Discursive elaborations of ‘Saami’ ethnos: A multi-source model of ethnic and ethnopolitical structuration

Ethnicity and the shaping of ethnic signs

Ethnicity is a sociocultural process in which actors and practices are interpreted in terms of differential social origins (cf. Levine, 1999). Seen in historical perspective, ethnicity is nested in the continuous structuring of social difference within complex and variable frames, which in each moment may be interpreted as structures (Giddens, 1984). These structures represent the differential appropriation and distribution of valuable resources and social power through the instrumental classification of subjects (Rex, 1970; Cohen, 1978; Williams, 1989; Kalb and Halmai, 2011). With an emphasis on transactional aspects of the ethnic process, Fredrik Barth clearly demonstrated that objectified classifications emerging from an ethnic field are relational, so that no ethnic sign can be taken as a substantial isolated unit: ethnicity is a process of social configuration through attributive relationships (Barth, 1966, 1969). If this is true for every ethnic sign, it is especially true for signs that label and designate a bounded unit as an ethnos (Moerman, 1965).

My concern in this essay is with the designation of an ethnos, that of the ‘Saami’. I focus on the process of configuration and structuring, paying attention to expressions and to historical trajectories that, in the longue durée, help render these situational contexts understandable. My purpose is to address two analytical tendencies that exist in tension with each other and, among others, make up the landscape of studies in ethnicity in recent decades, especially in anthropology. On one hand, a repertoire of concepts and cases has emerged in an analytical-empirical dimension that may help to dismantle essentialism in the treatment of ethnic processes (Banks, 1996; Baumann, 1996, 1999; Loury et al., 2005). On the other hand, a moral dimension has emphasized the right of human beings to express and interpret their ethnic identifications under conditions of civil equity (Taylor, 1992; Modood, 2007; Briggs, 1996; Baumann, 1999). The illustrations in this essay contribute to understanding the processes within which this moral dimension is shaped. It is important to not only note this tension, but also to reflect upon the imbalance of power between bureaucratic and media methods of constituting oppositional categorization and the subtleties of the social experience of people who live in a complex world (Kramvig, 1999, 2005).

To delineate creative synergies between these two dimensions, this essay relies on ethnography. Ethnography is a way to understand ethnicity in terms of social practice. Conceived in this manner, ethnicity is mainly an expressive-interpretative process handled by social discourse, that is, in the course of concrete and situated social action. On such a concrete and situated scale, ethnic predications about actors and practices come alive through signs, or, as Harald Eidheim put it, idioms (Eidheim, 1997). These signs are produced and circulate as a part of ‘ethnic common sense’, and as such they belong ‘to our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit’ (Brubaker, 2004: 9). In this respect, ethnicity is a matter for semiotics. My concern, then, is with semiosis: the open-ended process through which actors come to produce signs as expressions, consider those expressions to stand for certain objects, and commit to interpretations linking these expressions to these objects (Kockelman, 2007; cf. Peirce, 1991a, 1991b). Because my focus is on configuration and structuring, I do not search for structures of stable signifiers, but for signs in open processes of expression and interpretation. These ethnic signs are actually generated in each act that produces meaning.

Building on this understanding, I will use ethnography based on fieldwork in the European Arctic, to generate a model of the processes of ethnic and ethnopolitical structuring. This model makes three arguments that I articulate around the key concepts of semiosis, identity and ethnic identifications, and locality, and which constitute a theory of the processual production of ethnicity.

First, in deploying my model I argue that classes of people, practices, etc., become objectified through ethnic discourses. I show that the schematic structuring of pairs of linguistic labels that function in categorical opposition with each other – for example, ‘Saami’/‘Norwegian’ – impair our ability to cope with complexities that appear in ethnographic description and historical analysis. However, in addition to the powerful images produced by bureaucratic institutions and the media, which constantly reduce the ethnic field to oppositional and, frequently, exclusive categories, there are other possibilities of classification. My model will offer four of these possibilities: (1) ethnic prototypes that eventually allow universalistic embodiments, (2) ethnopolitical categories that spring from local experiences, (3) ethnopolitical categories that subordinate personal links and experience, and (4) fully universalistic categories.

