Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Repatriation, Revival and Transmission: The Politics of a Sámi Musical Heritage

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17411912.2012.689473

1741-1920

Thomas R. Hilder,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

This article concerns music and the politics of indigenous cultural heritage by focusing on contemporary musical performance of the Sámi. Often drawing on the distinct unaccompanied vocal tradition of joik since the 1970s political mobilisation, contemporary Sámi music has assisted in reviving language, identity and a nature-based cosmology, whilst commenting on the processes of Nordic state assimilation, land dispossession and border creation. Sámi musical performance thus helps to imagine a transnational Sámi community Sápmi, traversing Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula, whilst furthermore articulating Sámi concerns as an indigenous people. Owing to the legacy of cultural dispossession in Sámi encounters with modernity, and the recent emergence of debates concerning cultural ownership in Sámi and indigenous contexts, Sámi cultural heritage has become a politicised field. This article explores the themes of revival, repatriation and transmission in contemporary Sámi musical performance by considering strategies of claiming authorship over a Sámi cultural heritage. Based on ethnographic research of Sámi musicians, festivals, record companies, media, musical institutions and the Internet, my article investigates: recent efforts to repatriate archived joik recordings to Sámi communities; the use of archive recordings in work by contemporary Sámi artists; and education projects that work to strengthen the transmission of a Sámi musical heritage. By drawing on Diana Taylor's model of the 'archive' and 'repertoire', I ask: how does Sámi musical performance offer alternative ways of conceiving of a Sámi musical heritage that overcome logocentric notions of 'culture'? In conclusion, I propose that we might consider the Sámi festival as a kind of 'indigenous museum' in which a Sámi cultural heritage is performed, negotiated and transmitted into the future.