Multiculturalism, hybridity and the transformation of boundaries: Experiences from North Norway
Trond Thuen
Dept. of Social Anthropology
University of Tromsø, Norway
In this context of multiculturalism and essentialisations of cultural distinctiveness, vanishing and recreation of ethnic boundaries, localism and globalisation – what is special about North Norway? Perhaps it is that this region has been the scene of cultural encounters for a thousand years or more. The region is often referred to as the meeting place of “the three tribes”, that is the Saami, considered the indigenous or aboriginal population, the Norwegians or Norse population, and the Kvens, people of Finnish origin. The region has been an area of expansion, rich in resources, particularly marine resources, with a pleasant climate on the coast thanks to the Gulf Stream, and with pastures sufficient to sustain cattle and reindeer. It has also been an area of contested boundaries and state rivalry which directed a focus at the ethnic identities of its populations from the early start of Norwegian statehood. So let us have a brief look at the history of the three tribes and the state.
The Norse expansion towards the North since the early Middle Ages met with the aboriginal population of the region, the Saami, and since the 18th century people of Finnish origin (the Kvens) immigrated from the East. The region was not invaded, however, in the sense that a foreign state sent its troops to subdue the original inhabitants and its settlers to expel them from the land. There is no specific date of “discovery” but a slow influx of people from the south and from the east who settled in a very sparsely populated area and adapted their knowledge and techniques to the resources available for exploitation. So we may ask, then, did these encounters engender “the salad bowl”, “the melting pot”, or both, or neither of the two? Is it possible, in other words, to say something of interpersonal processes set in motion by encounters, on the basis of the character of these encounters?
Let us keep the question in mind, and let me first give you a brief and sketchy overview of who these peoples are, when they came, and what they did and do today. This historical backdrop is necessary because the present situation of multiculturalism in northern Norway can only be understood, I believe, if we take a diachronic view of its emergence over a very long time. To use Connerton’s perspective on “how societies remember” is necessary, I think, because it gives us an idea of how experiences of the Other have been incorporated through interacting in a habitus where structural constraints dictated by nature as well as by external forces, i.e. mainly the state and the system of land ownership, have set the framework for adaptations and interactional relationships between individuals belonging to the various categories of inhabitants, and this framework have manifested itself in a variety of ways.
The Saami have a history in Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Kola, Russia, of at least 2000 years, probably much longer. Where did they come from, and when? A number of theories have been launched, and no specific theory has been conclusively proved. The language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, but other cultural elements in archaeological finds seem to have come from the south. Anyway, recent scholarly argument contends that the question of origin should rather be something like “when did a concept of ‘Saami’ arise?” – that is, when did the self-conceptualisation of being distinct and different from certain other kinds of people surface? Logically, this must have been the effect of an encounter with such a strong experience of difference that it overshadowed what had hitherto presented itself as differences and transformed them into internal variations. We may assume that this significant Other must have been people speaking an incomprehensible language and probably utilizing other ecological niches than the original population. It could have been an encounter between immigrant agriculturalists and the indigenous hunters and gatherers. The encounter generated various forms of contact and exchange, furs against agricultural products and metals for instance. Much later, farming, cattle breeding and local and seasonal fishing became the resource adaptations on which a Norwegian population sustained itself, while the Saami population differentiated 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, moving their herds from the inland to the coast in spring and back again towards the eastern winter pastures in the fall. What might have existed of small scale reindeer breeding on the coast was engulfed by these larger herds, and an ecological and economic gap between 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 as exchange for grain. Later on, in the 17th century, these resources failed and the coastal settlers had to move away from their settlements exposed to the sea and entered the fjords, starting cattle breeding in a combination with fjord fishing. In other words, they had to adopt ways of living and exploitation that resembled that of the Saami in many ways. The closer contact also resulted in intermarriage and cultural borrowing of various kinds, and even the “exchange” of languages, in the sense that in communities on the coast of Troms and Finnmark many individuals are reported to have been bilingual in the 19th century. 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 border. We should also keep in mind that the bilateral kinship characterising the Norwegian as well as the Saami community 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 must have been the cultural habitus that dominated in the community that decided to which category the individual person should belong. Ethnicity is in the blood, people believe, but whose blood, in a system of cosanguinity? You need the cultural skills, the way of life and the specific competences that you incorporate through a process of socialisation, to decide the question of ethnic belonging.
