Contested terrain: Land, language, and lore in contemporary Sami politics

The Sami of northern Europe occupy a unique position in Western imagination. Simultaneously exotic and primitive, marginal and yet native, they have been the object of fantasy, ethnography, and empires. Today the Sami are also citizens in the modern nation states of Fennoscandia, and participate in their political and social processes. They are also a political force, both within Scandinavia, where they are seeking to secure some form of autonomy and self-rule within the context of the extant sovereign states, and also world wide, where they are heavily involved in the international network of indigenous peoples and other world organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO.;This dissertation explores the turbulent confluence of politics and culture in northern Norway today through the lens of folklore. Ethno-politics and ethnic identity use folklore in rhetorical and political processes whereby identities are shaped, “authenticated”, and “naturalized” through their links to “tradition.” Expressions of ethnic and indigenous identity also are folklore, paradigmatic narratives of community based on common origins, primordialism, continuity, and tradition. A folkloristic investigation of Sami politics in northern Norway, thus, may not only reveal a particular “template for reality,” that is, how reality is constituted according to a conceptual and narrative model, but also how such a “reality” is enacted.;In globally-informed contemporary Sami society, however, identity is necessarily multiple, despite the politically motivated claims of a bounded and discrete Saminess. The problem, simply stated, is, how does a Sami population that has successfully organized itself as an anti-type to Norwegian-ness, then resolve itself also as part of the Norwegian state's enterprise. How, in other words, do the Sami simultaneously define themselves as a “Sami people” while participating as Norwegian citizens? The intent of this dissertation is to investigate the multiple and various expressions of Sami identity that move along the axis defined by the poles of publicly articulated and privately experienced identity.