Ethnicity and class in coastal north Norway

This region has a special history of sociocultural contact between people of Saami, Norwegian, and, in later centuries, Kven ancestryFootnote ¹, which goes back more than a millennium and is somewhat atypical compared to colonial histories that elsewhere characterise indigeneityFootnote ². This atypical colonial past can only be properly explained when, aside from the obvious ethnic contrast, the class dimension is integrated in the analysis. It is my argument that we will achieve a more adequate understanding of inter-ethnic processes and identity formations if we apply a longitudinal, historical approach to our object of analysis, that is the role that ethnicity plays in the social organisation of everyday life. This role is determined by the interplay of ecological conditions dictating the basic prerequisites for survival, political contexts that determine opportunities for subordination as well as emancipation, and economic conditions that decide one's access to natural resources and how these can be transformed into values to be distributed systematically to the population. We will then see that the ethnic encounter over the centuries also engendered class boundaries that did not coincide with ethnic categories, and which created, to some extent, a complex of shared conditions and opportunities amongst people inhabiting large parts of coastal north Norway and being clearly distinct from, on one side the Norwegian élite, and on the other, the reindeer-breeding Saami of the interior of the region. In this broad historical perspective it may then be argued that in a very basic sense the experience of belonging to the same class of peasants/fishers weakened the significance of the ethnic border. And added to this shared social position in society, people on the coast also shared the same ecological environment and the techniques and types of knowledge that survival in this landscape demanded.

The question of what significance ethnic self-ascription and ascription by others actually has in everyday social interaction today is influenced heavily by an extensive discourse fuelled by the continuous politicisation of ethnicity. This discourse also invites a historical perspective, namely the context of a more than hundred years period of assimilation and nation-building policies instigated by the 19th century governments of Norway after its independence from Denmark (1814) and during its search for national autonomy from Sweden (achieved in 1905) and its efforts to consolidate national unity, mainly through the school system. After independence and through the 20th century until the present day a primary task of the state has been to promote economic progress and welfare through various modernisation measures, notably through the class levelling ideology of Labour governments. The policy of ethnic assimilation meant integration within the wider Norwegian national society and reinforced the local and regional ethnic boundary by making identity a political as well as a personal concern (Eidheim Reference Eidheim and Eidheim1971; Minde Reference Minde2003).

It is against this background that we should understand why the question of what it means to be a ‘Norwegian’, a ‘Northerner’, a ‘Saami’ or a ‘Kven’ increasingly has become contested as the Saami have achieved official recognition of their status as an indigenous people through a process of emancipation over the last 30–40 years. As various contributors to the academic discourse on issues related to identities and ethnic categorisation in north Norway have emphasised, the conventional dichotomisation between Saami and Norwegian (and to some extent Kven) is felt to be a straitjacket for many people (Kramvig Reference Kramvig2005; Gaski Reference Gaski, Gaski, Jentoft and Midré2008; Olsen Reference Olsen2008; Hovland Reference Hovland1996; Paine Reference Paine2003; Storaas Reference Storaas2007; Thuen Reference Thuen, Karppi and Eriksson2002, Reference Thuen, Lindgren, Niemi, Hauan, Niiranen and Thuen2007). It is argued that the categorical prescriptions in the regional and national political discourses on ethnically related issues, typically offered in the form of an allegedly unambiguous ‘either-or’ dichotomy between Saami and Norwegians, contradicts the individual and local experiences characterising the life worlds of coastal populations. In other words, what we have here is a particularly conspicuous case of contested borders and identities. Consequently, the issue demands some further analytical clarification. This is not just a question of academic or political categorisations being wrongly conceived. Both clear-cut and hybrid identity categories exist, and not only at different points in time and space. Evidently they co-exist and even may be ascribed to interchangeably by the same person. In some cases it is the social situation that defines the relevant presentation of self and not, as argued in Barth's (Reference Barth and Barth1969) groundbreaking contribution to ethnicity theory, that ethnic categories are dominant in interaction and prescribe the relevant definition of the social situation and the forms of interaction that are possible within this framing.

