Collecting, connecting, constructing: Early modern commodification and globalization of Sámi material culture

Abstract

This article analyses the role of material culture in the enforcing of a colonial order in early modern Sápmi (Land of the Sámi, the indigenous people in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia). In addition, the article focuses on the unequal power relations created through the collecting and cultural appropriation of Sámi objects. The 17th century saw a rapid growth of interest in the Sámi and their material culture. Clothing, sledges, ceremonial drums and other objects were collected for royal and noble courts of Europe, as well as for scholars and other collectors. This Eurocentric process of constructing Sáminess was concurrent with colonial attitudes towards non-European peoples. Empirically, the article explores the collecting of Sámi objects, clothes and religious/sacred material culture such as ceremonial drums and sieidis, as well as models and mannequins, and their role in the colonial rule and imperial representations of Sápmi.

Desiring the indigenous: affective commodification of the Sámi

“…Regarding Sámi material culture, the Swedish nation state collected, appropriated and displayed Sámi culture (tools, clothes, hunting, reindeer husbandry and ceremonial artefacts) and living Sámis as something exotic and deviant. Nordin and Ojala (2018) emphasize that such othering acts were not only practiced on the Sámi; they were a global colonial strategy that imposed Eurocentric order in which material culture and physiology were regarded as being anthropological evidence of the hierarchy between the races (Loomba 2015).…”

Religion of the past or living heritage?

“…Noaidi drums, one of the most well-known elements of Sámi religion, have long been objects of interest amongst museum collectors; they have been collected since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when their value as a collector's item grew because they were seen as instruments related to superstition (see Silvén 2012, Nordin & Ojala 2018. Today symbols found on the drums are used as decorations on souvenirs, jewellery, home textiles and so on.…”

Copper worlds: a historical archaeology of Abraham and Jakob Momma-Reenstierna and their industrial enterprise in the Torne River Valley, c. 1650–1680

“…The painting was believed already in the eighteenth century to portray Abraham Momma-Reenstierna, but we do not know for certain if this is actually the case. The contact between the brothers and the artist did however influence the choice of motif, and it is one of the first in a long series of paintings depicting this particular motif (Rapp 1951;Nodermann-Hedqvist and Manker 1972;Mathiesen 2014;Nordin 2017b;Nordin and Ojala forthcoming). …”

“…Broberg 1982;Ojala 2009;Baglo 2011;Hansen and Olsen 2014). This mystification of the Sámi accelerated during the seventeenth century with the scientific descriptions of the Sámi, expeditions to Sápmi and the collecting of Sámi material culture and of Sámi people themselves Nordin and Ojala forthcoming). In this context, the actions of the Momma-Reenstierna brothers played an important but little acknowledged role.…”