During the 18th and 19th centuries the other category of people immigrated from the east – the Kvens, people of Finnish origin attracted by the milder climate and the fish resources in North Norway. Some settled in East Finnmark, others came later and settled in the north of Troms, mainly. Some of them were specialists in forestry and preferred areas where the forest could be exploited alongside agriculture, others specialised in fishing. Thus there are communities today with predominantly Kven inhabitants, forming pockets within the Saami/Norwegian populations. And there are communities with populations composed of two or all three population elements.
What are the characteristics of the boundaries between them today? Can we talk about a sharp ethnic boundary, constantly confirmed through the mutual experience of difference and distinctiveness? Or are what might be expected to be significant ethnic characteristics neglected and undercommunicated, even to the extent that individuals may claim more than one identity, and maybe switch from one type of cultural expression to another, as the situation invites him or her to do? In other words, is the cultural repertoire that local people command so varied, so multifarious, that one may “change identity appearance” depending on the situation, on whom one is interacting with, what tasks are objects of the interaction, what tactfulness the encounters demand, etc.? Or is it the other way, so typically of the ethnic encounter elsewhere, that the roles that the actors can make relevant in their interaction are very limited and the exchange such that stereotypes, essences and distinctiveness are confirmed and the ethnic boundary constantly reinforced? Judging from our research in the region both patterns can be found, and this is perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of “the encounter of the three tribes”.
The ethnic category that persisted was that characterised by the culturally distinctive niche exploitation of reindeer breeding and pastoralism. This adaptation developed into a Saami specialty. Farmers, also Norwegians, might own small herds that were herded by the Saami specialists to the benefit of both parties, since the farmer had his farm to attend to and could not move with his animals. Also, a system of gift relationship between specific partners developed, based on mutual trust and delayed exchange. The pastoralist needed the farmer’s assistance when arriving at the fjord on his spring and autumn movement in order to cross the fjord safely with his herd, and this assistance was reciprocated with reindeer meat and skins. Meat and skins were also exchanged for dried fish and woven wool carpets used for tents. Such exchange relationships tied individuals to each other across the ethnic border, or between persons of the same ethnic belonging but with different adaptations, the settled and the nomads.
The other structural frameworks, besides ecology, are those of the state and the system of land ownership. They are interconnected, but let us look at the latter first. Until the middle of the 19th century almost all land in the counties of Nordland and Troms was owned first by the King, later by a small number of absentee landlords, and finally by a number of regional landowners. The farmers were tenants, whether Saami or Norwegian or Kven. Later, in the 19th century as this land tenure system gradually disappeared and the farmers became freeholders, most of them were still heavily indebted to the merchant elite. Thus, the position that dominated their life world was that of the typical peasant, trying to earn some money from seasonal fishing, selling his produce to the merchant who made his profit from exporting it as dried fish, while the fisher and his wife and children also attended the farm and his small flock of cattle in a subsistence economy. This way of life was typical of the population on the coast until the social democratic governments put an end to it in the 1930s and the after WWII period. The point of interest here is that there was no significant difference, economically speaking, between the Saami, the Kvens and the Norwegians in this respect. Ethnicity manifested itself in other ways.
It was manifest in the state’s policy of ethnic assimilation. Starting in the 1850s, this policy sought to encourage Saami and Kvens to become Norwegians. It was exerted through the school system, mainly, where only the Norwegian language was allowed, but also through a policy of modernisation which demanded Norwegian skills in order to be accepted as an industrious and reliable person. This policy profoundly changed the system of equality and reciprocity between the ethnically distinct population elements in most communities. The Norwegians had their identity confirmed as the people of the future, of national belonging. The labour movement had no sense of ethnic differentiation. Saami culture and language were something of the past, people were told. This feeling of superiority induced in the Norwegian part was, naturally, paralleled by a feeling of shortcoming, of inferiority, among the Saami and the Kvens. And while the Norwegian elite of teachers, agricultural educators, health servants, etc., encouraged assimilation, the local Norwegian neighbours of farmers and fishermen reminded the Saami of their cultural heritage and their descent. They were ridiculed when they tried to “become” Norwegians. It was a situation of double play and double bind. “The three tribes” became ranked, with the Norwegians on top. The stigma attached to the Saami and to a minor extent to the Kvens engendered a behaviour of pretended identity and created a boundary between the front stage, the public appearance, and the back stage, the private and shielded room where the Saami language was still in use. The reciprocal relationship between sedentaries and pastoralists was broken in many communities, as the settled Saami did not want to be reminded of their Saami identity through their friendship and kinship connections to the pastoralists, who retained their identity as Saami protected by their way of life, distinct from the others and with no intention of being assimilated.
