying, enduring, persisting, maintaining, and so on. How people experience waiting depends on the social and cultural context. Waiting is also a cultural practice (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010, p. 10). It is “a temporal region hardly mapped,” says Schweizer (2008, p. 1). Clearly, waiting is a much more productive, dynamic, and multilayered practice than the boring and empty wait associated with queues and cheerless waiting rooms suggests. Waiting entails oscillation between hoping and doubting, yet it is also a suspension of both (Bandak & Janeja, 2019, p. 5). Young people are waiting for change, waiting for a new tomorrow, but their wait is also a persistence in uncertain times. Their waiting is a navigation between different competing temporal horizons with different micro-utopias of hope (Bryant & Knight, 2019, p. 149). Waiting is also a question of the micropolitics of pace: waiting for the right moment at the right place. This waiting entails pace as a strategy for the future (Eisenstein, 2021, pp. 460–461). Young people aim to “hit the right pace” in their future imaginaries. The act of waiting is, moreover, drawing “attention to the passing of time” (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010, p. 21). The more they pause and invest in waiting, the more reluctant are young people to halt the waiting (Hage, 2009). Everyday life waiting is sometimes associated with mundane routine and boredom, but young people consider boredom to be a central element of their existence attracting “their thoughts, worries, and self-criticism” (Frederiksen & Dalsgård, 2014, p. 6). Boredom, an emotion linked to the emancipation of “the possibility of something else” (Conrad cited in Frederiksen & Dalsgård, 2014, p. 8), is also “the threshold to great deeds” (Benjamin cited in Khosravi, 2021, p. 16). Waithood or waiting situations influence young people’s future images and future-making in different ways.

In the landscape of multiple temporalities, the future is also serving as a harbinger of emerging social constructions of adolescence in different social and cultural settings. Temporal imagining and reasoning can help us better understand young people’s images of the relation between the past and the future, but also of their creative strategies aiming to hit the right pace in relation to essential decisions influencing their future as adults. Future-making is an agentive strategy inspired by action toward hope and aspirational visions (Green et al., 2012, p. 1642). Among young people, this venture is rarely a question of structured planning and risk management in the fashion of market-based business solutions, but rather a personal strategy for future-oriented change based on their reflexive everyday struggle as an “attempt to maintain a cohesive existence in an ever-fragmentic, entropic world” (Threadgold, 2018, p. 22). It is sometimes hidden in “pockets of hope” among vulnerable people responding to existential immobility and “stuckness,” or “waiting out” the crisis (Kleist & Jansen, 2016, p. 383). The “future in the present” (Malkki, 2001), the future as part of humdrum day-to-day activities among young people, is connecting waiting activities to future-making processes. Young people have images of the future, which frame future scenarios, and these serve as active elements in young people’s concrete present-day practices (Austdal & Helgesen, 2015, pp. 212–216). Young people’s contrasting images of the future, therefore, directly or indirectly, comment on a wide range of everyday life aspects reflecting their sense of belonging and cultural identity, family, and social network, as well as education and knowledge (Galland, 2008). One way of opening the way for radical and provocative visions of alternative presents is by “othering” the future. From this perspective, the future is imagined as “alterity of the present, rather than as a distant eventuality” (Pink et al., 2017, p. 133). In daily micropolitics, multiple forms of futurity unfold simultaneously, and young people experience temporalities of opportunity that they aim to catch (Eisenstein, 2021).