My use of the notion of prototype comes from Georges Kleiber’s La sémantique du prototype (Kleiber, 1990; Velasco, 2003: 432ff.). A prototype is a lexical and cognitive device of classification that sets an ideal model in relation to which members of a class are distributed in degrees of approximation. In contrast to the oppositional categorical mode of operation, under which a member does or does not belong to a class, the prototypical mode of operation leads to gradual degrees of membership, so that the contours of a class are vague and diffuse. I propose the concept of ethnic prototype to refer to a prototypical mode of operation on ethnic signs.

The four different classes of discursive elaborations do not work jointly, as a unitary process in time. Each of them has specific sources of agency, and may develop independently from the others. This model, and the processes and interrelations it makes explicit, have important consequence for the concept of identity. ‘Identity’ is not just a controversial word for designating what are actually contextual, biographical, historical and, in sum, dynamic processes of identification (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000; Brubaker, 2004; cf. Hall, 1996).

My second argument is that, at a deeper level, the whole process of the conformation of an ethnic social field is made up of courses of social action with temporal confluences and divergences. As my model makes clear, struggles for legitimacy are not addressed constantly through the same signs; nor are these signs addressed constantly by the same actors. Agency is enacted with a complex intermeshing of subjective and objectified social practices, in which ‘identity’ can only ephemerally operate as ‘sameness’ (Hall, 1996). This means that, even with a single interaction, identifications and identity are enacted within a distributive set of semiotic competences (Kockelman, 2007) in social settings of multi-scaled action (Latour, 1996, 2005).

My third argument focuses on criticism of the mechanical association between the ethnic predication of ‘identity’ and the bounded conceptualization of its locality. In this essay, criticism of this mechanical association is based on method. Ethnographic focus on situated practices makes it possible to elaborate on the local, not as a bounded enclosure including people, following what Rogers Brubaker has called ‘commonsense groupism’ (2004: 7ff.), but as a meaningful intersection of various institutional logics which, eventually and in turn, become intertwined with various logics of socialization: a kind of assemblage (Latour, 2005). As happens in one of Marcus’s strategies for multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), you follow the practice and try to make sense of it, with a feeling that its context of relevance (thus, its locality) is not necessarily just there. In the intersections, dualistic extremes such as universalistic-concrete, public-intimate, bureaucratic-unformalized, etc., come to operate in reciprocal articulations and translations; and it is precisely in these intersections where ethnic signs gain existence as expressive and interpretative tools. Thus, this third contribution opens a path for addressing a problem that has generally been neglected: how ethnic signs, which are usually taken for granted as things of the world, become shaped in contexts of multi-scalar relationships.

Discursive elaborations 1: Prototypical ethnos and universalistic embodiments

Let us take Guovdageaidnu as the starting point. Guovdageaidnu (in Norwegian: Kautokeino) is a town of about three thousand people located in northern Norway. ¹ Apparently, it is a small rural society. Almost all of its population are bilingual in Saami and Norwegian, though the spoken language is Saami (Davvi Sámigiella) in most situations of daily life. Guovdageaidnu is quite special in the context of the northern European ‘Saami’ world. It has three main characteristics that cannot be found together with the same intensity in any other place: (a) a dense kinship network, which is very significant in everyday socialization, (b) a reindeer industry, which directly gives jobs to a third of the population, and (c) a historical social continuity in the kinship and social organization of reindeer activity (Paine, 1994), which, as you are frequently told there, has kept ‘Saaminess’ (Sámivuohta) alive over the years within a general process of ‘Norwegianization’.

From an essentialist perspective and with these three characteristics in mind, it is easy to adopt the simplistic assumption that Guovdageaidnu society is the purest emblem of ‘Saaminess’. From the point of view of people both from Guovdageaidnu and from elsewhere, this portrait is as simple as it is misleading (Hovland, 1996: 19). Guovdageaidnu is also a society closely connected with state politics and with the rest of the world through a network of bureaucratic institutions, connections that have been intensely reinforced in the last four decades. If there are many ways of being ‘Saami’ in Norway today, you can find examples of the entire repertoire in Guovdageaidnu.

