Knowing from the indigenous North : Sámi approaches to history, politics and belonging / edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Sanna Valkonen and Jarno Valkonen. London : Routledge, 2019

Lehtonen, Mikko

English

Journal.fi

S O S I O L O G I A  4 / 2 0 194 2 2North as a Way of Knowing Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Sanna Valkonen and Jarno Valkonen (eds.): Knowing from the Indigenous North. Sámi Approaches to History, Poli-tics and Belonging. London: Routledge, 2019, 176 pages. ISB N 978-041-57-9074-1The North is still often imagined as a relatively remote natural area, untouched by humans. The prevailing mental images of the Arctic are those of ice, void, and occasional polar bears. Even though human beings have inhabited the North for more than 4000 years, it is as if the anthropocene would touch the area only as external effects. That is, at least before the melt-ing of the icecap allows major oil and mining companies to start large scale quarrying and drilling.Such imagery actively forgets the humans in the North. Time and again the 13.1 million peo-ple living in the area of the cir-cumpolar North vanish in West-ern imagination into the blue shade of ice. Of these inhabit-ants of the North, ten per cent are indigenous peoples: Sámi (Finland, Sweden, Norway and Northwest Russia), Nenets, Khanty, Evenk and Chukchi (Russia), Aleut, Yupik and In-uit or Iñupiat (Alaska), Inuit or Inuvialuit (Canada), and Inuit or Kalaallit (Greenland). The in-habitants of these alleged hin-terlands of the planet have for a long time been marginalized and despised. They have been held to be backward and, with-out state or other official appa-ratuses, belonging to the past, having at best exotic value for tourists.The book at hand is published at a moment when all this might be changing – at least in the Sámi case that is in focus here. After centuries of neglect and oppression the indigenous peoples of the North have become visible in new ways. Whereas the members of these peoples in past did not always want to mention that they be-long to their group, now the membership of these groups has become a contested issue, analysed in the volume by Saara Tervaniemi and Päivi Magga as well as Sanna Valkonen.If anything, the ethos of the book is that the marginal posi-tion of the North and its peoples should change – politically, culturally and epistemologi-cally. If there are to be political and cultural changes, what is needed is a profound change in the ways of knowing. The North has its “own understanding of what knowledge is and how it is produced” (p. 5), and this understanding should be no longer marginalized. Instead, it should be seen that the North is “a particular way of knowing and being, with its own needs, practices, concepts and imagin-ings” (p. 6).In the book, the North is not called the Arctic, since that BooksS O S I O L O G I A  4 / 2 0 19 4 2 3would represent the area “as affording a surface to be colo-nized”, as Tim Ingold (p. 112) writes. The effect of such colo-nization would be flattening the land, collapsing it into a two-dimensional plane akin to that of the cartographic map (p. 113). In the same spirit, the book is not about “knowing of the North” or “knowing about the North” but “knowing from the North”. Such knowing from transforms that what is known. The void is now “imbued with cultural val-ues and meanings”, even when these have no visible imprint in the landscape – that is, accessi-ble to “cultural outsiders”. From this perspective, the North “can seem natural and still be imbued with cultural values” (p. 4). The volume is edited as if it were a small symposium. After two introductory (keynote?) chapters there are three parts, each containing two (plenary?) texts and a commentary. In the best dialogical spirit, all the texts, not only the commen-taries, refer to each other and at points also question certain premises of other texts. The top-ics discussed include everyday resistance (Veli-Pekka Lehtola), Sámi collections, including du-odji (Eeva-Kristiina Harlin), the idea of Sápmi , including gákti (Saara Tervaniemi and Päivi Magga), the snowmo-bile in reindeer herding (Jarno Valkonen and Petri Ruuska), the art of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (Tapio Nykänen), and the de-bate on who belongs to Sámi (Sanna Valkonen).The topics may not be new, but the new perspectives open fresh insights into each of them.In short, the new perspectives of the book concern the ontology of becoming. The book argues against seeing local knowledge as something given and fixed. To the authors, nothing “is ever fin-ished; everything is on the way to being something”, as Tim Ingold writes (p. 114). Instead, the writ-ers are interested in how know-ing takes place in its becoming, how it “changes in time and place”, and “combines different knowledge and knowing accord-ing to what living and dwelling in a place requires” (Sanna and Jarno Valkonen, p. 16). Local in here is not something restricted to one place. Instead, Sámi cul-ture is seen as having “always lived on the border of many worlds, at the cross-roads of di-verse influences” (p. 17). These influences include also those of the nature. There is no distinc-tion between culture and nature. Instead, “the relation to nature is part of the worldview narrative of Sámi culture” (p. 22).In short, the book argues that knowing from the North means that local indigenous knowl-edge meets the critique of the hegemonic modern notions of the North. For the authors, the lived North cannot be compre-hended nor solved if we remain inside the prevailing modern notions of our world. Not only is the lived North incompre-hensible inside such notions, but the indigenous North and its everyday also represent a serious challenge to these very same notions.This is a strongly recommended reading not only for those inter-ested in the future of the indig-enous North but also for those who are interested in the future of our planet. Among other good things, the book includes a very useful guide to the de-bates on who is Sámi in Finland, offered by Sanna Valkonen. As Tim Ingold writes (p. 116), “harmony is not without a ten-sion”. On the contrary, it is the tension that causes things to hold. The tension in the book is between the notions of par-ticularity and universality, ex-periences and structures. Sanna and Jarno Valkonen and Tim Ingold write in the introduc-tion: “we prefer to leave it to the people themselves to situate their lives socially, and to cre-ate our theories based on their knowledge”. In the concluding chapter of the volume Michael Skey writes: “This type of emic perspective is, of course, a use-ful starting place. But it perhaps neglects, or at least downplays, S O S I O L O G I A  4 / 2 0 194 2 4the wider social structures that enable certain pronounce-ments or understandings of a given situation to hold good.” To me, too, it seems that the next welcome step in rethinking the indigenous North might well be connecting the institutional with the individual and the inter-subjective. In this most welcome volume, “politics” is placed in the subtitle. For the next volume, it might be lifted to the main title.Mikko Lehtonen

North as a Way of Knowing

https://journal.fi/sosiologia/article/download/124538/74695

North as a Way of Knowing

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Journal.fi