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Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas

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Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas Thomas Hylland Eriksen ABSTRACT: Since the early 1960s, Scandinavian anthropologists have made considerable contributions to the study of ethnicity, an early high point having been reached with the 1967 Wenner-Gren conference leading to the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in 1969. Later Scandinavian research on ethnicity and social identifi ca- tion more generally has been varied and rich, covering all continents and many kinds of majority/minority relations. However, over the last twenty years, anthropologists have increasingly focused on the study of the relationship between immigrant mi- norities and the majorities in their own countries. There are some signifi cant general diff erences between ethnicity research overseas and at home, shedding light on the theoretical constructions of anthropology as well as the ‘double hermeneutics’ be- tween social research and society. It can be argued that anthropology at home shares characteristics with both European ethnology (with its traditional nation-building agenda) and with sociology (which, in Scandinavia, is almost tantamount to the sym- pathetic study of the welfare state), adding a diluted normative relativism associated with the political views of the academic middle class (to which the anthropologists themselves, incidentally, belong). The article refl ects on the consequences of embroil- ment in domestic politics for anthropological theory, using the experiences of overseas ethnicity research as a contrast to ethnicity research at home, where anthropologists have been forced, or enabled, to go public with their work. KEYWORDS: ethnicity, history of anthropology, immigration, minorities, Norway, Sami In Norway, anthropological engagement with ences, o en including anthropology), by NGOs domestic political issues has been consistent and political interest groups and, occasionally, (and complex) ever since Norwegian anthro- by a wider readership. The anthropology of pologists began to do research among minorities Norway is, in other words, public whether the ‘at home’. Even the most meticulously descrip- anthropologists like it or not. Some in fact use tive, or arcanely analytic, research monograph their position, and their research, in a empting on the Sami or on immigrants is bound to be to infl uence public opinion and policymak- interpreted, largely by non-academic readers, ers directly. Many Norwegian anthropologists in a political context where issues of minority thus write for the press, appear on radio and rights, national cohesion, multiculturalism and television, and publish the occasional book problems of cultural diversity have been at intended for the general reader. the forefront for many years. Anthropological No anthropologist writing about ethnic mi- studies are perused by civil servants (many of norities in Norway can aff ord to be oblivious whom, in fact, have a training in the social sci- of the political connotations of their work, Anthropology in Action, 16, 2 (2009): 27–38 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action doi:10.3167/aia.2009.160203 AiA | Thomas Hylland Eriksen and the boundaries between scholarship and hold this chair (social anthropology took over engagement, or between research and poli- entirely from the 1950s), was responsible for tics, are continuously blurred. Naturally, there the decision, as early as 1951, to move the Sami is considerable refl exive awareness of this collections of the museum to the open-air Nor- among anthropologists working ‘at home’ al- wegian Heritage Museum (Norsk Folkemuseum), though we, like any profession, have our blind arguing that since the Sami were a Norwegian spots, and besides, anthropologists o en feel people, their material culture should be exhib- that they are being misrepresented and mis- ited alongside Norwegian peasant artefacts understood by non-academics relating to their and buildings (Bouquet 1996: 45). A strong work. Since research agendas and journalistic political statement at the time, Gjessing’s deci- or political agendas o en diff er, a frontier zone sion refl ected his view that Norwegians and of negotiations and mutual misunderstand- Sami were ‘brethren peoples’ sharing the same ings, but also occasionally of fruitful collabora- territory, and ought to be treated as equals, tion and learning, has emerged in the area of notwithstanding their cultural diff erences and minority research over the last few decades. traditional hierarchical relationship. This essay explores some of the ways in which Engagement with, and direct infl uence on, the political and the scholarly merge, forc- Sami ethnopolitics has continued in Norwegian ing scholars to