The way to understand what ethnicity is about in this region in each particular case is to look closely at conceptualisations of personhood articulated in interpersonal micro-level contexts. Over the centuries of inter-ethnic contacts in the north, ethnic boundaries have been confirmed, negotiated and rejected. To understand the dynamics of boundary processes we thus need to understand how they are fuelled partly by locally produced experience, partly by state orchestrated schemes of control through preconceived categorical definitions of its subjects. It is a well-established fact that states demand clear-cut definitions of its citizenry for all sorts of control purposes (Scott Reference Scott1998). The creation of a shared nationhood, as it pervaded governmental ambitions in Norway during the 19th and well into the 20th century, was focused on integrating minority ethnicities in the majority at the same time as and partly as a means to promoting modernisation, class levelling and economic progress. To deserve being a member of the national collective citizens should have a recognisable common language, belong to the same religious belief system, and articulate a certain level of national loyalty.

Social interaction – reducing or confirming categorical boundaries?

However, the ethnic boundary did not and does not have the same types of significance at the national level as it has at the local level. In daily life it is articulated along with a range of other status positions defining the local person and determining its capacities for taking part in social interchange. Amongst these bonds kinship, neighbourhood and class should be considered the salient ones. The focus on ethnicity may be argued to have attracted too much attention in the anthropological analysis of structural dimensions in the north of Norway, to the effect of rendering it essential and to the neglect of other aspects of social organisation.

What I intend to discuss here is the interplay of social forces engendering the invigoration as well as the obliteration of the ethnic boundary between ‘Saami’ and ‘Norwegians’ (in quotation marks to emphasise that the labels are differently constructed and varying situationally). ‘Fuzzy boundaries’ may seem a contradiction of terms, but it is a way to question the notion that ethnic identity is ipso facto ‘imperative and cannot be temporarily put aside’ (Barth Reference Barth and Barth1969: 17). For the purpose of this discussion it is of interest to go back to Barth and his pair of most groundbreaking contributions to anthropological theory, Models of social organisation (1966) and the ‘Introduction’ to Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969). Arguments from both texts have been compared and discussed before, notably by Paine (Reference Paine1974), but still seem of relevance in the context of the present discussion. It clearly also needs to be added that ethnicity theory has been refined in various ways since Barth's original contribution, not least by himself in his contribution (Barth Reference Barth, Vermeulen and Govers1994) to the edited volume The anthropology of ethnicity. Beyond ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’ (Vermeulen and Govers 1994). Amongst the many post 1969 contributions to the development of theories on ‘ethnicity’, ‘identity’, ‘plural society’, ‘hybridity’, etc., I would like to mention Bentley (Reference Bentley1987), Tonkin and others (Reference Tonkin, MacDonald and Chapman1989), Cohen (Reference Cohen1994), Harrison (Reference Harrison1999a, Reference Harrison1999b), Jenkins (Reference Jenkins1997), Nash (Reference Nash1989), Verdery (Reference Verdery, Vermeulen and Govers1994) and Werbner and Modood (Reference Werbner and Modood1997). In varying ways these commentators address the fluid character of everyday ethnicity and, in contrast, the exacerbating manipulations of governments and other political interests in order to incorporate populations under ethnic banners. Taking these contributions into consideration it might look futile to return to the original interactional paradigm of Barth (Reference Barth1966, Reference Barth and Barth1969). However, it is assumed that a longitudinal approach might serve to disclose some important aspects of the fluctuating interrelationship between the horizontal on-the-ground relations and the vertical class and government engendered frameworks encapsulating them. And while most of these more recent contributions emphasise fuzzy boundaries, hybridity and situational variations of ethnic ascription as an aspect of (post-)modernity, my contention is that such down-playing of ethnic boundaries seems to have a long history, when cohabitation tended to subordinate ethnicity to other and more influential circumstances related to ecologically determined opportunities and to the dominance of a class hierarchy. In this context it also seems relevant to point to Ingold's (Reference Ingold and Ingold2000) criticism of ‘the genealogical model’ as the prime paradigm for the taxonomic division of peoples. Barth's line of argument in his ‘Introduction’ to Ethnic groups and boundaries was based on his transactional approach presented in Models of social organization from 1966. In Models, social interaction amongst actors seeking to achieve certain valued ends through various forms of exchange with others was considered the driving force behind patterns of behaviour and regularities in society. Through such interaction values come to be compared and shared systems of evaluation would emerge that engender further transactions and thereby confirm expectations and create ‘society’, which is basically to be conceptualised as systems in the making, integrating value discrepancies and bridging gaps between separate conversion processes. The Models perspective was based clearly on an economic paradigm, not only through its emphasis on the actor's pursuit of maximisation (or rather optimalisation) of values and interests, but also by its inspiration from entrepreneurial studies of activities that break through conversion barriers between separate value systems and through such innovative work produce new types of profit (Barth Reference Barth1963). In this way, it was argued, innovative action types become conventions and differences are made commensurable and, in the end, integrated within a shared value system. This integration is the outcome of a feedback between transactional purpose, derived from values and interests, and the results of transactions, in the form of confirmed or new experience: ‘[. . .] the analysis of the cumulative effects of transactions has enabled us to isolate a feed-back process, whereby values, though initial to each item of behaviour, become modified and changed through their results.’ (Barth Reference Barth1966: 21).

