Joshua Green, formerly an honours student in anthropology here at STU and now an MA student in anthropology at the University of Alberta, is currently conducting fieldwork for his MA thesis in the Faroe Islands. And he’s blogging about it! Check out his blog, “A Canadian in the Faroes,” at the following URL:

http://thefaroes.blogspot.com/

Josh did an honors thesis here at STU on concepts of tradition, authenticity, and cultural production at the Miramichi Folksong Festival (http://www.miramichifolksongfestival.com), based on fieldwork and archival research.

His current MA thesis examines similar issues pertaining to Faroese folk music, particularly the ways in which old Faroese folksongs are incorporated into contemporary Faroese popular music. An example is the Faroese Folk metal band Týr (http://www.tyr.fo).

Josh has been posting mostly photographs taken during his fieldwork. But check out some of his earliest posts to find two excellent research papers that he wrote about the Faroes, one of them presented at the 2011 Canadian Anthropology Society conference, hosted here at STU in May and co-organized by STU’s own Dr. Craig Proulx.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Josh was not the only scholar of folk metal at the recent conference of the International Council for Traditional Music, hosted at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Growing field!