“You Just Throw Yourself Into It”: On fatherhood and family in the Faroe Islands

This article explores the empirical realities of fatherhood and family lives as
experienced by Faroese men, through an anthropological lens. It delves into the question about men’s ambivalent roles and identities in Faroese society today: what does it mean to be a father in the Faroe Islands today? Drawing on information from an ongoing ethnographic study of contemporary Faroese fatherhoods, the first extensive research project on men and masculinities in the context of the Faroe Islands, in this article I am querying common representations of the socalled ‘new man’ disseminated through diverse contemporary studies on fathers and fatherhood: Is the Faroese father a ‘new man’, a ‘traditional’ man, or a representative of something else entirely? My objective is to rethink the father and his fathering styles through empirical exploration of the generative interplay between local gender and masculinity norms and images of the ‘new man’ from political and academic discourse and hence, to further the anthropological participation in and contribution to public debate on culture, parenthood, gender, and masculinity in understudied
corners of the global North.