In Ethnic groups and boundaries, however, this perspective seems to be abandoned in favour of the seemingly opposite idea that differences are confirmed through interaction. In Barth's words:

What seems to inspire the argument here is the structuralist paradigm of cognitive ordering of meaning through the comparison of opposites, compare Lévi-Strauss, and also Bateson's famous ‘difference that makes the difference’ (Reference Bateson1979: 79) phrase. Ethnic identity is revolving around the ethnic boundary that confirms, and is at the same time confirmed by, the contrasting identities interacting with each other in some (restricted) way. It is ‘the other’ who tells me who I am, ethnically speaking. Our mutually–conceived differences confine the field on which we can interact, exchange messages and objects of value, and since our differences are constantly confirmed, the encouragement to enlarge our field of interaction is restricted. Although individual members of an ethnic category may manage to change social identity, that is to pass through the boundary, this may take more than one generation and demand a skilful adaptation to the cultural competences of the other, as well as the other's adjustment of identity ascription to include such ‘immigrants’ within the scope of variation contained in the conventional identification of one's own category.

How can this seemingly contradictory notion of the significance of interaction for the breaking down of social diversities and the confirmation of ethnic boundaries be explained? Or, in simpler words, when are ethnic boundaries sharpened, and when are they blurred? Should we retain the argument of the instrumentalist school, that ethnicity is to be understood as the conscious manipulation of certain social identities for the purpose of political gain, the mobilisation of collective interest through the confrontation with ‘the other’ by constructing him/her as ‘the enemy, ‘the competitor’, or, at least, by ascribing certain significant differences to some parts of one's social environment in order to reduce interaction? Originally put forward by Cohen (Reference Cohen1969, Reference Cohen1974), this reduction of the concept of ethnicity to the realm of ‘informal politics’ as he put it, has proved to have a strong descriptive significance. It is constantly confirmed in cases of ethnic conflict, when seemingly harmonious social relations are turned into confrontation and conflict (see for instance Bringa Reference Bringa1995) However, such antagonistic and confrontational mobilisations of support have to appeal to symbols and values to which some basic difference between the groups in question can be attributed in the first place, be it religion (as it very often is) or a history of grievances inflicted upon ‘us’ by ‘the other’. A contended provocation on an individual level may then serve to ignite a conflict between collectives, although the social boundary between them has little significance for practical purposes. In other words, ethnicity is not just instrumental, that is invented for a specific purpose; it needs some primordial quality in order to be made operational. Partners in interaction need some key symbols to function as devices for their mutual identification of each other. However, to explain the integrative functions of social interaction across an ethnic boundary we should imagine this boundary to be of a character that allows interaction to be expanded to other sectors, that is to cover varying aspects of local social life in such a way that persons engaging in interactions come to experience each other's individuality and not just his/her appearance as a representative of the categorical ‘other’.

