Sami Folkloristics.
Lindow, John
Sami Folkloristics. Edited by Juha Pentikainen, in cooperation with
Harald Gaski, Vuokko Hirvonen, Jelena Sergejeva, and Krister Stoor. NNF
Publications, 6. (Turku: Nordic Network of Folklore, 2000. Pp. 280.)
When the great botanical systematizer Carl von Linne (Linnaeus)
visited Lapland on a collecting expedition in 1732, he was fascinated by
the indigenous population. Their simple reindeer-herding lifestyle, as
he saw it, put them in a golden age, on an Elysian field lacking the
complications of a society based on agriculture. Had he been inured to
constant cold since childhood, Linne famously said, he would quite
readily have changed place with one of the reindeer herders he observed
on his journey. Linne even planned a book on these people, to be called
Lachesis Lapponica, a work that never saw the light of day. But there
was already a long tradition of informed writings about this indigenous
population of Fenno-Scandia, going back to the Middle Ages in Iceland
(in sagas placed in Norway) and even the Viking Age in England
(interpolated into the translation of the Historia adversus Paganos
undertaken at the court of King Alfred the Great). Description of the
Sami people--an endeavor known in its earlier stages as
"Lappology"--stretches back to humanism and shared
Linne's view of the people as an exotic other. Besides description
of the material culture, the emphasis was on religion, a religion lost
or driven underground by the conversion of the Sami to Christianity and,
one suspects, state and church vigilance and recidivism.
The research picture of the Sami has to some extent continued to
emphasize the pre-Conversion cult and religion and has therefore been
based on the older written sources. Although much folklore was collected
and published over the years, and a type index of legends was produced
by J. K. Qvigstad in 1925, Sami folkloristics has not exactly been a
growth industry. Perhaps it is because many of the best workers in the
field enter it, as do four of the eight authors represented in this
book, from the discipline of history of religion. Certainly, as the
essay by Stein Mathisen shows, even the folklorists recording Sami
material in the earlier part of this century--a classic collecting
period in Scandinavia--thought little of the originality and future of
the materials they were documenting. For this and many other reasons a
book on Sami Folkloristics is to be welcomed.
In the Preface, Juha Pentikainen writes:
This book bearing a programmatic title Sami Folkloristics is an
indication of a new era both in the discipline of folkloristics in
general and in a new field recognized as Sami studies in
particular. (8)
The book consists of ten articles divided into two parts,
"Sami research history" and "Sami folklore
interpreted." Part 1 includes Hakon Rydving, "The Missionary
Accounts from the 17th and 18th Centuries--The Evaluation and
Interpretation of Sources," Juha Pentikainen, "Lars Levi
Laestadius as Sami Mythologist and Mythographer," Stein Mathisen,
"Changing Narratives about Sami Folklore--A Review of Research on
Sami Folklore in the Norwegian Area," Pentikainen, "Finnish
Research on Sami Folklore," and Jelena Sergejeva, "The
Research History of Kola and Skolt Sami Folklore." Part 2 includes
Harald Gaski, "The Secretive Yoik--Yoik Lyrics as Literature and
Tradition," Vuokko Hirvonen, "How to Make the Daughter of a
Giant a Sami--a Myth of the Sami People's Origin," Sergejeva,
"The Sun as Father in the Kola and Skolt Sami Tradition," and
Thomas A. DuBois, "Folklore, Boundaries and Audience in The
Pathfinder."
As a glance at these titles suggests, and as a reading of the
articles will bear out, the claim of the indication of a new era in the
discipline of folkloristics is overstated. The articles of greatest
theoretical interest are by the two trained folklorists, Mathisen and
DuBois. Following Edward M. Bruner ("Ethnography as Narrative"
The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M.
Bruner, 139-55. Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press,
1986), Mathisen traces the development of Sami folklore scholarship as a
narrative in itself, which is to say that he situates scholarship over
the years within master narratives about the Sami within Norwegian
culture. DuBois invokes theory toward the end of his article by placing
the film Pathfinder in Barth's "middle level" of ethnic
interactions, but the article in general constitutes a common-sense
separation of elements in the film that would appeal to the inside
(Sami) and outside audiences, and he shows how these elements work
together.
The claim of the indication of a new field recognized as Sami
folkloristics is not justified. Certainly there has been growth in Sami
studies lately, however one chooses to define the concept, but part 1
focuses essentially on Lappology, and the four studies in part 2 lack a
unifying theme.
There is, indeed, a kind of inherent contradiction between the
first half of the book, focusing largely on the older materials and the
corresponding older research and accepting a split into national
research histories, and the second half, with its emphasis on the vale
of interpretation that is internal to the Sami community and not
immediately informed by the older research materials or the
sensibilities of the nation states which facilitated such research. But
one reads both parts with interest, rather as one reads through a
favorite research journal, and there is much to be learned from and
react to in each article.
As with any collaborative project, there are inconsistencies,
occasional repetition, and the odd linguistic misstep. My favorites are
the calque "learned to know" for "became acquainted
with" (11), and the legend "Sami dresses" beneath an
illustration showing both a man and woman in traditional costume. More
vexing is the editorial decision to stick with dialect orthographies, a
decision, wholly unassailable on both ideological and scholarly grounds,
that might nevertheless confuse precisely the audience of
non-specialists for whom the book is presumably intended. This confusion
extends to the index, which I would assume to be an entry-point for some
users. A student seeking information on, for example, Sami Shamanism,
would find an entry on "Sami shaman," just beneath "Sami
drum," which s/he might realize was related. But there is also an
entry on "Shaman drums," one on "Shamanic" and one
on "Shamanism;" as if this were not confusing enough, there
are also entries for "Noaidi," where many people with some
prior discipline knowledge might look, and cross-references to that
entry from "Najd" and "Nyodd." The careless index
typifies what I fear will be the difficulty and perhaps frustration of
students and researchers looking for a thorough and systematic treatment
of Sami folkloristics instead of a volume of loosely related individual
pieces.
John Lindow
University of California, Berkeley
USA
