© Kjell Olsen 2018
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.33673/OOA20191
Kjell Olsen
Identities, Ethnicities and Borderzones: Examples from Finnmark, Northern Norway
Cover design: Trygve Skogrand / Passion&Prose
Cover photograph: Saasemen / Shutterstock
The cover photograph is not included in the CC BY 4.0 licence.
Typesetting, layout and graphic design: Trygve Skogrand / Passion&Prose www.passionandprose.com
Original edition: Orkana Akademisk 2010 Orkana forlag as, 8340 Stamsund
ISBN 978-82-8104-1509
This book has been published with support from the project Multicultural Meeting Grounds. Ethnic Border Zones and Everyday Life in Northern Norway, Finnmark University College/The Research Council of Norway.
www.orkana.no post@orkana.no
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the preliminary result of 20 years of living and working as an anthropologist in Finnmark, Northern Norway. The chapters compiled here have originated at different times in this period; those that have been published elsewhere have been rewritten in order to contribute to a coherent whole. Together, they cover a period from the early 1990s to the first years of the next millennium; roughly, this equals the period from the founding of the Saami Parliament to the early days of the debate on the Finnmark Act, which was to put the ownership of 96 percent of the land in the county into new hands. During the process of land hand-over from the government to the Finnmark Estate, which was appointed to act on behalf of the people in Finnmark regardless of ethnic belonging, some identity processes have changed while others, as I will argue, have gained momentum.
The book is a revised version of a dissertation submitted for the degree of Dr. Polit. at the department of Social Anthropology, the University of Bergen. During the process of producing this book, I have received invaluable help from many people. Firstly, I would like to thank the informants who spent time in discussion with me, and students at Finnmark University College who have listened to, and often corrected, my ideas. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Finnmark University College, in particular Stein R. Mathisen and Leif Selstad. Large parts of the dissertation were written while I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University of Waikato. Thanks to the staff there for their generous hospitality. Ørnulf Guldbrandsen was, for many years, an encouraging supervisor. In the work of turning the dissertation into a book I am also grateful to the late Robert Paine for his excellent advice. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my family for all their support during this work.
Alta, November 2010
Kjell Olsen
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Chapter 1
THE PLACE AND THE PROBLEM
Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, has for about 1,000 years been known as an area associated with both Norwegians and Saami. This cultural heterogeneity has been continued in spite of the area’s increasing political and administrative integration into the changing state formations. In the middle of the 19th century, a formal national policy was initiated that aimed at the cultural assimilation of the Saami and the immigrated Kven populations of Finnmark. In the beginning, this goal of assimilation of the minorities of the area was undertaken by the national church and a school system which increased its influence in the country (Jensen 2005: 32). The minorities’ conversion to Lutheran Christianity and Norwegian language was the initial goal of the emerging Norwegian nation-state. This aim of Norwegianising the northern population had its greatest impact among the Kvens and the coastal Saami living in the fjords and along the coastline. In these areas, the population was culturally heterogeneous and the Norwegian culture had the strongest impact. In the interior, where the Saami made up a majority, the impact of Norwegian culture was less direct. Throughout the 20th century, Finnmark was included in a general modernisation process that reinforced the impact of the Norwegian culture. The turning point came after World War Two. Most of the buildings in the
county were burnt down by the German Army and the population was evacuated to the south. Reconstruction was entirely in Norwegian style, and the majority of material representations of coastal Saami culture vanished. This change was reinforced by the growth of the Norwegian Welfare state that through its institutions fully integrated Finnmark in the Nation. From then on, the major part of the coastal population saw their future as Norwegian regardless of their former belonging. Despite this development, which appeared to see the disappearance of the Saami culture, the Saami culture is today a vital culture in the area. The Saami have gained particular political rights, and have developed their own political institutions inside the framework of the Norwegian State.