Boundary persistence through a thousand years

In this context it might be of interest to have a look at what characterised the relationship between Saami and Norwegians in the coastal zone of this diversified population before the introduction of the assimilation project (Hansen and Olsen Reference Hansen and Olsen2004). Considering the fact that Saami and Norwegians have existed as two distinct ethnic categories over more than a thousand years, and accepting the notion that ethnic boundaries persist as an effect of limited interaction across the boundary, one may ask what made them restrict their interaction to limited fields of mutual interchange. To quote Barth again:

One may characterise the time of the original Saami-Norse encounter as a time when their significant ‘other’ must have been people speaking an incomprehensible language and probably utilising at least some other ecological niches. We may imagine it as the archetypal encounter of immigrant agriculturalists and fishermen with the indigenous hunters and gatherers. The encounter generated various forms of contact and exchange, like furs against agricultural products and metals. The ethnic boundary was indisputably corresponding to contrasting ecological niches. Much later (that is in the latter part of the middle ages), while farming, cattle breeding and local and seasonal fishing continued to sustain the Norwegian population, the Saami population diversified into coastal, permanently settled communities depending on the same niches as their Norwegian neighbours, while other parts of the Saami population specialised in reindeer pastoralism. An ecological and economic gap between the combined fishing and agriculture on the coast and herding in the interior divided not only the Saami internally, but created a category of Saami and Norwegians on the coast with hardly any distinctions when we look at the ecological niches they exploited. In the middle ages the Norwegians were strongly attracted by the fish resources and settled on the outer coast, as close to the fishing grounds as possible, depending on fish not only for subsistence, but more importantly as a commodity that permitted the exchange for grain imported from the south. Later on, in the 17th century, these resources dwindled and the coastal settlers had to move away from their settlements exposed to the open sea and entered the fjords, starting cattle breeding in combination with fjord fishing. In other words, they had to adopt ways of living and niche exploitation that in many ways resembled that of the Saami. The closer contact also resulted in intermarriage and cultural borrowing of various kinds, and even the ‘exchange’ of languages, in the sense that in many communities on the coast of Troms and Finnmark individuals are reported to have been bilingual in the 19th century (Thuen Reference Thuen1989). In some communities foreign population elements were absorbed into the host community through marriage, in others they formed a separate cluster of people kept apart by the ethnic boundary. We should also keep in mind that the bilateral kinship characterising the Norwegian as well as the Saami community (Pehrson Reference Pehrson1964; Thuen Reference Thuen1989) did not prescribe a specific ethnic belonging based on descent, when ancestors were of both categories. The system of consanguinity gave ‘mixed’ individuals the opportunity to choose either belonging, Saami or Norwegian, and it was the cultural habitus dominating in the community, as well as the demographic composition of it, that decided to which category the individual person should belong. Ethnicity is in the blood, people believed, but whose blood, in a system of consanguinity?