Bureaucratic agencies have mostly been created as part of the ethnopolitical development produced, especially since the ’80s, in cooperation with the Norwegian state and international agencies. In this respect, Guovdageaidnu is not actually either rural or remote. The Saami language has held out as a precious heritage of the place; but while having coffee, for example, in the cantina of Saami University College, I heard a chorus of languages every day: English, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and of course as the dominant voice, Saami. Local kinship is impressively relevant to daily life and also embedded within bureaucratic agencies, but people coming from the most diverse places in Scandinavia meet to study and work in Guovdageaidnu. Inasmuch as the institutions and the social milieus around them are also emblems of ‘Saaminess’, we have here at least two frequently mixed sources of the making of ethnic dynamics: a prototypical image of ‘Saaminess’ anchored to inter-generational continuity and kinship, and a relatively recent and expansive set of universalistic embodiments of the ‘Saami’ ethnos.

For people who have grown up in Guovdageaidnu, ethnic characterization is permanently mixed up with local characterizations. Every trait conceived as ‘Guovdageainnolaš’ [‘of Guovdageaidnu’] in those who live there is, by immediate extension, conceived to be ‘Saami’. However, in this mixture of ethnic and local, the local, in its most concrete and practical meanings, is dominant (Holtzman, 2004). Within these local settings, expressing ethnicity is pointless. As Fredrik Barth could have predicted (Barth, 1969), for those living their ordinary experiences at the alleged core of the ethnic prototype, ethnicity is rather irrelevant.

When ethnic expression of ‘Saaminess’ becomes present in Guovdageaidnu, ethnic condition takes the form of a continuous process, rather than a discrete, categorical grid. Speaking of people who, initially named ‘dáččat’, had become ‘sámit’ through marriage or sustained socialization, Rasmus explained the process in this manner: ‘I think that ethnicity is like the trunk of a tree … It is like the inside of that trunk; from there out you reach the bark, and then comes the periphery.’ ² Inasmuch as the society of Guovdageaidnu still today is a society of families, ‘Saaminess’ is mainly understood to be a condition nucleated around kinship, an implicit condition of significant social links: the nearer to the centre of the trunk, the older in time, the more pertinent and robust the ‘Saami’ identification. In the same way kinship becomes meaningful in the intricacies of everyday practices, in a sort of continuous scale of grey. ‘Saaminess’ is, in these contexts, very far from the overarching abstract all-or-nothing category that, in ethnopolitical terms, applies to the ‘Saami people’.

The words ‘sámivuohta’, ‘sámi’ or ‘sápmelaš’ have different meanings when used in the contexts of ethnopolitical discourse, as representations of a pan-‘Saami’ ethnos embracing those who identify themselves as ‘sámit’ in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. These ethnopolitical contexts are pertinent for evoking a community that is necessarily imagined (Anderson, 1983). ³

In itself, concrete kinship is not a suitable idiom for the expression of a political ethnos, a universalistic subject. Yet ethnopolitics operates with the concept of the ‘Saami family’, as is expressed in the title of the official ‘Anthem of the Saami Family’. However, if you have grown up in Guovdageaidnu, you draw a clear distinction between that figurative ‘Saami family’ and the concrete family of the home and kin network. In Guovdageaidnu, being kin is being (more or less) a ‘Saami’; but being a ‘Saami’ does not make you kin.

In the words of Sara, a young woman born in Guovdageaidnu, kinship is ‘steadfast, whether you like it or not’. On the contrary, the universalistic ‘Saami family’ is created in practice through elective friendship. In its most tangible figuration, this ethnos is a society of friends conceived, by metaphorical analogy, ‘as if they were family’. Registered in the Saami Electoral Roll, and casting her vote for the Saami People Party in 2003, Sara evoked the unbounded territory of the ‘Saami People’, Sápmi, by mentioning her friendship ties.