Young people, as protagonists who can influence the future in a good way, are divided because of the unequal distribution of hope (Hage, 2016, p. 466), but they all struggle, from different positions, to be capable of using the future “to question, unpack, [and] invent what is going on and what is doable now” (Willow, 2020, p. 9). Young people’s future-making practices and rationalities are affected by the rhythms of the “not-yet” – “whether it arrives immediately, is foreseeable and calculable, or is expected yet forever postponable” (Pels, 2015, p. 767). Young people’s waithood and future-making represent cultural coping strategies for the precarious transition from adolescence to adulthood in a globalizing world characterized by discontinuity and future uncertainty (Frederiksen & Dalsgård, 2014, pp. 3–4). Time is, so to speak, “a troublesome figure in young people’s lives” (Frederiksen & Dalsgård, 2014), especially in a time when the world seems to move toward the rather dystopian – and not utopian – scenarios of young people’s future image collections. With hope the future looks like a “reservoir of possibilities” (Polak, 1973), but “everyday utopias” (Cooper, 2014), referring to existing ordinary spaces, and a “hopeful modality of engaging with, and in, the world” (Sliwinski, 2016, p. 432), guides us to the intersection between hope, utopianism, and space, which also invites us to contextual discussions about young people and time.

Youth and Islands Temporalities

The Faroe Islands is an island community in the North Atlantic Ocean, midway between Iceland and Norway, with a population of 54,000 inhabitants (https://hagstova.fo/en/population/population/population). It is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, which has been self-governing since 1948. The Faroes were colonized by Norse Vikings in the start of the ninth century AD, but people from Ireland and Scotland are believed to have lived in the archipelago for shorter or longer periods of time since the seventh century. There is very limited knowledge about the history of the islands before the Vikings arrived. The Faroes, consisting of 18 islands and more than one hundred villages and towns, covers an area of 1,400 square kilometers. The Faroes were part of the Kingdom of Norway until 1814, when the Treaty of Kiel transferred the Faroes to the Kingdom of Denmark (which had been in a union with Norway since 1380). During World War II British troops occupied the Faroes while Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Faroes developed to become a modern welfare society with a large export-oriented fishing industry. The severe economic crisis in the Faroes in the early 1990s resulted in a large wave of out-migration, very high unemployment rates, and the closure of many private companies in the fishing sector. The Faroese economy recovered rapidly because of successful restructuration of the economy and reconstitution of the political institutions. Almost 95% of the population is Christian, and roughly 75% of the islanders are members of the (Lutheran) state church – Church of the Faroe Islands. The Faroes are still very dependent on fisheries, as more than 90% of the export incomes derive from fishery products. Farmed salmon represents roughly half of the Faroese export value today. The sea continues to play a central role in the lives of the islanders – economically (fishing, hunting, harvesting seaweed, tidal stream marine energy, tourist adventure, etc.), culturally (lore of the sea, local knowledge, symbol of Faroeseness, boatraces, children’s play, etc.), and as space for wayfaring (travel between islands and between countries, etc.). As a heavily fisheries-dependent economy, fluctuation is always a part of the game. The labor market is considered highly flexible with effective transitional forces between industries (FEC, 2012). In this environment, with economic, social, and cultural continuities and discontinuities, young people draw their future images (Gaini, 2018).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent a lot of time doing the same thing as many other people around the globe: waiting for the end of the pandemic. I became interested in waiting – and its suspension of time – as a field of research, which represents an extension of my longstanding interest in young people and time (and futures). I realized that there is a lack of knowledge on waiting specifically, and temporalities generally, in ethnographic studies of small islands (with islands as loci as well as focus of the study). In this chapter, I am therefore taking a waiting-temporality approach to studying the heterogeneous youth lives of small island societies. As such, the chapter is also unpacking how small islands have been treated as places of “no time” or “slow pace,” yet also as a landscape with none but one temporality. The scholarly literature on waiting has been growing rapidly since the end of the twentieth century, and interesting anthropological volumes have been published, such as Ethnographies of Waiting (edited by Janeja & Bandak, 2019) outlining the politics and poetics of waiting. However, the new publications have predominantly explored precarious waiting situations in urban settings in large states and territories, for instance (prolonged and unwelcome) waiting among displaced and marginalized groups of people (e.g., Bendixsen & Eriksen, 2019; Hage, 2009; Jacobsen et al., 2020). In waiting, says Schweizer, “time is slow and thick,” and we can even think of waiting “as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights” (Schweizer, 2008, p. 2). With this promising image of waiting in mind, which could be reversed from the perspective of the Other seeking the “haste of modern life,” this chapter will look at island youth in waiting. The sea is at the heart of island temporalities. Many island communities around the globe are threatened by climate change leading to potentially disastrous sea level rise, which could entail the end of time for the archipelagos. The sea is also a very rich metaphor for temporalities and acceleration/deceleration. The ocean’s flows and twirls, its capriciousness and intensity, resonating the maritimity of the temporal orientation of islanders, influences the pace of life in the North Atlantic (Gaini, 2022a).

