Abstract
The Saami, the indigenous population of northern Fennoscandia, have constantly been conceptualized as the others in relation to the (pre-)history writing of the modern nation-states. Here, the discussion focuses on Saami archaeology and representations of Saami prehistory in Sweden. It is emphasized that all ethnic, national and territorial concepts are embedded in networks of power, and that the connections and separations behind the concepts need to be explored. In this article a relational network approach is suggested as an alternative to dualistic thinking about ethnicities and territories. Ethnicity is here seen as one set of relationships, interwoven into many networks stretching over time and space. The network approach is in part inspired by actor-network theory, which is briefly described together with some possible points of interest for archaeological studies.
Highlights
The Saami, the indigenous population of northern Fennoscandia, have constantly been conceptualized as the others in relation to thehistory writing of the modern nation-states
One of the most dominant images of northern Sweden is that of the last wilderness and the pristine nature untouched by humans
Archaeological research in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation remains little known among archaeologists in Sweden 15 years after the breakdown of the iron curtain, even though this research would be very relevant when studying prehistory in northern Sweden
Summary
The Saami, the indigenous population of northern Fennoscandia, have constantly been conceptualized as the others in relation to the (pre-)history writing of the modern nation-states. In northern Sweden, the archaeological research is a much more controversial activity than in the southern parts of the country, with connections to many sociocultural and political contexts in present-day society, including identity processes and conflicts over places and lands. In the traditional culture-historical view on people in anthropology and archaeology one can observe a "one-entity syndrome", representing a desire for a single operational unit for categorizing people, a unit in which language, cultural identity, material culture and sometimes biology were fused. This syndrome is visible in the many maps and schemes produced of archaeological cultures that are fixed in space-time as bounded one-entities. Sometimes archaeologists use "cultural identity" or other alternative labels as one-entities and black-boxes, and the resulting visions of the past will be the same as before
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