At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the study of ethnicity is central to North European folklore research. Political borders melted during recent decades, allowing an unprecedented flow of people across continents, dramatically altering the social and cultural landscape of twentieth century Nordic nation-states. The ethnic scene diversified even more with the revitalization movements of indigenous people (most notably the Sámi, whose native geographic territory spans four countries), who responded to globalizing economic and cultural forces with both resistance and compliance. Nordic folklorists lead the way in documenting and interpreting this new, diverse world order.
The contributors to this volume find two factors which help bring focus to today’s ethnic research. First, they review the process of representation, and particularly representation in ethnographic archives, museums, and tourist culture. In northern Europe, the majority groups of nation-states-Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, and Russians-have dictated the conditions of cultural or political exchange between their dominant cultures and those of historical minorities or recent immigrants. Their view of ethnic groups as “other” has been shaped by long traditions of past representations. Second, the contributors identify a critical matrix of ethnicity in religious traditions, which may both unite and divide. Religion may help construct ethnic selves within groups, but it may also establish formidable boundaries between groups.
The sixteen chapters in this book resulted from three years of collaborative work among a group of Nordic and Baltic scholars led by Swedish folklorist Barbro Klein, funded by the Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Nordic Academy of Advanced Study. The research was first presented at meetings in Estonia (1999) and Norway (2000). The book is organized into four sections of four chapters each, as summarized below.
Under the subheading “Representing Ethnicity and Religious Diversity,” Stein R. Mathiesen finds centuries-old continuity in current representations of Sámi, who are often portrayed as having a close tie to nature and therefore in need of paternalistic guidance from outside. Kjell Olson describes the changing representations of Sámi song traditions. In Christian church traditions as well as international representations today, the joik is thought to stand for the continuity of Sámi culture, but it has lost much of the meaning that once existed locally. Pekka Hakamies and Jyrki Pöysä both study persons whose genetic Finnish ancestry allowed them in the 1990s to migrate from Russia to Finland, where they are now categorized as “other.” Ingrians, who maintained Lutheran and ethnic Finnish identity in the face of Stalinist repression, are imagined by mainstream Finns to be Russian or Soviet-like; and when emigrated athletes win Olympic medals for Finland but cannot speak Finnish, “there still seems to exist an embarrassment about the right to feel delighted.” Space does not allow a summary of Pöysä’s discussion of ice-hockey, beer and geopolitics,” which gives an entertaining introduction to the problem of sports and alcohol as elements of national identity in Europe today.
The theme, “Religion in Multi-Ethnic Settings,” congregates the next four chapters. Barbro Klein unearths national television news reports about two events in 1992 which deepened the “othering” of immigrants in Sweden: the burial of a Syrian Orthodox patriarch inside a church, and the miracles stemming from the appearance of Jesus to a fifteen-year-old immigrant girl in that congregation. Galina Lindquist identifies global sources for the beliefs and rituals of a Moscow Voodoo priestess, whose practice negates the xenophobic and chauvinist cosmologies of native Russian folk traditions and Orthodox Christianity and redraws the borders of her religious community (“ecumene”) to embrace the whole world. Jelena Porsanger presents a history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the far north, where religious practice has served the interests of the Russian State from the sixteenth century onwards. Missionary activities in indigenous languages once aimed to decrease the influence of the Danish Lutheran church, but today, monolingual Russian traditions strengthen Russian cultural hegemony in the region. Art Leete presents a description of two public reindeer sacrifices in Nenets and Khanti festivals, against the backdrop of earlier ethnographic texts which depicted these groups as either violent savages or shy, peaceful people. Both of these representations resonated in the 1990s during the public display of pre-Christian customs, but the participants themselves enacted multiple meanings, among them the current political battle over rights to Siberia’s rich oil reserves.
“Sites of Contestation” is the next section, examining the relation between religion, space and place. Anna-Leena Siikala documents sacred Udmurt and Khanty groves, which are known to all community members but may remain hidden even while plainly visible to the outsider’s eye. Pia Karlsson Minganti documents public controversies over the construction of mosques in traditionally Lutheran Sweden. Joann Conrad examines cartographic and mental maps to demonstrate the improvisational nature of binary oppositions differentiating between Norwegian and Sámi people (modern vs. past-oriented, global vs. local, etc.); she argues that the categories of global and local are not opposed, but rather, mutually constitutive. Finally, Pertti Anttonen dissects competing appropriations of Saint Henrik in the revival of a medieval pilgrimage road in the 1970s, which ascribed to the route the contradictory meanings of Catholic martyrdom site and/or site of Finnish national, ecumenical Lutheran-Catholic-Orthodox history. The conflict reemerged in the year 2000, in debates over where an alleged bone of St. Henrik should be put on display.
The book concludes with four chapters based on the theme of “Reshaping Tradition: Museums, Archives and Tradition.” Zoë-hateehc Rurrah Scheffy traces out a sequence of museum exhibits featuring Sámi drums from the late 19th century to the present day. The authority to speak for Sámi spiritual life was realized differently when exhibits were created by outsiders who represented political power structures, or by Sámi insiders who challenged those dominant representations of their culture; a recent exhibit combined self-representation with an aesthetic view from outside. Tuuliki Kurki delves into the Finnish Literature Society’s archive to reinterpret the contributions of an “outsider” self-educated peasant ethnographer, whose collections were once criticized as unreliable and whose interpretations were ignored as irrelevant but today contribute to a multivocal, heterogeneous picture of tradition constantly negotiated between scholars and folk. Kjell Olsen argues that the tourism industry has replaced folklorists and the nation-state as today’s most prominent representer of folk culture. The tourist’s gaze in northern Norway is guided toward visual information such as colorful clothes to identify who is Sámi, but, since the Sámi in everyday situations look like all other local people, Sápmi (the land of the Sámi) becomes invisible to outsiders if “emblematic” representations such as traditional clothes or reindeer are absent.
One author in this final section of the book, Lizette Gradén, turns her gaze to North America and Lindsborg, Kansas, “Little Sweden, USA,” a place well known to American students of ethnic folklore. She interprets a miniature landscape of six small Lindborg buildings that was first mass produced in 1996, showing how the creation, sale, and use of these miniatures select and concentrate historical eras and events from the past, yielding a distinctive, exclusive image of stability and Swedish-American identity.
This book’s bibliographical references demonstrate strong influences from global interpretive scholarship—Geertz, Clifford, Hobsbawm, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Anderson, and Appadurai are some of the oft-quoted names of “classic” twentieth–century scholars who have been writing outside the Nordic region. The chapters, however, are not a series of local North European examples which reconfirm earlier global theoretical positions. Together, the authors present a new, refreshing, and at the same time, very complex ethnography of ethnic diversity, as they grapple with the fundamental social and cultural changes taking place in North Europe today.
The editors write, “In a globalizing world the relationships of ethnic groups and nations are transformed so that places once disparate and distant from each other enter into dialogues with each other.” It would be interesting to see how these ideas might play out elsewhere. The book’s two recurrent themes—the changing prism of representation, and the anchor of religion—could enrich research on American cultural diversity, perhaps uncovering commonalities in the cultures of this continent’s indigenous, racial, immigrant, ethnic, and religious groups.
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[Review length: 1330 words • Review posted on December 15, 2006]