The Faroese focus “on a society that is resilient, concurrent, and self-sufficient,” says Aitken, “suggests an ethic of sustainability,” which reflects the idea of “gaining potential in the perpetual moment of the present” (Aitken, 2018, p. 5). Today’s dominant image of the Faroes is, generally, bright with self-representations emphasizing shared vigorous efforts to create a wealthy and forward-looking society (Karlsdóttir et al., 2019). The economic growth of the last couple of years, with successful export-oriented salmon farming and other fisheries ventures, has led to population growth, declining rates of unemployment, and massive investments in the infrastructure (schools, roads, tunnels, retirement homes, and so on) of the Faroes. Of course, this represents a rough generalization of the complex social realities of a society in shift, which has its struggles and frictions, and which indeed also could have been depicted with more attention to the underbelly of Faroese insularity (Gaini, 2022b).

To the casual eye, the Faroes could be perceived as an archetype of all archipelagos, because it is a faraway place, which is easily demarcated on a geographical map. It epitomizes the dated anthropological metaphor of “cultures as islands,” which persists in present-day tourist branding of the islands. The small and narrow islands, 18 in total, in addition to many adjoining islets and skerries, accommodate coastal – and nothing but coastal – communities spread all over the country. In other words, the Faroes are also coastal par excellence, no area being located more than five kilometers from the shoreline. The feeling of being at the water’s edge, between the vast ocean and a narrow strip of land composed of valleys and grassy cone-shaped mountains, makes it hard to forget that you are an island-dweller living an island life (Gillis, 2012). Islands are the realm of possibility, more than any other landscape is, says Gillis (2009), who emphasizes the openness and ambivalence of the seashore and the hybridity of the coastline in exploration of the nature of islands. Island communities have always attracted anthropologists’ attention, as they are “good to think with” (Gillis, 2007). In an interesting exposition of the island metaphor in anthropological research, Eriksen concludes that,

In a literal sense, there is nothing specific to island societies as a category. Nor are islands necessarily more isolated than other places. Used metaphorically, the island concept highlights relative isolation and as such has some relevance. It can still be misleading, however, because human societies are, to varying degrees, in contact with other societies. (Eriksen, 1993, p. 144)

Islands are used as basic metaphor in many discussions, often as exoticized Other, yet also as place of contrasting meaning: “An island can be both paradise and prison, both heaven and hell, says Baldacchino. It is “a contradiction between openness and closure, between roots and routes, which islanders must continually negotiate” (Baldacchino, 2007, p. 165).