Ethnographic descriptions of the fjord areas in Western Finnmark in the 1940s and 50s give little hope for such a development among the Saami. Knut Kolsrud (1955: 174) laconically ends his description of a fjord settlement by stating that the label “coastal Saami” no longer had any physical-anthropological, social, or cultural meaning. Only with regard to the language did he find some remnants of the old coastal Saami culture. In all other respects the population had been assimilated into the Norwegian culture. According to Kolsrud, the coastal Saami culture was practically dead. Ten years later Harald Eidheim (1971: 52) describes a nearby settlement as appearing to outsiders to be without any features of ethnic differences. Clothing, food, houses, social institutions, ideals and values appeared to be the same as those in every Northern Norwegian community. During his thorough fieldwork Eidheim (1971: 53) experienced that the locals were eager to tell him how well-travelled they were, and how competent in modern fishing and farming. Among the women, the high hygiene standards of their housekeeping was a frequent topic. All these expressions of what could be understood as a belonging in modern Norwegian culture were told in a slightly broken local Norwegian dialect, and with an eagerness that surprised Eidheim.
Later on in his fieldwork, Eidheim was told by some of his informants that the majority of the people in the settlement were ‘a kind of Saami’, and some
people ascribed the lack of local economic prosperity to this fact. In the local settlement there was a clear hierarchy in which all arenas, except for a closed Saami sphere, were dominated by Norwegians and Norwegian cultural values. In this region, all locals knew who belonged to the two categories Saami and Norwegian. For the Saami section of the population it was necessary that: “… in order to achieve the material and social goods they appreciate, and to share the opportunities available in the society, people have to get rid of, or cover up, those social characteristics which Norwegians take as signs of Lappishness” (Eidheim 1971: 56). Only by becoming Norwegian could they fully participate in the Norwegian welfare state. Nevertheless, to become Norwegian meant to get rid of all local signs of Saaminess, and locally this could only occur over several generations. The alternative was to move away (Eidheim 1971: 66; Høgmo 1986).
It is these, to an outsider, invisible dividing lines based on local signs and knowledge that Eidheim (1971), in line with Fredrik Barth (1969: 13-16), analyses as the persistence of ethnic boundaries between Saami and Norwegians. This is an ethnic dichotomisation among a population with an apparently homogenous culture. Still, in this analytical approach ethnic identity was regarded as imperative, guiding all social interaction (Barth 1969: 17; Eidheim 1971: 50). In the fjord community in Western Finnmark, a Saami ethnic identity became a stigma that hierarchically ordered the relationship between Norwegians and Saami. The coastal Saami themselves had internalised this hierarchical order. They regarded the signs of Saaminess as something shameful that should be hidden and not transmitted to a new generation. In relation to the expanding trans-local and national institutions of the welfare state, the competencies of the Saami culture were irrelevant. A Saami culture and identity only had a place in a closed Saami sphere, and became a stigma in all other situations in the local community (Eidheim 1971: 59, 62). The educational system, the church, the business sector, the labour market, the health care system, farming and fisheries and the connected institutions were all spheres of the Norwegian
culture (Eidheim 1971: 69). Contemporary research on Saami culture also perceived this culture as vanishing and belonging to the past (Eidheim 1993: 257). This was the general opinion with regard to the coastal Saamis in the population. Compared to the Saami of the interior, the coastal Saami lacked all the colourful and exotic cultural features that, from an outside perspective, could set them apart from the modern Norwegian. At least, the reindeer-herding Saami in the interior could still be seen as Noble Savages, even if their culture too was predetermined to have an insecure future.
It was in the Saami interior, in milieus that the coastal Saami in the fjord areas had no contact with, that the idea of a revival of the Saami culture was found. In the 1950s, a small group of educated Saami and Norwegian academics started a political process that in the 1990s put Saami culture and language on an equal legal footing with Norwegian (Eidheim 1971: 76; Eythórsson 2005: 256). Eidheim (1971; 1992; 1997) analyses this development as a process of dichotomisation and complementarisation. Throughout this political process the Saami and their culture became visible as different but equal to the Norwegian society, and the Saami could thereby gain political rights normally ascribed to distinct peoples. In this process, features of Saami culture were recodified to appear as equivalent to the Norwegian counterparts. The ethnopolitical struggle was externally aimed to create equality between the Saami and the Norwegians. Internally among the Saami it developed what Eidheim (1992: 3) labels ‘a collective Saami self-understanding’ that made it possible for Saami to speak about themselves as a people similar to the Norwegian people. Primarily, this collective self-understanding, and its external representation, draws upon a symbolic content that originated in the interior where Saami culture appeared as most different from Norwegian culture (Eidheim 1997: 42; Stordahl 1996: 148 ff.; Hovland 1996a: 152 ff., 215 ff.). Few, if any, of these symbolic expressions of a collective Saminess were present in a contemporary coastal Saami society. This Saami self-understanding, as based on a collective representation that dichotomises Norwegian and Saami culture, has mainly
been formulated inside the frames of and have been embedded in practices in public national institutions.