Sara: [Besides kin] there are other relations. Yes, […] we would be linked as sisters and brothers. The others are always your kin. Friends you can choose, you cannot choose your family. It is yours forever. […] But friends who are very close … how many of them are there? [She mumbles names] … That’s easy, there are about ten …

Ángel: Yes … and where are they from?

Sara: They are all around Sápmi … the southern zone, Røros is the southernmost place. And also on the Finland side … Ánar.

In its most concrete expression as it is intertwined with the local prototype, the place of the ‘Saami’ universalistic ethnos is a chronotope of criss-crossed lives (Bakhtin, 1990). These friends ‘all around Sápmi’ have careers in a network woven within scholastic and work institutions. At a weekend soirée in the Alfreds Kro, one of the places to go out for a drink in Guovdageaidnu, sitting with two or three acquaintances gives the ethnographer the image of a constant coming and going, with some joining in conversation for a while.

A boy on his way to the disco sees his aunt and sits down with us. His aunt teaches at Saami University College. She and another teacher, who also works at one of the two newspapers written in Saami, were once fellow students at the University of Oslo. Joining the ‘Spanish’ anthropologist today to drink a few beers, their conversation turns the meeting into a remembrance of social links. Some of the links are constructed in continuity with the old days in Oslo, others are characterized as new and unexpected, and still others as interrupted and now renewed. In this public space, the experience of universalism comes alive.

Universalistic institutions are normally imagined to be modern, but modernity is an old thing today. Bureaucracies have not emerged recently and suddenly in Guovdageidnu or other places in Sápmi (Minde, 1995: 14). The first primary school came to Guovdageaidnu in 1726, when the little town was part of the Swedish Kingdom. The school was a section of the church, which established a parish with an appointed priest in 1673 (Guovdageainnu Historjasearvi, 2002: 7). Since 1751, the municipality of Guovdageaidnu has been administered by the Norwegian state. Over two and a half centuries, several state institutions have been located in the town. Some of them have stood for the ‘Norwegian nation’, such as the Air Force Station, opened in 1955 and closed in 1995, and others for the ‘Saami nation’, such as Saami University College, founded in 1989.

The Central Association of the Saamis (Sámiid Guovddášlihttu), from which local Saami Associations would arise during the 20th century, was founded in 1904. The Association of Saamis of Guovdageaidnu formed in 1963. In Norway, local associations became federated in 1968 in the National Association of the Saamis of Norway. In 1949, the Guovdageaidnu Saami Transhumant Reindeer Herders’ Body was founded and it, in turn, became affiliated with the National Association of the Reindeer Industry of Norway. By the time the Saami Parliament of Norway was founded in 1989, a solid history of associative practices, models and structures had been created in connection with a series of bureaucratic institutions.

If we pay attention to the everyday experience of people in Guovdageaidnu, discursive elaborations of ‘Saami’ ethnos rest on the intertwining of two basic networks. On the one hand, the network of significant translocal friendship relationships is anchored, in part, in the most intimate relationships of kinship. On the other, the network of universalistic bureaucracies is anchored, in part, in biographic trajectories.

Discursive elaborations 2: Ethnopolitical incarnations in local experience

To express an ethnopolitical argument is more than to express ethnic difference. An ethnopolitical argument is not only the thematization of an ethnic difference between actors in the scale of concrete communication. In this kind of argument, political themes or strategies, which have been normally constructed in other institutional settings, are included. Thus, any actor producing discursive elaborations on ‘Saami’ ethnos with an ethnopolitical argument works with a basic problem: to articulate different scales of institutions in the unitary flow of his communicative action. In this matter, the relevance of ethnopolitical utterance or expression rests on competence in playing with contexts of reference and scales of institutions (Eriksen, 1991).