Method and Context

This chapter is based on qualitative data collected in the framework of an ethnographic project on young people’s future perspectives in the Faroe Islands. The Faroese project was part of an international research project exploring young people’s future perspectives in the Nordic/Arctic region (Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland), representing a component of the “Foresight Analysis for Sustainable Regional Development in the Nordic Arctic” program (Karlsdóttir & Jungsberg, 2015). In collaboration with my research assistant, Ester ÁarskarÐ, I made individual semi-structured interviews with two groups of eighth graders (aged 14–15) in the Faroe Islands in May 2014. Two classes from two schools were picked out for the purpose: one in a regional town on the island of Eysturoy (we call it “East Town”), the other in the capital city of Tórshavn. The objective was to involve young people from the main urban center as well as from a smaller more rural community as participants, but both groups of participants were from major public lower secondary with more than one track for each grade. Though, some of the East Town eight graders had primary education from much smaller village schools. Choice fell on East Town because of its strong links to a network of villages at the same time as it is a place with a variety of services and businesses making it rather independent from the capital. Regarding the socioeconomic status of families with children, there is no significant pattern of differentiation according to the size or location of the school. Potential social, cultural, and religious differences are mirrored in the internal composition of the schools. This makes the school a suitable arena for our project, as the school class can be considered as a cross section of society. Before the interviews the participants from both schools were informed about the project’s aim, objectives, and ethical principles at an introductory meeting arranged by me and the head teachers. Besides the interviews, I also asked the pupils to write essays describing their ideas and visions of how Faroese society would look in 2045. We received 17 and 25 essays from Eysturoy Island and Torshavn, respectively. The personal essays, written and submitted before the interviews took place, were guided by this introduction:

Faroe Islands 2045

Imagine that you travel in time and arrive to the year of 2045. You meet an eighth grader. He tells you how it is to live in the Faroe Islands in 2045 – about school, leisure, family-life, culture, etc. – and you take notes. In this essay, we want you to write the story of this youth. You are welcome to compare your own everyday life with the life of the youth living in 2045.

This is an invitation to reflect on future young Faroe Islanders’ everyday lives and identities, when the research participants themselves have reached the age of 45 or 46 years. The essays, as methodological schemes, encourage the youth to draw a future landscape without necessarily linking it directly to their personal (intimate) perspectives. In this way, the essays offer an opportunity to discuss the relation between micro- and macro-level events and between material and cultural shift. Another important objective is to use essays to produce a dialogue between today (2014) and tomorrow (2045), hence, also to present a constructed future reaction to present-day problems. Another benefit of this method is that it encourages young people to develop new creative writing and critical thinking skills (Trell & van Hoven, 2010, p. 93).

Ethical precautions are crucial in research projects involving children (Shaw et al., 2011). Even if my participants were not small children, they were below the legal age of responsibility and could not participate without parental consent. In addition to positive parental consent, of course I needed the child’s own consent. Participation was voluntary and no pressure was put on any pupil to take part in the project. As a youth researcher I needed to reflect on my role and duty as “representative” of young people’s positions (Punch, 2002). As a method, the essays also minimize the pressure of concrete questioning and emancipate the participants’ future “worlding” (Knight, 2017, p. 84). Rather than illustrating the present and future in real/unreal oppositions, the essays can be read and analyzed through the optic of an ongoing generative process (Knight, 2017). When I was interpreting and analyzing the pupils’ texts, I focused on their open and covered messages about the positive and negative aspects of potential developments in society. Working with the essays as ethnographic material, my aim was to search for young people’s cultural identities and temporal reasoning through their future narratives.

Results from the Faroes

Young Faroese people cannot predict the future; however, each one of them is a source of ideas and scenarios that not only differ from the typical forecast voiced by adult experts, but also expose foresights and interesting patterns of variation. Between utopian and elegiac prophecies, some of which are quite entertaining and provocative, you will find a series of interesting issues and questions that the youth take to the fore as main events in upcoming decades. Some are pessimists, others are optimists, yet all are expecting social shifts and technological developments veiling the “traditional” Faroes to the past. Young people have a kaleidoscopic view of the future, offering alternative paths leading in different directions rather than a deterministic view of an unavoidable future scenario. young people embody the new and innovative in culture, hence also “what belongs to the future” (Fornäs, 1995, p. 1). Asked about their attachment to their home community, nearly all the young islanders see themselves living in the hometown as adults with a family of their own. Most of the participants are open to the idea that they might be living abroad in the future, yet a large majority have a plan of living and bringing up their own children in the Faroes. Young people often mention family relations, close friendships, and general safety in the Faroes as the main reasons for their strong wish to settle in the Faroes in the future. The material from the interviews with and essays written by Faroese eighth graders represents thick description of change and continuity in Faroese society in the upcoming decades. Young people with limited life experiences have presented their interpretations and ideas about a future in the Faroes. Our main conclusions can be summarized in these six statements (Gaini, 2015):

  • I.