Fields of mutuality

In broad historical perspective we may discern some basic fields of mutuality in the life worlds of coastal northerners that explain the relatively minor impact of ethnicity in differentiating people's opportunities. The most significant is the ecological one, offering the yields of marine and terrestrial resources, fishing and farming, and the structural one of tenancy, the renting of farmland from a landlord. The system of land tenure lasted until the end of the 19th century. To this concurrence of basic life opportunities we also should add the shared system of religious belief, Laestadianism. This is a conservative or even ‘fundamentalist’ Lutheran lay movement that emerged around the middle of the 19th century in northern Sweden and spread to large parts of northern Norway and Finland. It gathers Saami and Kvens, and also to a certain extent Norwegians, within the same congregations, sharing a spiritual fellowship across state borders (but with certain divergences in doctrine that does not correlate with ethnic differences). It puts a strong emphasis on the renunciation of worldly goods and the need to publicly confess sins and ask for forgiveness from fellow members. It has generally a critical attitude to the state Church (Norway, Sweden and Finland are constitutionally Protestant Lutheran states), but has refrained from breaking its bond to it. And finally, as mentioned, their mutual integration was (and still is) supported by a kinship system that makes no distinction of the patriline from the matriline or the consanguine from the affinal. There may have been certain preferences of intra- over inter-ethnic marriage, but finding one's spouse from a different ethnic category was far from prohibited. This made for extensive networks of relatives and enhanced the opportunity of finding suitable partners for various kinds of short term transactions or lasting companionships, and it also produced an increasing number of persons who could claim a mixed parentage. In short, the ethnic boundary could indeed be ‘temporarily set aside’ without much ado whenever some task invited cooperation. By the middle of the 19th century, before the onset of the assimilation policy rendered effectual most directly through the school system, inhabitants in many coastal communities were recorded as bilingual or even trilingual (Saami, Norwegian, Kven) (Thuen Reference Thuen1995: 146–147).

The structural dimension that most profoundly divided the population in the north and defined their life chances to be basically divergent was that of class. Saami, Kven and Norwegian fishers/farmers all occupied a basic set of statuses defined by the niche adaptations they shared, fishing and farming, and by their class position as tenant farmers. The landlord, the merchant, the school teacher, and the priest, were all Norwegians. They were few in number, they were mostly immigrants, but more importantly, they possessed an authority as high level representatives of hierarchical power systems with centres outside the region, the state, the market and the church. The other significantly different category with which people on the coast contrasted was the reindeer-breeding nomads of the interior, Saami like most of them and speaking the same language, but otherwise sharing fewer common traits than the coastal fishers and farmers shared with each other across local ethnic boundaries.

We then may look for an explanation of the apparent paradox that social interaction may have integrating as well as disintegrating impacts in the variable that defines ethnicity as a cultural phenomenon in the first place. We need to ask what people consider to be the distinctive conceptual qualities that separate one category from the other. And whenever such qualities are defined, we have to ask what sustains their differential distribution. In the case of coastal northern Norway these sustaining forces seem to reside mainly outside the local community. The prerequisite for locally integrative interaction resided in the shared repertoire of statuses, and the outcome of such processes was a common habitus inculcated as predispositions for actions, beliefs as world view, ecological knowledge, standards of performance, and opportunities and restrictions on the attainment of shared values.

In summing up this brief overview of the historical context we may state that in an environment of shared ecological adaptations as fishers and farmers, and in a shared structural position as tenants depending for their farmland on a landowning élite and for their fishing equipment on a small number of rich merchants (often the same as the landowners), ethnicity did not count as any differentiating variable that would interfere with their class position. Saami and Norwegians were treated alike. The languages may have served to distinguish them, but a mutual bilingual competence may have served to counter the differentiating effect of language. In the latter half of the 19th century Laestadianism grew to become an inter-ethnic meeting place in many parts of the coastal social landscape (Bjørklund Reference Bjørklund1985; Thuen Reference Thuen1995).

Reinventing the Saami-Norwegian dichotomy

In a historical perspective this situation of contrast–making boundaries versus hybridised compositions of identity should be understood in the light of a transition taking place within, first and foremost, the state–orchestrated policy of assimilation lasting more than hundred years (approximately 1850–1960) mentioned above. The assimilation policy drove a wedge into the local system of a seemingly symmetric field of social interaction (Minde Reference Minde2003; Thuen Reference Thuen2009) by transforming the inter-ethnic relationship from a symmetric to an asymmetric one. The outcome was a ranking of ethnic categories in which a sense of social equality created by common fate had reigned, through implanting the notion of an evolutionary engendered cultural superiority of all things Norwegian in the minds of Saami as well as Norwegians. We may consider it a transition from a commonality reminiscent of Durkheim's (Reference Durkheim1933) mechanical solidarity to one of organic solidarity allowing for an ethnically differentiated society exhibiting asymmetric relationships and a systematic diversification of career opportunities in economic and political systems on the local and regional levels.

