Gro B. Ween

World Heritage and Indigenous rights: Norwegian examples.

This article approaches Indigenous concerns with World Heritage through the use of three Norwegian Sámi sites. The article argues the importance of approaching World Heritage as a process. A process, in this context, is a multi-sited, multi-dimensional coming into being. Exploring the ways in which World Heritage sites are brought into existence provides the opportunity for a closer view of exactly how Indigenous rights are relevant. The three Norwegian Sámi cases examined confirm the need to maintain two perspectives of the use of Indigenous rights. Firstly, Indigenous rights are useful as a post-colonial trope, making visible the cultural gaze of World Heritage institutions and processes. Secondly, heritage protection processes have a concrete impact upon the lives of a people. Significant themes in the course of such processes are opportunities of co-management; the continuation of cultural practices and opportunities for economic development. While Norway, internationally speaking, is recognised for its Indigenous rights initiatives, cases of heritage protection have indicated the existence of several severe blind spots in the Sámi rights implementation.

The Norwegian Trekking Association: Trekking as Constituting the Nation

Abstract This article takes a performative approach to understanding the significance of hiking practices in ‘wilderness’ landscapes. It examines the role of the Norwegian Trekking Association in nationalising hiking practices in Norway through the use of technologies of governance and by incorporating people into particular practices of movement. The paper thus shows how the Association was implicated in the production and continued re-production of anationalised landscape, and how the performance of route-making and route-following have prioritised certain kinds of activities, and hence certain kinds of people, over others.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

Doing is Learning: Analysis of an Unsuccessful Attempt to Adapt TEK/IK Methodology to Norwegian Sámi Circumstances

Abstract This article describes a case where an attempt was made to introduce TEK/IK into a conflict between Sámi reindeer owners and environmental institutions. The conflict was brought on by the establishment of a national park in Southern Sámi areas in Norway. At first, the Sámi were in favour of the park, but later on their attitudes changed as the content of planned national park developed. The reindeer owners discovered that the size of the park would be reduced, leaving out what they thought were significant areas in need of protection. They saw the encouragement of increased tourism activities as a threat to reindeer herding and felt alienated by the number of representatives they received in the park management structures. On the basis of these observations reindeer owners protested, but were ignored. As researchers well-established in the Southern Sámi area, we were brought into conversations regarding the park as the local reindeer owners searched for ways of bringing new arguments into the process. At this point we thought TEK/IK represented an opportunity to add weight to Sámi perspectives. As the title of this article indicates, as push came to shove we did not succeed in making room for local participation in our TEK/IK project, despite these existing on-going relations. The article attempts to understand what happened. Our analysis is based upon a perception of TEK/IK as not one, but at least two co-constituted knowledge practices. The premise is that research failures are as important to publish as successes. Our joint ethnographic experience has methodological implications for future TEK/IK research.