    The youth generation is in general optimistic about the prospects of the Faroe Islands as regards educational and working opportunities, economic and political development, and family and welfare policies.

  • II.

    The youth generation envision a more multicultural society with new ethnic, religious, cultural, and social groups living together. This will also change the family structure.

  • III.

    The youth generation envision a more urbanized and centralized society with sophisticated physical infrastructure within the country as well as a fast and modern connection to neighboring countries.

  • IV.

    The youth generation envision a more technologically advanced society with better computerized equipment at schools and other societal institutions. We will see side effects of the digital everyday life: social and psychological distress because of the exaggerated use of digital media.

  • V.

    The youth generation envision a society that might well be affected by climate change and global warming, but they do not expect any radical changes soon. It is veiled in unanswered questions.

  • VI.

    The youth generation envision a society that they would like to return to in case they move away to foreign countries for shorter or longer periods of time. They don’t expect any drastic population decline within the near future.

Young people talk about the future with a lot of “maybe” and “I don’t know,” but also “hopefully” and “regrettably” in the narratives. A girl reflects on her future with family and children in our interview:

I don’t know … if I get children myself of course I would ideally like them to stay in the Faroe Islands, but it is nothing that I can decide … so if they can get the chance to do what they like to do in the Faroe Islands, I think they will stay here …. (Lisa from East Town)

She is thinking about the next generation in relation to mobilities: Will the children leave or stay? Like most other young islanders, she realizes that her future children might move out of the country because of the limited opportunities in her home community. John talks about his future in a down-to-earth fashion, without any lifestyle extravaganza, echoing a strong aspiration for intergenerational continuity:

I guess … I am going to upper secondary school and get a good education and a good job … I imagine that I will be living in a house and have a family and the children will be happy, I hope. (John from East Town)

Rósa, a quiet girl talking about her mother’s regret of not living the dream of studies abroad, reasons that it is better to “try it” even if it does not become a successful adventure. You can always return home to the islands – more mature and wiser (hopefully) than before.

[…] my mother says that she didn’t take education in Denmark and didn’t move to other countries, she says that she thinks we [the children] should go abroad to get education … try it … and then come back home. (Rósa from East Town)

Tóra has a clear idea of what she wants to do in the years to come. She has a plan with a realistic temporal framework. Like most of her fellow islanders, she does not rush and does not mind deliberately waiting/delaying to establish family and take on adult roles. The “identity moratorium” (Coté & Allahar cited in Cuzzocrea, 2019, p. 570), providing her with freedom of experimentation with roles and beliefs, is not interpreted as a sacrifice of safe and smooth transition to accepted adulthood.

I would like to live in Valley Town [close to East Town] … always wanted to live there … I have for a long time been thinking about ‘wandering’ [youth low-budget international voyaging with backpack], or to go to high school in USA, or something like that … so I have big plans before taking education … I am thinking that I must have an education before I get house and children, family, and all that …. (Tóra, from Valley Town)

Tóra, like most young people in the Faroes, does not consider the project of getting a family and children to be precarious. The question is not if you will get children, but when and where. Among the young islanders, it is very common to plan a stay abroad – usually in Denmark – as a moratorium, but also as a valuable and formative life experience to capitalize on return to the archipelago. Jenny, from the capital of the Faroes, is reflecting on her future in relation to place and migration in our interview. Young islanders, living in a society with what some researchers have called a “culture of migration” (Hayfield, 2017), are connecting the waiting and temporal horizons with spatial cross-ocean movements. Crossing the ocean is a big step for a young person, separating him from his family, but Denmark, with a large Faroese diaspora, is considered the “least” alien of foreign countries (Gaini, 2013).

