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The sense of time in the north: A Sámi perspective
Abstract
This paper refers to some aspects of the theoretical anthropological debate on the perception of time and I shall argue, following Ingold (2000) that amongst the Sámi people time is understood as an unfolding of interrelated tasks, rather than as a linear succession of standardised and arbitrary units. I also argue that the Sámi perception of time is not opposed to the western perception, but rather entails a different approach to the significance of clock time. The results of my fieldwork, conducted among the Sámi people in Finnish Lapland, lend support to the idea that the basis for a people's shared understanding and subjective experience of time lies in the interaction of skilful agents in carrying out diverse but interrelated tasks. It is not sufficient to live in a place, to belong to a particular ethnic group or to be engaged in the same subsistence activity to perceive time in a certain fashion. No matter how much we change the combination of actors, the perception of time is generated in each case through situated activity within the landscape.
... In more recent times, Mazzullo (2012) found that the Sami people of Finland constructed their experience of time around a set of interrelated tasks, a taskscape. Mazzullo (2012) explained that unless the activity was related to school or other official timetabled activity, many of the Sami people were very relaxed about punctuality. ...
... In more recent times, Mazzullo (2012) found that the Sami people of Finland constructed their experience of time around a set of interrelated tasks, a taskscape. Mazzullo (2012) explained that unless the activity was related to school or other official timetabled activity, many of the Sami people were very relaxed about punctuality. For example, during the herding months, farmers would rarely look at their watches to determine how much time they needed to work and instead "it was the accomplishment of the tasks that would take precedence, though quick naps could be taken everywhere and anytime" (Mazzullo, 2012, p.217). ...
... The perception of time and space among indigenous northerners is part of their specific culturally embedded practice on the land [95]. There is a clear awareness among them that the extractive industry presence in the Russian Arctic and sub-Arctic is a rather short intermezzo in the long history of human habitation on the land. ...
Recent interest by scholars in the ocean and its complex ge-ographies has not been directed much towards the everyday life of those on board fi shing vessels and how they sense the nature around them. A large trawler for oceanic fi shing is a highly effi cient industrial production machine, carrying an array of equipment that mediates the connection between crew and nature. Th is article presents results from an experimental research project, where one of the authors joined a fi shing trip on an Icelandic factory trawler. Th e resulting rich set of ethnographic material reveals much about the particularities of being at sea. It is argued that the ship can be understood as a series of distinct taskscapes, each of which aff ords certain relations between human and non-human nature.
This introduction opens a special section on emotional and experiential aspects of travel in Northern and Siberian landscapes. Conventional representations of the Arctic as a frontier have foregrounded the difficulties and risks of travel. The collection of articles presented here serves to complement this perspective, exploring both negative and positive connotations of travel. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Greenland and Siberia, authors discuss the joy of movement along with moments of frustration and tension. Time and seasonality, companionship and imagination, and anticipated and unexpected encounters all bear particular significance in the Far North; simultaneously, they are key to a more nuanced understanding of the emotional qualities of travel in general.
of Sakha (Yakutia) with economical and political independence. The Yakut changed their ethnonym (recognized name for the group) (Bromley 1975: 11; cited by Banks 1996: 19) to Sakha at the time of the declaration of independence, and the republic was named after mis. During the Soviet era, although every individual was registered by his nationality, which might surely function to make one assure one's ethnic ascription, the internationalism, or the Russification, was the basic policy of the Soviet Union. Everyone was required to be a Soviet first, and ethnicity could never be the focus of any political matters in the former Soviet Union. Then what does the upsurge of these political movements towards
This article explores the impact of industrialization upon the concepts and experience of time and work. This has been viewed in terms of a transition from pre-industrial task-orientation to an organization of work based on clock time and disembedded from the field of workers' social relationships. It is argued here, to the contrary, that task-orientation remains central to the experience of work in industrial society, even though the reality of that experience is systematically denied by the `Western' discourse of freedom and necessity. The argument is exemplified by reference to ethnographic studies of locomotive drivers. It is concluded that clock time is as alien to us as it is to the people of pre-industrial societies: the only difference is that we have to deal with it.
The aim of this article is to identify the unique Russian conceptualisation of indigenousness and its origin in relation to state formation. First, I focus on the variety of the internationally used legal vocabulary in the Russian context. To be familiar with the understanding of 'indigenousness' in Russia also means to be familiar with its history: every modern legal, political or social interpretation of the notion of 'indigenous' in Russia refers to it. I explore the question 'What does it mean to define a people as
Landscape and temporality are the major unifying themes of archaeology and social‐cultural anthropology. This paper attempts to show how the temporality of the landscape may be understood by way of a ‘dwelling perspective’ that sets out from the premise of people's active, perceptual engagement in the world. The meaning of ‘landscape’ is clarified by contrast to the concepts of land, nature and space. The notion of ‘taskscape’ is introduced to denote a pattern of dwelling activities, and the intrinsic temporality of the taskscape is shown to lie in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. By considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal. Some concrete illustrations of these arguments are drawn from a painting by Bruegel, The Harvesters.
We contrast two understandings of traditional knowledge: as enframed in the discourse of modernity (MTK), and as generated in the practices of locality (LTK). Where `indigenous knowledge' is opposed to science, it always appears in the guise of MTK. This modernist understanding rests on a genealogical model of transmission that separates the acquisition of knowledge from environmentally situated practice. For local people, by contrast, traditional knowledge is inseparable from the practices of inhabiting the land that both bring places into being and constitute persons as of those places. To illustrate the meaning of LTK, we describe how Saami people in northernmost Finland perceive their environment, focusing on their experiences of the weather. These are shown to be embedded in life-histories, dependent on tasks of travel, multisensory, crucial to spatial orientation and the co-ordination of activities, and seasonally periodic. To regard people's knowledge of the weather as an aspect of tradition means thinking of tradition as process rather than substance, as part of a way of life conceived not as the enactment of a received script but as the continual negotiation of a path through the world. Here there is no contradiction between continuity and change. LTK, we show, is tantamount to skill: a property of the whole organism-person, having emerged through a history of involvement in an environment. From the perspective of LTK, there is no opposition between traditional knowledge and science. For science is itself a form of LTK, differing from other forms in the practices through which it is generated, rather than in the epistemological status of the knowledge itself.
The Invention of Culture, one of the most important works in symbolic anthropology in recent years, argues that culture is not a given that shapes the lives of the people who share it. Rather, it is people who shape their culture by constantly manipulating conventional symbols taken from a variety of everchanging codes to create new meanings. Wagner sees culture arising from the dialectic between the individual and the social world; his analysis is situated in the relation between invention and convention, innovation and control, meaning and context. Finally, the author points out that the symbolization processes that generate the construction of meaning in culture are the same as those that anthropologists use to "invent" the cultures they study.
Perception, tradition and environment among Sámi people in northeastern Finland. Unpublished PhD dissertation
- N Mazzullo