ABSTRACT
The 17th-century Uppsala polymath Olaus Rudbeck touted Sweden as the site of the original Garden of Eden. Eden was later re-created in facsimile by the mystic philosopher Swedenborg on the Stockholm island of Södermalm. Impotent against dependence on and aggression from external forces and agencies, they are continually buffeted by the perils of monoculture and ecological attrition, the social and cultural degradation of tourism, community attrition by episodic emigration. Recent decades have partly reversed these stereotypes: islanders are nowadays admired for their fortitude and as repositories of old-fashioned virtues. Time-honored insular traits are no longer reproved as backward but envied as rooted, primitives no longer cannibalistic but conservation-minded. In a world increasingly dominated by urban individualism, small islanders remain consummately communal. In this sense they are throwbacks to ways of life more common in pre-industrial times, when most people lived in and were largely confined to small rural communities.
