Curating collapse: performing maritime cultural heritage in Iceland’s museums and tours

Abstract

Industrial fishing has shaped Iceland for centuries, serving as social mortar, fueling Icelandic independence, and underscoring its geopolitical strategies. With the reorganization and enclosure of fishing in the twentieth century, however, rural coastal communities increasingly turned to tourism as a significant source of revenue. This transitional process is not straightforward, raising complex questions of shifting cultural and social identity for these communities. This paper represents a pilot study of maritime heritage discourses from museums, tours, and attractions in urban Reykjavík and in remote locations in northern Iceland. We examine these different discourses and the local dimensions of social change they perform or communicate through a lens of political ecology and maritime cultural heritage studies.