The Saami ethno-political struggle was fought in national forums and later on as an indigenous struggle in international political forums. In the field of art, education, health care, cultural preservation, science, the church, and in regional policies the political changes in the relationship between Norwegians and Saami have gradually been embedded in national institutional discursive practices. Today these discursive practices perpetuate a clear-cut boundary between Saami and Norwegian where the first is seen as a distinct ethnic group and an indigenous people. As the national institutions and their discoursive practises during the Norwegianisation period and the early welfare state had an assimilationist impact on the self understanding of local communities, groups and individuals so, too, the new way such institutions represent the relationship between Norwegian and Saami, has made an impact in Finnmark. In sum, these institutional discourses dominate the national discourse. Notwithstanding, today there are a number of visible expressions on ethnic identity in Finnmark that take several different forms. These expressions range from statements of individual identity to political comments on ethnic relations. This means that several discourses are operative at the same time in the field of ethnicity and belonging in Finnmark. Concomitantly, these expressions relate to the dominant discourse of ethnic dichotomisation. In this situation, more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which people try to work out their everyday statements of identity in a changing social landscape.
The first five chapters analyse how the Saami culture is codified and delimited against the Norwegian culture in trans-local discursive practices. Heritage preservation, the museum industry, tourism, the Norwegian Church, and the arts are all institutions with practices that co-opt and transform symbols of Saminess in terms based on these institutions’ own prerequisites and presuppositions. These trans-local institutions are embedded in global and national
discourses as well as being present in local contexts where they represent their version of the relationship between Norwegians and Saami. In local contexts in Finnmark, such institutional discursive practices appear to represent and claim a distinct border between Norwegian and Saami as two ethnic groups on equal terms. It is this method of representation and the discursive assumptions of these institutions that dominate the national public debate on ethnic issues in a way that comes close to an ideological monopoly.
When I arrived in western Finnmark in 1990 I saw little that related to the stigma pointed out by Eidheim (1971) in his work. Neither did I, except when I visited museums and other institutions, experience much of the Saaminess that my analyses reveal is codified in public institutions. The everyday life that I encountered did not differ much from elsewhere in Norway regardless of the area’s multicultural reputation. This discrepancy raises the question that is answered in the last two chapters; how is the institutional way of representing the Saami meaningful for local people – regardless of a Saami identity or not –and how does this way of codifying Saminess manifest itself in a local context?
The two last chapters analyse the local discourse in Alta, the largest town in Finnmark. The municipality of Alta has today incorporated those places that Kolsrud (1955) and Eidheim (1971) described about 50 years ago. In this town at the end of the Alta fjord, one finds people who have moved from the coastline, smaller fjord settlements, and the interior, as well as many other places. Like most growing centres, the place is a mixture of people who can trace their background to what can be conceptualised as a multitude of different ethnic groups, regional identities, and nationalities. These two chapters demonstrate how a local discourse on identity relates to the dominant discourses of the national institutions, and how they interact with and diverge from this discourse.
THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE
Finnmark is Norway’s northernmost county. In the east it borders on the Kola Peninsula of Russia and Finnish Lapland. In the south it borders on the county of Troms. The surface area is 48,637 square kilometres. Despite its size, Finnmark has only about 73,000 inhabitants. In fact, the population is lower than 40 years ago. Although the county lies between 70 and 71 degrees north, the climate is relatively mild compared with places situated at similar latitudes such as Greenland, Siberia and Alaska. The Gulf Stream ensures that the harbours along the coast do not freeze over. But if the coast enjoys relatively mild winters, the contrast to the relatively cold winters of the interior of the county is noticeable. On the mountain plateau the temperature can drop to -40°C in winter. The main industries are fishing, aquaculture, tourism, reindeer farming, mining, and services. More recently, inauguration of the search for oil in the Norwegian and Russian parts of the Barents Sea has sparked optimism. However, no conclusions as to the consequences of these opportunities for the county can yet be drawn.
