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Revoicing Sámi Narratives:
North Sámi Storytelling at the Turn of the 20th Century

By Coppélie Cocq. 2008. Umeå: Sámi Studies, Umeå University. 270 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7264-516-5 (soft cover).

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Reviewed by Aija Veldre Beldavs, Indiana University

[Review length: 1556 words • Review posted on November 5, 2008]


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Coppélie Cocq’s doctoral dissertation, Revoicing Sámi Narratives: North Sámi Storytelling at the Turn of the 20th Century, is an excellent study organized in three well-crafted parts. This book is suitable for students and colleagues in other fields with regards to the turn of folkloristics to dynamic models using contextual, intertextual, critical discourse, and performance approaches, and their application in actual practice to the analysis of texts. In her study of the relationship of storytellers, contexts, and collective genre tradition expressed as the coexistence of multiple voices, Cocq also confronts the consequences of the dominant research process of the early twentieth century with the goal of recovering voice and context lost by an approach focusing on classification of tale types and static culture interpretations.

Taking as a point of entry Norman Fairclough’s work on critical discourse analysis and the social study of narrative texts at the level of practice, Cocq utilizes Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Julia Kristeva’s concepts of intertextuality, heteroglossia, and polyphony to recover voice and conscious agency in the narrative strategies of four key informants foundational to classic Sámi narrative research. The folkloristic perspective adds to Fairclough’s three areas of analysis--texts, discursive practice, and social practice--interplay and reciprocity from the perspective of the storyteller, variously relating to tradition and prior texts.

In so doing Cocq also works within the receptionalist approach of Elizabeth Fine to restore performance or active participation to the emic audience or community, by projecting from current emic group values. At the radical extreme, as expressed by Lauri Honko in 1989, huge archival collections of texts are considered as hopelessly decontextualized, essentialized, and useless, even though they may be primary historical sources for indigenous groups. Cocq notes that the texts of the four informants from the same area of Guovdageaidnu at the beginning of the twentieth century are considered seminal and central to modern Sámi storytelling. Johan Turi (1854-1936) was the first Sámi to write about Sámi in the Sámi language in collaboration with the Danish artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant-Hatt, who met him in 1904. The importance to Sámi scholarship of Turi’s Muitalus Sámid birra (A Story About Sámi) and two other books is suggested by a colloquium celebrating Turi’s work and life held in Umeå, Sweden (2004) “Johan Turi: Indigenous Author, Indigenous Authority.” As Thomas A. DuBois has pointed out, the community continues to actively participate in its artistic construction of meaning.

The other three, Ellen Ucce, Isak Eira, and Per Baer, were the primary informants of Norwegian senior ethnographer Just Knud Qvigstad (1853-1957), whose editorial omnipresence overlays the polyphony of his informants. Distortions are the consequence of prioritizing professional etic over informant emic authority with resulting text normalization, such as probable gender bias and the imposition of context in the transformation from oral performance to publication to distort original emic genre. Their total of eighty narratives was published in Lappiske eventyr og sagn, Vol. 2, Troms og Finnmark (1928). To some degree entextualization and detextualization may be overcome by intertextuality, different source texts compared as context for each other, as well as considering text production and distribution. Comparison of the differences and similarities of the four informant texts shows the social practice of storytelling as expressions of social change.

While Russian scholar Mark Azadovskii in his A Siberian Tale Teller (1926) both contextualized narratives and emphasized narrator experience, such an approach did not become dominant until the contextual revolution beginning in the 1970s with such scholars as Dan Ben-Amos, Alan Dundes, and Richard Bauman. In Scandinavian studies Lauri Honko emphasized contextualization, organic variation, and scale approach, while Lotte Tarkka noted meaning to be relational rather than fixed. Cocq doesn’t mention the insights of Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales, but she makes excellent use of Charles Briggs’s and Richard Bauman’s concepts of genre as models of intertextuality and discourse production and as strategy used by the narrator who is now acknowledged as social agent rather than passive tradition bearer. The degree of responsibility and creative ownership is inversely related to Briggs’s and Bauman’s concept of distance in the “intertextual gap” as elicited by modality studies. Maximizing the gap is to explicitly assert individual personality and choice, while minimizing is to suppress explicit contextualization and emphasize collective genre pattern.

