Island studies. Island geography. but what is an island?

Abstract

There are institutes which research phenomena and processes taking place on islands. Such research is conducted nowadays among others at universities in France, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and Scandinavia. Godfrey Baldacchino from the University of Prince Edward Island is a professor of Island Studies (and the editor-in-chief of the "Island Studies Journal"1). One of the actively operating commissions of the International Geographical Union is the IGU Commission on Islands. Therefore, the term "island" is commonly present in the modern reality and so strongly rooted that, as a results, its meaning very rarely raises doubts. Sometimes a group of researchers makes an attempt to refl ect upon the defi nition of the term2. Those attempts are not followed by satisfying results, which does not encourage to further research on islands, be what they may. The following article is another attempt to ponder the nature of islandness and to point those characteristics of an island which differentiate it from other geographical objects. According to the author, the group of geographical objects treated as islands is defi nitely too wide, and the vast protruding lands, commonly regarded as islands, continue to be islands in the universal awareness only out of habit, or due to the lack of a better, adequate term as a result of existing terminological dichotomy between the terms island/continent.