The policy of assimilation did not succeed although the state tried for more than hundred years. Or, more correctly, it succeeded in some areas, it believed it succeeded in some other areas, and it obviously did not succeed in some third areas. And, as we shall see, it imposed an ethnic awareness where it intended to wipe it out. In its effort to homogenise the population the state not only severed bonds of equality (class and ethnicity), it actually created a generational barrier between grandparents and grandchildren, and it is exactly this barrier that so many younger persons since the 1960s have sought to transgress by engaging in an effort to (re)gain a Saami identity, for example by learning the Saami language to be able to speak with their grandparents in the language that was once theirs but which they did not transfer to their children (Hovland Reference Hovland1996, Minde Reference Minde2003, Thuen Reference Thuen1995).

There is one aspect of the state's assimilation project that should not go unmentioned in this context. That is the contradictory message it left when, on one hand, the authorities, and in particular the educational authorities down to the local teacher, argued that learning Norwegian and forgetting the Saami language was the only way for the Saami to be emancipated from poverty and discrimination, and on the other hand their Norwegian neighbours constantly told them, directly or indirectly, that they would never be able to rub off all signs of Saami identity. They would still speak a ‘broken Norwegian’, and anyway, the knowledge of who their ancestors were would not be forgotten. The self-image that this situation created was, for many, characterised by a sense of stigma (Eidheim Reference Eidheim and Eidheim1971). The contradictory message produced an inescapable double-bind: efforts to absorb a Norwegian cultural competence were encouraged from outside, that is by the school, while at the same time performances of such competence were ridiculed and rejected by their close Norwegian counterparts. When people were led to believe that Saaminess indicated an inferior, more ‘primitive’ culture and a corresponding inferior identity, Norwegians might also feel their own identity jeopardised through Saami assimilation and adopted the concept of it being some sort of identity pollution (Harrison Reference Harrison1999a; Reference Harrison1999b). Only slowly has this stamp of inferiority disappeared from local discourse, to be supplanted with either an acceptance of Saami identity as complementary to Norwegian, or by a consensus, in the form of a silent agreement, that the ethnic boundary has disappeared and everyone is now a ‘Northerner’.

This is where one finds today a conspicuous diversity in the self-understanding and presentation of identity. Some communities display an acceptance of ethnic plurality and a revitalisation of Saami and Kven idiomatic expressions, while others adhere to a local consensus of disregarding diversity and confirming the ‘Northerner’ identity as their basic, shared identity. This also implies that in some communities and families awareness of ethnic descent is kept alive, whereas in others it is suppressed or even forgotten, that is considered of no relevance for their self-understanding (Olsen Reference Olsen2008). However, there is always the chance that a specific public event, certain political issues or the personal choice of a family member to declare his/her self-identification as a Saami will spur a debate around the relevance of the ethnic boundary.

The second phase in the rise of ethnic awareness is that of Saami (and, somewhat later, Kven) ethno-political emancipation taking place within a rather narrow span of time, from the late 1960s until the present. We are actually talking of little more than one generation's experience, since the emerging collective self-awareness of Saamihood triggered by the Alta conflictFootnote ³ and the idea of a not just contrasting, but complementary Saami collective identity, a nationhood, subsequently to be accepted and confirmed by the Norwegian government as a correction to the formerly dominant and precious idea of national homogeneity. The emerging Saami nationhood, however, had to construct its emblems from a cluster of cultural idioms mainly to be found in just one area, that of the reindeer-herding people of inner Finnmark and some few exclaves to the south. They are far from representative, numerically speaking, of the whole Saami community. So how could the predominantly Norwegian–speaking, not reindeer–breeding ‘potential’ coastal Saami be persuaded that they were Saami after all, and how were they to persuade others, the reindeer herders and the Saami speakers as well as their Norwegian neighbours, of their Saami identity?