Early in the morning of 6 February 2004, as part of the activities programmed for the Day of the Saami People, the mayor of Guovdageaidnu had to give the traditional official speech at the primary school playground to the children and some parents. In front of this audience, he linked the universalistic image of the ethnos – the ‘Saami people’ – with more concrete affairs concerning the school. One of these affairs, bullying, had received some attention from the media based on several instances with children of various origins. Addressing the children in the audience, the mayor appealed to one of the recognized virtues in the Anthem of the Saami Family: tolerance of ‘other people, though they hold other opinions or are not Saamis as we are’. This is an example of the incarnation of the universalistic ethnos ‘Saami’ in local experience. Through this incarnation, an experience of social relationship among the children gives life to the ethnonym ‘Saamis’ and the pronominalization of an embracing ‘we’.

A local incarnation of the universalistic ethnos is an expression in which the actor takes as a theme the subject ‘we’, which is anchored to a significant relationship, and characterizes that ‘we’ as a historical or founding ethnos (Levine, 1999: 168; Kockelman, 2007), nation or imagined people (Anderson, 1983). This ethnos is a category that includes subjects, generally many subjects, with whom the actor has never had significant interpersonal communication.

When we compare Class 1 elaborations (prototypical ethnos and universalistic embodiments) with these Class 2 elaborations on the ‘Saami’ ethnos, we find an important difference. With Class 1 elaborations, actors tend to construct a prototype of gradual identification: you may be more or less ‘Saami’, as you may be more or less kin (closer or less close), or more or less of a friend (closer or less close). Using ethnopolitical incarnations in local experience, actors employ a category that entails an ethnic predication about an abstract population.

Discursive elaborations 3: In ethnopolitical contexts, actors subordinate personal links and experience to a universalistic ethnos

I use the term ‘ethnopolitical context of communication’ for the context in which the speaking actor intends to promote political consequences on behalf of a universalistic ethnos. This kind of context can be understood in the manner of a Weberian ideal type (Weber, 1984 [1922]: 7ff.). The more formalized the contextual conditions (actors, times, places, schedules, etc.), the more typically ethnopolitical the context. The actor introduces, in this manner, valuative and cognitive standards which, coming from a universalistic program of action, move personal links and experience in the enunciation act to a second order of reality.

Class 1 elaborations produce a prototypical ethnos that, understood as a matter of degree and intertwined with universalistic embodiments, takes root in kinship and significant others. Class 2 elaborations present ‘Saami’ ethnos as a category embodied in the situations of everyday life. Bureaucratic standards are always present in this second class, but conventions that make personal links in the enunciation act understandable tend to constitute the fundamental order of reality.

When talking in ethnopolitical contexts, actors frequently produce Class 2 elaborations. The more formalized the situation becomes, the more they tend to produce Class 3 elaborations. In these elaborations, the imagined category of the ethnos goes first, subordinating situated practices, sensibilities and relationships that should be changed, affected or reformed by the perspective of the ethnic category and its conceptual consequences.

The degree of formalization of these universalistic programs of action corresponds to the degree of their written expression. This expressive condition concurs, in turn, because universalistic ethnic categories are produced mostly by actors socialized in environments where writing is feasible, and where it is possible for them to switch between oral and written codes. This point is important, especially in historically colonized social milieus where writing did not exist as a linguistic mode of expression before colonization. Written textuality may, thus, be an indicator of the past penetration of colonizers’ expressive codes or of the social distribution of school training in more recent times. Formalization in writing is also a road to the objectivation of universalistic ethnic categories: a method for making them permanent in time and extensible in space by means of documents and media. The prototypical ethnos of Class 1 elaborations, oral in essence, cannot compete in public discourses with the strength of written devices, and remain ephemeral, mute, and invisible.

In the autumn of 2001, I attended an international conference organized at Saami University College for assessing the progress of the officially implanted 10-year ‘Saami’ school program in Norway. On the last day of the conference, Ragnhild Nystad, representative of the National Association of the Saamis of Norway in the Saami Parliament, Vice-President of the Saami Parliament, and President of its educational board, addressed the audience, reading her talk titled ‘How should parents’ responsibility concerning the education and use of the Saami language at home be reinforced?’ This is a pattern of elaboration by means of which practices in the domestic sphere are understood to be a matter of ethnopolitical management. It is important to remark that this is not a case of trivial artificialism. In putting ‘Saami’ identification through language in first place, as an objective to be encouraged in linguistically ‘Norwegianized’ parents, Ragnhild Nystad was seeking to change their sensibilities. Her objective was to produce a re-attachment to the historically stigmatized Saami language in the parents, a re-attachment operated by displacing the aims of the ethnopolitical institution to the sphere of intimate subjectivity.