The policy of assimilation or Norwegianisation, based on the racist ideology derived from social Darwinism of the 19th century slowly ended in the 1950s and 60s. The state changed its attitude when confronted with international currents of postcolonialism preaching collective cultural rights of indigenous minorities that were imported by a growing Saami elite of educated persons, who also started to organise mostly young Saami and argued that cultural preservation was a matter of creating self-respect and the only way of eradicating the stigma of Saaminess. The pastoralists were the cultural heroes, having kept the language and other symbols of cultural distinctiveness intact through the long period of assimilation policies (not unlike, by the way, how the Norwegian cultural elite in the previous century had “invented” the Norwegian allodial or freeholding farmer as the keeper of Norwegian identity through the dark ages of Danish dominance). The idea of cultural authenticity was cultivated. Artists sought inspiration in cultural symbols of folklore, religion, music, and narratives of resistance. In a confrontation with the government over the damming of a river in order to construct a power station in the late 1970s and early 1980s a large number of Saami and Norwegian environmentalists mobilised in hunger strikes and road blockades. It was said afterwards that they lost the battle but won the war. The dam was built, but the government sat down to investigate the Saami grievances based on their claim of aboriginality. Committee reports were produced and a constitutional amendment was adopted, charging the state with the responsibility to safeguard and protect the Saami culture and way of life. A Saami act was also adopted, giving the Saami language equal status with the Norwegian in certain municipalities and, most importantly, it decided that a Saami parliament was to be established, elected by a Saami electorate registered in a special roll. For this purpose an official definition of who is a Saami had to be constructed, which says that anyone with at least a Saami speaking great-grandparent and who reckon himself or herself to be a Saami, is entitled to register. As a highly appreciated symbolic gesture the late King Olav V inaugurated the first Saami Parliament in 1989. The Saami were finally accepted as a people in their own right when the king declared that Norway was created on the territory of two peoples, the Saami and the Norwegians.
There were dissidents among the Saami, however. A political organisation was founded in opposition to the whole idea of Saami separateness within the constitution, of special legal rights apart from the Norwegians and of a Saami parliament and voting register. Saami are lawful and loyal Norwegian citizens, they argued. Their future lies in the protection of subsistence in marginal communities, in economic support on an equal basis with their Norwegian neighbours. Special treatment would only encourage ethnic tensions. And most importantly, many, if not most Saami are actually of mixed origin. Isn’t it possible to be both Saami and Norwegian, when our ancestors came from both sides? - they asked. Why should they have to choose between these opposite model identities? That would generate the reinstalment of the previous stigma. Most Saami, that is the coastal people, did not command the skills commonly associated with Saaminess. The prototypical Saami was the pastoralist, and the reindeer herders already had a much too predominant position when it came to pasture rights in areas where the coastal people also used to graze their sheep and goats and harvest nature’s products.
The oppositional political organisation lost its influence as the Saami Parliament gained influence on governmental affairs concerning Saami interests, however. The number of registered Saami has increased from election to election. All the Norwegian political parties minus one, which is quite influential, have acknowledged the Saami constitutional rights.
This year a new conflict has emerged, this time over the ownership and management of a large part of the county of Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway and home of the majority of reindeer breeders. A new law has just been adopted by the Norwegian Parliament that transfers state-owned land to a special institution with a board of representatives of the Saami Parliament and the Finnmark county council on a 50/50 basis. So why the conflict? Local or regional ownership certainly sounds better than state ownership, one should think. There is no clause of ethnic exclusiveness in the text of the new act. The problem seems to lie in how the act is interpreted, in how it is associated with the underlying symbolic framing of the ethnic relationship. Those who oppose the new law interpret it as saying that it prescribes a reallocation to the Saami of scarce resources that used to be for everyone, i.e. for all Norwegian citizens. Those in favour argue that it does not discriminate on ethnic grounds, that it introduces a model for co-management and that it means a transference of ownership from the governmental level to the regional, or from South to North, which certainly has a positive connotation in the minds of northerners. But they also argue that the act is in accordance with the International Labour Organisation convention 169 on “indigenous and tribal peoples in independent states”, signed by Norway in 1990, and stating that indigenous peoples are entitled to ownership of the lands they inhabit. So according to this it is Saami land, but the Saami have accepted co-ownership and management.