...memory ...is the 'place' where concepts are stored. It is the organization of memory that defines what concepts are... what establishes the 'concepthood' of something is the way it is integrated into memory. Or to put it the other way 'round, nothing is a concept except by virtue of the way it is connected up with other things that are also concepts. In other words, the property of being a concpet is a property of connectivity, a quality that comes from being embedded in a certain kind of complicated network... Put this way, concepts sound like structural or even topological properties of vast tangly networks of sticky mental spaghetti... (and) derive all their power from their connecting to one another.Douglas Hofstadter Metamagical Themas 1985:528
Genealogy is the national obsession. When somebody dies, the local newspapers always carry an obituary, listing in great detail a family tree, with names and dates of birth that can go back for a hundred years or more..."Why all this genealogy?" Stefansson said over dinner one night. "Look around this barren land. There are no remains. No sculptures. No cathedrals from hunderds of years ago. The country was too poor for any of that. There was a culture her for eleven hundred years, but try to find it. There were books that survive and they are the only way we have to convince ourselves that we fit into the context of human history. Write it all down," he said, referring to the single lasting legacy of ancient Iceland, the sagas --the most complete profile of any Western medieval society. The sagas present a vast literary and historical portrait of the feuds, battles, seductions, and triumphs of early Icelandic society. They almost always begin with long lists of genealogical information...
Michael Specter "Decoding Iceland" New Yorker Jan 18 1999 pg. 43)