Alta, with its approximately 18,000 inhabitants, is the largest town in Finnmark. While most other places in the county have seen their population fall steadily since the late 1950s, Alta’s has been, and still is, increasing. In many ways, this development mirrors a common feature, wherein many small settlements have vanished in the post-World War Two period, while regional and local centres have survived. The settlement pattern has thus changed dramatically in the last thirty years. The history of Alta can also be said to be typical for the ethnic history of the area (Nielsen 1990, 1995; Eikeseth 1998, 2003). In the 12th century, the area began to become gradually integrated in a European economy. Later on it was to become politically and culturally integrated in the Norwegian nation-state. For most of the coastal and fjord areas, this meant that the indigenous Saami population and the Kven immigrants that first came to the area in the seventeenth century became less visible, and in the last part of the
twentieth century were apparently incorporated into the Norwegian population. This ethnic development means that Alta belongs culturally to the coast and fjord areas. In the interior, the Saami culture has maintained its position as the dominant culture of everyday interaction. Because of the seasonal migration of the reindeer herds, this particular part of Saami culture is highly visible along the coast in summer. Situated between the coast and the interior, Alta was, until the 1930s, a market place for trade between the different coastal settlements, the inland, and the South.
Northern Norway has been called ‘the Meeting Place of Three Tribes’ (Schøyen 1918). This name refers to the Saami, Norwegians, and Kvens, but ignores the fact that people of many other nationalities have also made an impact on this multicultural area. People from northern Finland have used the coast of Finnmark as a natural part of their labour market. There was a strong Russian presence in Finnmark due to the Pomor trade, the commerce between the Norwegian coastal population and the Russians from the regions by the White Sea, which lasted from the end of the eighteenth through the whole of the nineteenth century before gradually dying out in the 1920s. The Russian impact has once more been felt after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Once again the Russian language is commonly heard in the county. The fisheries have meant that people from Central Europe have been coming to the area since the twelfth century; as a consequence, it was a colony on the outskirts of the Danish kingdom until 1814, a situation that created a constant stream of civil servants, and which continues today. To reduce the movement and presence of people to only three tribes is a simplification. As the leader of the Saami party Finnmarkslista and Member of the Saami Parliament, Torhild Bakken, writes in a letter to the editor:
‘Many of us have problems because we are a mixture of Norwegian, Saami, Kven, and often a little bit of aristocratic Danish blood from a deported Lord. Then it becomes difficult to select the Saami and say that one feels so much more Saami than anything else’ (Bakken 2005: 11).
Bordering on the northern edge of Troms, Alta also is a centre for sections of the population in this area. Alta was incorporated as a town in the year 2000, but it still has all the structural features of, and is regarded by most of the people in the area as, a rural community, a bygd. The word implies a lack of the intimate physical structure and the social life that is a striking feature of the many small towns and settlements along the coast of the area. Measuring twenty kilometres from one side of the municipal centre to the other, the physical environment resembles many other so-called bygdebyer (rural towns) found elsewhere in Norway. What is now the new town centre is located between the two previously separate settlements of Bossekop, to the west, and Elvebakken, to the east. Local rivalry still exists between the two, even if the ethnic dimension no longer plays a prominent part. Until World War Two, Elvebakken was regarded as a Kven stronghold, while Bossekop was seen as Norwegian. An old woman who had grown up in Bossekop in the 1930s told me that, when she was a child, she was regarded as posh because she was not able to answer in the local Kven dialect when visiting friends at Elvebakken. Today, the influence of Læstadianism can still be seen in the eastern part, and is probably the main cultural division in the town (Olsen 1993).
The town began its development as an educational centre in the 1950s (Eikeseth 1998: 433 ff.; 2003: 91 ff.). The municipal administration grew up between the two old settlements, with first a high school and later a teachers’ college and a district college. This has made the town an educational centre for the area. The development has had an impact because local people do not have to go away for higher education, and it attracts students from other places. Finally, its status as an educational centre has linked the town to a national labour market for people with higher education.
ISBN 978-82-8104-150-9