Rossella Ragazzi – University of Tromsø, Norway
Abstract
The article analyses how we, as a team of visual anthropologists from the University of Tromsø (Sápmi-Norway), worked with two young Saami musicians (S. M. Gaup and L. Somby) who are themselves researchers in the “joik” tradition. Sápmi is the term of the imagined nation of the Saami people, covering a territory that goes across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Northern Russia. The joik is the specific form of Saami chanting. It coveys lyrics, melody and throat singing techniques, with a high level of abstraction in rendering the relation to people, natural sites, places, animals and events, that we attempted tounderstand contextually and historically. We did not only wish to pursue an archival quest to document contemporary joik, but we wanted to render through film how joik is a vehicle for existential revelations of the self to one’s community, to imagined communities, to former and future images of self as a Saami subject. We also wished to reveal how joik operates in connecting a multiplicity of identity markers, where musicians and their audience assign meaning to events, situations, history, stories, symbols and places. The cultural complexity emerging in this multivocal and multisited project shows the embodiment of verbal recollections, gestures, conversations, lyrics, chants, improvisations, outbursts and secretive features of the Saami chanting endeavor. Among the archetypal cultural features attributed to the Saami, the article will critically analyze: the wandering in space and time, the gathering around the Àrran (hearth, bonfire), the “joik which remembers” (poetics expression of the first known Saami writer, Johan Turi, 1908), and the taboos and achievements of political indigenous activism. Among the socio-political issues that the film addressed is the poignant reality of fading away languages: Southern Saami is today spoken by less than 500 speakers in Norway. The core analysis will articulate how the joik is operating as a medium and agent for sociality and construction (and de-construction) of collective memory.
Keywords
Joik, Music, Indigenous Media, Norway, Saami, Disappearing Languages, Trancultural Cinema, Youth Culture