Dilemmas and challenges in forging a shared Saami identity

The dilemma concerns the issue of cultural diversity within the ethnic boundary, when we consider an ethnic minority that has no state border to define its nationhood formally. Norway's borders were undisputed all through the process of national emancipation in the 19th century. This meant that despite regional and class differences, and despite deep political controversies (even about what should be deemed nationally appropriate, compare the Norwegian language issue of the Danish–inspired bokmål versus the dialect–inspired nynorsk), national identity corresponded with citizenship. And lastly, after a process of class and gender emancipation, this status of Norwegian citizen came to comprise equal political rights on an individual basis. The national border comprised a social, a cultural, and, not least, a regional diversity. It is quite obvious that it also enabled diversity, in the sense that it did not incur a suspicion or accusation of deviance, of being ‘less Norwegian’ than the rest of the citizens. It did not put anyone's belonging and sense of a shared identity as a member of the imagined nationhood in jeopardy.Footnote ⁴

This is not so when we consider the Saami. Their nationhood was, and to a large degree still is, a shared belonging in the making. The ‘imagined community’ notion of nationhood introduced by Anderson (Reference Anderson1983) would hardly cover all individuals who, with reference to descent alone, might be entitled to a Saami identity. In the eye of the outside world, that is not just to their regional neighbours, but more importantly to Norwegians in the south and foreign tourists, the authentic Saami still conventionally means reindeer–breeding nomads. It is difficult for the Saami on the coast to overcome this outside regard and substitute it for an internal one that embraces diversities without making them the basis for a ranking scale from ‘more’ to ‘less’ Saami. In the process of Saami revitalisation the coastal population of mixed ancestry was left in confusion. The reconstruction of Saami personhood had little sign material to its disposal if it was not to rely on notions of ways of life from before World War II, or, ideally, from before the assimilation process.Footnote ⁵ Authenticity became a contested issue for the Saami revivalists of the 1960s and 70s (Stordahl Reference Stordahl1997), and questions like ‘who and where are the Saami’ and ‘what is Saaminess’ were not easily answered (Thuen Reference Thuen, Karppi and Eriksson2002). As mentioned, one answer to the confusion has been to adopt the identity of ‘Northerner’, which seems to be a label comprising an ancestry background of a rather mixed character but with a clear adherence to a Norwegian, not a Saami category and very often also rejecting the ethnic identity issue as a matter of little concern, an ‘invention’ by certain politicians and academics (see for example Kramvig Reference Kramvig and Eidheim1999).

Also as has been pointed out, for example by Olsen (Reference Olsen2008), it is a fact that for many persons living in areas outside those settlements where the Saami language is used on a daily basis, the presentation of oneself as a Saami is only activated ephemerally, inadvertently, or, as an opposite, emphasised and celebrated at specific occasions. It is not a performance that signals an identity that a person intends to present and expects to be judged by in daily interaction, as this person's normal behaviour. What the ethnopolitical changes and the revitalisation of Saami identity performances have brought about is that these occasions have become more frequent and much more accepted, as we can see at festivals, at inauguration rituals such as weddings and confirmations, exam diploma handouts, etc. At such occasions it is no longer exceptional that some participants are wearing a Saami costume. This means that there has been a profound transformation of boundary signification that is most clearly distinguished when we compare the pre-assimilation and the post-assimilation periods with each other. Contrary to Barth's perspective of ethnicity as a rather permanent phenomenon, ‘occasional’ or ‘situational’ ethnicity (Okamura Reference Okamura1981) seems to be a more adequate notion of the Saami-Norwegian relationship as found in coastal North Norway.

A Saami modernity?