Following the theoretical and contextualizing introduction of Part I, Cocq demonstrates through texts in practice the intergeneric and dynamic feedback relationship between the strategy-employing individual artist and a responsive collective. In addition to a discussion of Qvigstad’s positionality and authority, Part II includes a close analysis of linguistic and rhetorical strategies of Turi’s texts utilizing the original Sámi, rather than the English translation based on the Danish. In Part III three chapters are also devoted to the subjective in storytelling, familiar to contemporary folklorists. In contrast to stories of Turi’s personal experiences as a hunter, the intertextual gap is minimized for what could be classified as animal myths, religious expression, or supernatural legends about ulda, the reputed source of both joik (song) and noiade (knowledge), originally prohibited by Christian authorities and shared by Turi only in subsequent work. Personal attitude is strongly revealed in Turi’s account of the radical Puritan religious Laestadian revolt in Guvdageaidnu in 1852, sections on swindling and reindeer theft by outsiders, alcoholism, and the satirical section on the “strange animals” of Sapmi who are the Sámi.

Two chapters in Part III are devoted to different functions important for the Sámi community at the turn of the last century, confronting the closing of national borders and consequential radical changes in northern Sámi social structure and belief systems. Laestadianism simultaneously had successfully penetrated Sámi mentality, combated rampant alcoholism, and also declared storytelling associated with noiade or shamanistic world views to be sinful. Cocq disagrees with Qvigstad’s exclusion of Laestadian settlements from fieldwork, noting that legends were in some cases adapted, rather than lost, to reflect changed religious views.

The normative function of storytelling is a guide to socialization, a source of information, and a warning of dangers to the community. The defensive function involves discourse of group solidarity, identity, and empowerment. It is within these functions that the narratives of the four key informants are interpreted as coming from different vantage points with the co-existence and intersection of different traditions about ambiguous or helpful fairies (ulda) and giants in contrast to cannibalistic ogres (stallu) and evil marauders (Tchudes) as portrayed in the Sámi Norvegian film Pathfinder (1987). The interpretive tradition concept of Thomas A. DuBois with a common generic axis is cited as a way for audiences to recognize even highly innovative performance as an aspect of tradition. Thus, Turi creatively adapted his narratives as socially significant to outsiders while also speaking to insiders.

Stories about dead-children (eahparash), changelings, and young women kidnapped by the underground otherworld or married to ulda are used as devices by the storyteller to take a personal position on normative attitudes for common concerns: dangers to unattended or unbaptized children, choice of marriage partner, relation to property, and respect for animals and all aspects of the environment on which the Sámi are dependent. Like fairies in other European traditions and attesting to ethnic contacts, ulda are associated with otherworld ancestors, a part of the extended community. Cocq shows how using indirect, non-agency language and setting stories in an ambiguous past by Baer, Utsi, and Eira, and by Turi, or an unwillingness to elaborate, is a way for storytellers to distance themselves from dangerous subjects; these techniques also reinforce taboos, such as bringing up narratives about living noaide shamans.

The Tchudes represent merciless outsiders who from the first millennium on have persecuted Sámi and in earlier times caused Sámi to hide underground to avoid slaughter. In more recent times, the Tchudes have usurped Sámi land, recasting Sámi as minorities; enforced assimilation policies; and destroyed the siida as a primary indigenous social organization and settlement pattern. As with stories about stallu, Sámi persevere not because of physical strength but because of cunning that overcomes the stronger, but more simple-minded enemy. Continuity with earlier narratives is achieved by recontextualization across multiple contexts. The cultural landscape of Sapmi, the Sámi homeland crossing Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia is diverse in language and social livelihood, so that even same-topic stories are displays of polyphonic heteroglossia and the ability to adjust to audience, sometimes with double meaning, especially if outsiders are present.

Cocq’s study as stated is limited to the northern reindeer-herding Sámi who have become emblematic of Sámi culture. Turi’s narratives are based on his own experience as a former reindeer-herding now wolf-hunting Sámi living within the national borders of Sweden. However, Cocq might have expanded her contextualization by noting that most Sámi are not, and for the longest period of Sámi history were not, nomadic large-scale reindeer hunters. Before the colonization of Sapmi, more Sámi were part of semi-nomadic forest or coastal cultures, while reindeer herders were smaller scale.

In addition to summaries in Swedish, Sámi, and French, included are highly informative original drawings by Turi of migration, autumn camp, a star map, and courting as well as photos of Turi, his tombstone, Qvigstad, Per Baer, and Ellen Utsi’s grandfather. A picture of a sieidi marker might have been included. Missing is contextualizing information about the author and her involvement in the subject. Concurrently Cocq has published “Polyphony in Sámi Narratives” in the Journal of Folklore Research 45 (2008) 193-228.