Discursive elaborations 4: Fully universalistic ethnos

A fully universalistic category is elaborated whenever ‘Saami’ ethnos characterizes a social subject (here, not necessarily a ‘we’) which is thematized with reference to a universalistic image of a people, and without concrete links to actors participating in the enunciation act.

In producing Class 3 elaborations, the actor addressing an audience to be reformed intends to promote the subordination of personal links and experience to a universalistic ethnos. In Class 4 elaborations, this subordination is taken for granted. Personal links and experiences in the communicative context are overlooked. Basically, discourse centres on reinforcing the ethnos as a categorical sign, interpretations of which project images of a wholly abstract population. These Class 4 elaborations are straightforwardly recognizable because they are constantly present in the media. In clear contrast with the ‘Saami’ prototype in Class 1 elaborations, Class 4 elaborations work on a crystal-clear categorical use of the ethnonym. Though fully universalistic categories are disembodied in semantic terms, they are also produced as a result of concrete socialization. An actor must have been socialized in embodied universalistic contexts to appreciate them, particularly in bureaucracies with their social milieus.

A multi-source model of ethnic and ethnopolitical structuration

The discursive elaborations I have presented are conventionalized forms of action (Díaz de Rada, 2011). Actors’ lines of reasoning with Class 2, 3 and 4 elaborations may be studied structurally by paying attention to the nature of the relational scheme between ethnic categories, as grammars of identity and alterity (Baumann and Gingrich, 2004). My emphasis here is not on structural grammars based on the assumption of a constituted categorical ethnos. To reduce ethnicity to a fixed or essential categorical identity is to leave out of analytic reflection the experience of actors who, committed to the interests of significant others in their concrete world, must give up the subtleties and embodiments of everyday life to adopt categorical, normally oppositional and exclusive idioms of social classification (Handelman, 1981; Herzfeld, 1992: 22ff.).

This renunciation does not slip past people who live in Guovdageaidnu and the other little towns in Sápmi. As a matter of fact, it constitutes one of the main paradoxes that goes with modernity for those who are most ethnopolitically involved. They aspire to preserve a world ordered through degrees of identification and belonging – one in which total exclusion and total inclusion are hardly possible – but must brandish expressive resources of oppositional categorical reification. That this paradox arises among the locally socialized can be illustrated by Gerd Baumann’s ‘Southalians’ in his Contesting Culture: ‘To be a socially competent Southalian is to know when best to reify and when best to relativize difference’ (1996: 132).

Discursive elaborations on ‘Saami’ ethnos are not rigidly bound to any specific type of actor, but always expressed in contexts of communication (Okamura, 1981; Eriksen, 1991) and relational ethnic spaces (Barth, 1969). Diverse actors produce them in a flexible but patterned way. I have organized my argument along a conceptual dimension that I consider essential to understanding this patterning: universalistic categorization in contexts of communication. In a context where it is pertinent to express significant relationships with his or her interlocutors, an actor will tend to produce Class 1 elaborations on the ‘Saami’ ethnos by means of a prototypological ordering of ethnic space. When context makes ignoring these relationships appropriate, the actor will tend to use his or her baggage of bureaucratic valuation and cognitive standards to produce a categorical ordering of ethnic space by means of Class 2, 3 and 4 elaborations. As this actor moves into Class 4 elaborations, ethnic categorization tends to be more universalistic, dichotomization between ethnic categories more feasible, and the relevance of ethnopolitical bureaucratic organizing more decisive to making discourse understandable.