The break with a Saami past caused by the assimilation process cannot be healed by the state's recognition of the Saami as an indigenous people, and neither can the Saami ethno-political achievements and their global positioning within the world of indigenous peoples create a kind of peoplehood that approximates a nationhood complementary to their Nordic majority counterparts. The concept of Sápmi as a shared homeland for all Saami is an ideological construction without specified borders, and it is a construction at odds with the pre-modern notion of Saami society as primarily a local society (Eriksson Reference Eriksson, Karppi and Eriksson2002). There is a basic difference between the 19th century political and cultural élite project of creating a Norwegian imagined community out of the many local and regional diversities that once constituted Norway as a geopolitical entity, and the Saami modern ethno-political enterprise of consolidating a Sápmi above the multitude of diversities of not just a dialectical and economic character, but also an experiential one as represented by a heritage of ethnic disparagement.

We can see this problem exposed in the fact that the ideological construction of Saami indigeneity is also an issue of internal debate, dating back to the reorganisation of Saami ethno-politics in the 1970s when the Saami movement confronted the government with their claims of minority rights, but was criticised from within by those who were more concerned with economic survival of local communities than with challenging the government by demands of ethnic emancipation and recognition of indigenous status. In reality, the Saami idealistic effort to create a distinct Saami modernity, exhibiting a repaired link to the Saami past as well as a modern otherness complementary to the Norwegian mainstream society, seems a futile project. When we look beyond the region where Saami identity is an everyday obviousness, this leaves the articulation of Saaminess to the private sphere and to the occasional public celebrations of identity, like ‘the Saami people's day’ (Olsen Reference Olsen2008). Such celebrations, however, seem to have gained a level of acceptance by the ‘Northerners’ with a foot in both ethnic camps, which has superseded the formerly rather aggressive protests against such disruptions of the silent agreement not to make a point any more of the ethnic boundaries that determined people's identities in the past.

Today we see a renewed debate around the legitimacy of ethnically defined land rights triggered by the introduction of the Finnmark Act. Passed by the Norwegian Parliament in 2005, the Finnmark Act recognises the right of the citizens of Finnmark County, predominantly Saami but also Norwegians, to own the land that they have used for their livelihood since time immemorial. The territory in question was formerly owned by the state. The Finnmark Property is the land-holding unit managing the area handed over to it by the state (about 96% of the area of the county of Finnmark).

The paradox here seems to be that the act, itself the outcome of a Saami ethno-political pressure on the government to acknowledge its commitment to international declarations of indigenous rights, in particular the International Labour Organisation's Convention 169 and its confirmation of indigenous land rights, does not confer such rights exclusively on the Saami. The privileged status is defined by locality and customary use. The board of the Finnmark Property comprises an equal number of representatives elected by the Saami Parliament and the Finnmark County Council, respectively. In other words, the mixture of ethnicities is confirmed and the boundary defining eligibility to land rights is derived from time (customary use) and space (Finnmark inhabitant, local community membership). In administrative and legal terms boundaries should be indisputable, and status rights clearly defined. In this context ethnicity is a particularly slippery concept. That may be part of the reason why the government ruled (and the Saami Parliament accepted) that the right of ownership is to be conferred to inhabitants of the county, Saami as well as Norwegians. However, opponents of the act, many of them ‘Northerners’ on the coast, argue that it is in reality an exclusive privilege of the Saami since they dominated the interior of the county and have established the required right based on customary use. Ethnicity is again politicised as it is being suspected of bestowing an exclusive right upon just one of the two categories (or three, if the Kvens are reckoned) in the region.

The fluidity of ethnic membership today might perhaps be seen in some respects as reflecting a continuance of the flexibility of social organisation that prevailed in traditional society. It is inviting a Saami modernity that is not complementary to but encapsulated by the Norwegian (or rather global) one and insisting on defining its boundaries as fluid and permeable. But at the same time and as an opposite force, Saami ethnicity is also confirming its boundary as complementary and contrasting, depending on situation and purpose and founded on a multi-cultural competence.