Jenny is a 14-year-old girl living in Tórshavn with her mother and two siblings. She lived in the same house her whole life. Regarding future occupation she has three professions in mind: to be a journalist, a construction engineer, or a lawyer. She says that she keeps changing her mind and doesn’t know which profession is on the top of her list. We ask if she expect to find a suitable job in Tórshavn. She is not so sure; she says that she will probably stay in Denmark for quite a long time before returning to the islands. She thinks it is difficult to get a good job here, but she doesn’t know if it will be different in … 20 years … she doesn’t know. Even in case she studies and works in Denmark for many years, Jenny is still determined to return home afterwards. It is her goal. Does she think she will get the life that she wants in her hometown? “Yes, I guess so,” Jenny answers. She knows that it is a small place that doesn’t have very much of everything, she says … and that it lies far from Europe … but yes, because she grew up with this and knows exactly what it is … so, Jenny can easily make a life here.

Very few young people look at the past in nostalgia as they, in brief, believe the future will bring many good things to the country. The future, says Arjun Appadurai, should be studied as a cultural fact; and futurity, rather than the past, should be at the “heart of our thinking about culture” (Appadurai, 2013, pp. 188–189). Present-day practices and decisions are according to him largely based on interpretation of their role and meaning for future scenes. Tomorrow is full of uncertainty for any individual, as a Faroese proverb (reiterating universal wisdom) instructs with this message: “No one knows in the morning, where he may spend the night.” You never know what tomorrow will offer. In one of the essays, written by May, we are traveling to the future – 2045 – to engage in a dialogue with a pupil from eighth grade in a village school:

Then I ask him, if they still dance the traditional (circle) dance and sing the accompanying ballads, and such things, and he answers yes, they do, and he does not expect it to end yet, at least […] because Faroe Islanders have always danced the Faroese dance, so this will continue. (May)

Another girl, discussing future cultural change in her society in her essay, creates a scenario with growing foreign culture influence through language and media in the small island community:

Faroese culture is strongly influenced by other countries. We have adapted to cultures from other countries – the USA is a good example […] Almost all the songs and movies are in English, and especially on the Internet, you will have to read and write English almost everywhere. The language is a large part of the Faroese culture, and it is a shame that Faroe Islanders’ reading and writing in their own language is so bad. (Wendy)

Penny from East Town, who recapitulates a future teenage girl’s description of life in 2045 in her essay, narrates about language and identity:

The culture has changed a bit, now Faroe Islanders eat much less whale meat, and the language has changed slightly, we don’t speak “stone Faroese” anymore, English and Danish have blended into the Faroese language. There are now just a few farmers in the Faroe Islands […] I think that in a few years, no one will be able to talk, because it will not be necessary to know how to talk, because then people will just be writing to each other, on Facebook or something similar …. (Penny)

In an interview, Ken talks about present-day realities in his village. He talks about the waiting as a part of everyday life in a place where something very surprising seldom happens,

We are waiting for something to happen, change, but I like my village, we manage, sometimes we are bored, but we can also go somewhere, drive to another village, or just visit a friend […] There could have been more activities, more action, but we cannot complain […] It is peaceful, and we all know each other …. (Ken)

Young Faroe Islanders are indeed renegotiating their local identities in relation to values and lifestyles that they learn about through media and social communication (Gaini, 2015). It is a glocalization process, a result of growing local–global interconnectedness, where local identities are reconstructed through dynamic local–global interaction in a multitude of temporalities (Kjeldgaard & Askegaard, 2006). This not only influences local places and identities, but also how people navigate and find their position when they are located in a faraway place. From this angle, the home and local identity seem solid at the same time as they are renegotiated and, somewhat, “hybridized” in relation to global society and its wavering and fragmented temporalities.