All these discursive elaborations coexist today, as a repertoire of expressive resources of identification, so that an actor can use them, more or less pertinently, in diverse contexts of communication. This cultural repertoire (Carrithers, 2009) may not be exhaustive. Further analysis of empirical data should provide more elements. Specifically, this repertoire emerges from an ethnography of a ‘Saami’ ethnos. Of course, the same elaborations may not be valid in other ethnic fields. Nevertheless, I argue that the patterning and shifting from prototypical to different modes of categorical ordering of ethnic space can be useful for further comparative analysis.

Concluding remarks

People using words or other signs interpreted as ethnic in educational conferences, public dialogues, radio broadcasts, municipal addresses and ethnographic interviews, among other situations, are making ethnic substances, properties and relationships come alive (cf. Kockelman, 2007). As I have shown, the four classes of discursive elaborations form a complex repertoire in which every actor in Sápmi is relatively competent today. The complexity of ethnic dynamics lies in the fact that people who identify themselves – more or less – as ‘Saamis’ may shift competently, according to situation and moment, from prototypes (Class 1 elaborations) to categories (Classes 2, 3 or 4); and, within these, from universalistic ethnopolitical categories incarnated in local experience (Class 2) or categories subordinating personal links (Class 3), to fully universalistic ones (Class 4), and the other way around.

Although clearly defective as tools for complex interpretation (Kramvig, 1999, 2005; Gaski, 2000; Olsen, 2010), fully universalistic categories that find their historical sources in state politics and law, media and expert global forums are not today outside of the rest of the actors. This is so because such fully universalistic categories have become widely articulated through incarnations in local experience (Class 2) and also have become a matter of sentimental education from ethnopolitical agencies for the people who seek ‘Saami’ identification (Class 3). In this respect, even the most universalistic ‘indigenous’ sign may be made relevant to personal interests through its utility for the vindication of concrete rights in everyday life. These diverse universalistic signs have thus become embodied in biographical experience and concrete agency (Class 1).

The model I have proposed as emerging from this particular case in northern Norway and my theoretical treatment of semiosis, ethnic identifications and locality as a multi-scaled intersection of socialization and institutional logics are now open to generalization and comparative analysis. Many points deserve broader attention, but I would like to particularly emphasize two of them. The first is the imperative of the historical appraisal of ethnic processes. The turn toward history in anthropology, based on criticism of structural-functionalism’s atemporal constructions (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1990), is, of course, a classic source of inspiration. My contention is that, especially when exploring the structuring of ethnic fields, time constructions based on transactional materials coming from situated fieldwork become unintelligible when isolated from broader scales of temporality. Semiosis is, in these fields, particularly sensitive to objectifications of meaning with longer temporal trajectories, as John Ogbu argued regarding his concept of subordinated minority (Ogbu, 1974).

A further and, perhaps, deeper reason has to do with the projection of intersectional epistemology, which I have proposed in relation to local onto temporal constructions. This has important consequences in terms of the practical morality of our research and, thus, in terms of the relevance our own constructions may gain among concrete actors within ‘our’ fields (Fabian, 1983; Bourdieu, 1980). To reduce ‘their’ time and processes to reflect the short periods of ‘our’ presence among them is an implacable form of sociocentrism. Appearing methodological at first sight, it incorporates a whole episteme of subordination of ‘their’ historical struggles for legitimacy.

The second and last point I want to emphasize has to do with the analytic and moral criticism of categorical universalism objectified in bureaucratic and media constructions of ethnicity. We may insist, of course, that such constructions are misleading and inadequate; but, as I have mentioned before, an agency inside a bounded society that is impacted by external universalistic forces is today, and perhaps always has been, an essentialist fiction. It is not advisable to minimize the relevance of categorical universalism, discarding it as an external imposition, artificial device, or mere misleading conceptualization. This could lead us to ignore the paradoxical, and very often ironic, experience (Brown, 1999) of those who, although conscious of the discontents of oppositional categories, have grown up in a world where surviving without them becomes quite impossible. How can ethnic discourses be articulated in ways that evade the black-and-white, all-or-nothing, fully inclusive and fully exclusive operations of universalistic categorization and explore more-or-less reasoning and, hence, openness to negotiation, of ethnic meanings operated through prototypes? This practical question is, in turn, open to state, media, experts and ethnopolitical actors.