become public anthropologists anthropology up to the present day. However, whether they like it or not. Let us begin with I shall argue that a peculiar ‘homeblindness’ – the indigenous Sami and the anthropologist. a lack of refl exivity concerning one’s own cul- The Sami are an ethnic group numbering tural background – which is ultimately caused roughly 40,000 in Norway (with smaller num- by the anthropologists’ double role as scholars bers in the neighbouring countries of Finland, and as citizens, has contributed to this research, Sweden and Russia). Although they are as as well as that on immigrants, in largely un- diverse today as the majority Norwegians in noticed ways. their ways of life, Sami are symbolically associ- ated with reindeer herding and transhumance (seasonal migration), an economic activity mo- Stages in Anthropological Research nopolised by (certain) Sami and invested with on Sami considerable prestige. Following a centuries- long period of Norwegianization (a empted Modern anthropological research on Norwe- ‘acculturation’ and assimilation), a modern gian Sami, which has chiefl y been undertaken indigenous rights movement began to develop by Norwegian researchers (Robert Paine being in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the early 1980s, one prominent exception), can be divided into the Sami movement has achieved political three stages equally refl ecting the intellectual recognition, leading to new legislation on land development of the discipline a er the Second tenure and language rights, and the formation World War and the political circumstances im- of a Sami parliament in 1990, with limited pinging on it. A representative work in the fi rst but real legislative power over the Sami core stage, to which Gjessing himself was a diligent regions (notably Finnmark county, the north- contributor, was Vorren and Manker’s Same- eastern corner of Norway). kulturen (‘The Sami Culture’, 1957), a book that Anthropologists and ethnologists have been went through many reprints and was still on involved with the Sami movement since the the mandatory reading list for fi rst-year un- beginning of academic research in the country. dergraduates in the early 1980s. The book fi ts Professor Gutorm Gjessing at the Ethno graphic into an ethnological discourse where the main Museum in Oslo, the last cultural historian to objective of the science of culture consists in the 28 | Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home | AiA classifi cation and description of presumedly began to phase out the wide-ranging cultural clearly bounded cultures. The authors describe science represented by Gjessing at the Eth- pa erns of se lement, beliefs, technology (the nographic Museum, following which Fredrik fi rst hundred pages of the book are devoted to Barth and his students developed a powerful ‘material culture’ – we had just been taught the department of social anthropology in Bergen Geertzian concept of culture and were mildly (see also Eriksen 2008a), there was a shi in fo- disgusted by the idea that culture could be cus and emphasis in Sami studies. This second material), social organisation and artistic ex- stage in modern Sami studies was defi ned not pressivity. Vorren and Manker’s classifi catory only by the shi from a cultural history para- subdivisions of transhumant Sami, coastal digm to a sociologically oriented social anthro- Sami, forest Sami and Skolt Sami (thus named pology, but also by the publication of Harald because of their characteristic headdress) are Eidheim’s few but infl uential articles about controversial today, both for political reasons Sami-Norwegian ethnicity (see Eidheim 1971 and because the categories do not necessarily for a selection). Eidheim’s perspective on eth- correspond to sociologically interesting facts; nicity, which was a clear infl uence on Barth’s but the most obviously dated part of the book (1969) celebrated introduction to Ethnic Groups is the short chapter which discusses the Sami and Boundaries (where Eidheim’s chapter has as a biological people. The chapters about the the Goff manesque title ‘When Ethnic Identity coastal and forest Sami have a perceptible ele- Is a Social Stigma’), was initially inspired by ment of cultural history since their ‘form of symbolic interactionism and the Manchester culture proper has been covered up quite com- school (Gluckman, Clyde Mitchell et al.), but prehensively by the cultural evolution of the was later enriched by Bateson’s system theory last centuries in the Sami homeland’ (Vorren (Eriksen 2008b). In his string of articles where and Manker 1957: 83). This is, briefl y, a work of he saw ethnicity as a relationship, not as a descriptive ethnography, which takes Roman- cultural essence, Eidheim was concerned with tic notions of cultural purity for granted, and the ‘fashioning
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