ABSTRACT
In this article we argue that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the emerging Icelandic State was informed in its actions by the sense of loss attached to the fall of the Icelandic Commonwealth. The sense of loss played a role in how the state sought to legitimate itself partly as an instrument of modernization and progress. We draw attention to how the traditional Icelandic turf house became a particular focus for this work of the state. Thus the state construed the turf house as essentially unsuitable for human habitation and as an emblem of the poverty, stagnation and humiliation that attended colonial rule following the collapse of the Commonwealth. As such the turf house was in effect to be eradicated from the landscape. Still, by the time almost all existing turf houses had been eradicated, this same state took it upon itself to archive the turf house as cultural heritage. Such archival practice, however, excludes the social, locally embedded practices that made the construction of the turf house possible, as home, the location of life. It excludes the skin-like inscriptive archival work involved in the cutting of the turf, the transporting of the turf and the collaborative, collective and embodied work of building such a house. It excluded such anarchist practices of local independence and mutual help, as it existed away from and sometimes in opposition to the state.