Waiting for the Future

The way we look at adolescence, and the ways that we construct social oppositions between childhood and adulthood, is characterized by the prolongation of the life stage called “youth” in the Global North. Today, says Coté provocatively, “it takes up much, if not all, of what in an earlier society would have been ‘adulthood’” (Coté, 2000, p. 1). Young people, as we have observed on the previous pages, are by themselves reinterpreting the meaning of adulthood and reconfiguring the roadmap to adult life. As the border between youth and adulthood for many people has become blurred and ambivalent, says Coté critically, “people have increasingly had to adapt by individualizing their lives – taking things into their own hands rather than relying on traditional institutions to provide structure for them” (Coté, 2000, p. 4). The breakdown of “ontological security” (Giddens, 1991) has forced young people to negotiate “a set of risks which were largely unknown to their parents” (Furlong & Cartmel, 1997, p. 1); risks influencing their capacity to become established independent adults. Making a large number of individual choices in their everyday lives, young people may indeed unintentionally reinforce the erosion of “the social order of which their parents’ generation lived” (Mathews & White, 2004). Young people’s future perspectives and narratives uncover how lived experiences, social practices, and the everyday struggle to bend and destabilize dominant categorical futures – what Tsing has called neoliberal society’s “shadow of inevitability” in relation to future imaginings (Tsing, 2005) – are mobilized in their efforts to negotiate their entry into adulthood. Young people’s actions, says Strathern, are always informed by potential worlds which have not yet materialized (Strathern cited in Nielsen, 2011, p. 398). In small island communities, like the Faroes, young people experience their lives to run through a temporal landscape characterized by many multilayered waiting-contexts turning their mind to the past as well as to the future. Young islanders’ everyday lives in small local communities are often associated with “slow time” and a decelerated pace of life, where “pausing” is an inescapable activity, but waiting is also a powerful social agent. In an article about waiting in Africa, Stasik et al. (2020) explain:

While struggling to realize imagined futures, or simply to overcome the ennui and temporal anxiety of enforced waiting, people solidify old and forge new social relationships. The fostering of exchange and mutuality in waiting provides a sense of belonging, boosts individual chances for progress and creates venues for shared political and economic practice. (p. 5)

As a temporal phenomenon, waiting is to be examined at the intersection between social framings of time and human experiences of time (Jacobsen & Karlsen, 2020, p. 7), but it is also important to explore the interplay between decelerated–accelerated tempi in multiple everyday practices. Young people’s waiting practices do also represent an opposition to societal expectations of adaptation to the modern globalizing society’s temporal regimes. Slow time is not a problem in itself; it only becomes an obstacle when in direct contact with fast time, because, Eriksen argues, slow time will end up as the loser in any confrontation with fast time (Eriksen, 2001). Why is it so? The explanation is that if you have fast time of any kind in your life, for example, through Internet communication, your thirst for more of the same – fast time – will steadily increase. In other words, it makes slowness feel increasingly decelerating. Young people, in contrast to the parents’ usual opinion, contest the accelerating time of “supermodernity” (Augé, 2008). Their cultural identity is very much the outcome of the bricoleur’s indefatigable attempt to reconcile apparent cultural contradictions. It is therefore unjustifiable to blame the youth, generally, for the sacrifice or surrender of slow time in order to inflate late modern fast time (Gaini, 2013). When young people are waiting in islands, they are also experimenting with island temporalities, and this waiting entails, as mentioned earlier, pace as a strategy for the future (Eisenstein, 2021, pp. 460–461). The art of waiting is a powerful tool for the negotiation of youth–adulthood continuities and discontinuities. “We all wait for the future,” says Rundell, “yet not for the same ones, nor in the same way, nor in the same tempo” (Rundell, 2009, p. 51). For the youth generation of the Faroes, the youthful waiting is not a very frustrating experience, but rather an expression of active self-realization between personal and collective futures, and between local and global avenues toward adult life. Young people’s social maturity is not only defined according to their behavior, knowledge, and values, but also by way of their creative coping strategies concerning temporal experiences and reasonings. The patterns of waithood and future-making in young people’s everyday life practices and struggle is providing us with a contextual understanding of how social maturity and respectful adulthood are communicated and defined in island communities.

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