Myrdene Anderson

Reindeer and magic numbers

All parties to stereotyping negotiate and share somewhat overlapping yet contradictory models of themselves and of others. These models color anticipation, enactment, interpretation, and recollection of social behavior. Reindeer‐owning, entailing breeding, herding, and harvesting of the animals, is built into the consensual stereotype of the Saami, even though this occupation characterizes only ten percent of the population of this minority people. Yet virtually all Saami accept and manipulate the coin of reindeer when dealing with strangers, whether Saami or not. One could assert that a simple algorithm summarizes the inflation of herd‐size for owners and the invention of herd by non‐owners of reindeer.

The division of production, distribution and consumption in Saami society

The reindeer‐herding Saami, living in the Lapland regions of Sweden, Norway and Finland are an occupational minority within an ethnic one. In this article, the author demonstrates how for the Kautokeino Saami of Norway, the exigencies of contemporary housing, transportation and schooling preclude that the women invest as much time in supervisory herding and in husbandry decisions as was the case a generation ago. However, their rights to individual ownership of reindeer and influence in the management of the households total resources continue. Despite governmental efforts to transform reindeer herding into a meat‐producing industry integrated with the overarching cash economy, the inputs of women in some families permits it to remain a diversified subsistence economy.

My half-century saturated in semiotics: A spiralling confessional

Ordinarily, a confession would not be a reply to a request or even a response to an invitation; a classic confession precipitates from an inner compulsion. This essay is a confession, even though it was nudged into existence by Kalevi Kull, the “who”, inviting me, the “whom”, to write some nebulous “what”. There was a suggestion of “when” (yet deadlines fortunately never die), and an assumption that I would grasp the “how” and that the “where” would be irrelevant. Back to the “what”. “What” remains a humongous mystery, as does “why”; precisely, that is my first confession. Yet I picked up the dangled thread, by default exploring via narrative the fusion of semiotics with my very self. These tangled traces also qualify as confessions. Let me add that the human tool-toy of language has forced these signs of thought and speech and writing, into secondness. Sharing the thirdness weakened into secondness leaves behind the spatiotemporal-free firstness of potential, and the thirdness of habit, drawing on Peirce (cf. CP 1: 356). Consequently, to start, even with an unknown, I must defy the symmetry of ultimate potential. I’ll let Kull do this, with his suggested frame of “50 years”. Let’s round that out to a half-century and allow gravity to take over. A persisting habit of mine, of leaning forward more than reflecting back, turns out to characterize my whole life. Any process consumes me, while products, or consequences, seem inconsequential, inasmuch as I will have already moved on – figuratively if not actually – to something else. I’ve found various metaphors for this condition, admitting to being a gourmand without pretension of ever becoming a gourmet, a dedicated lumper sidestepping analytical splitting. By analogy, I have been a “goat”; with that pesky goat as a totem, I could browse high and low and all around, fuelled by curiosity, steeled for surprise. From that vantage point, I might consider some conspecifics as “sheep” – somewhat linear and predictable grazers.

Culture as Habit, Habit as Culture: Instinct, Habituescence, Addiction

We consider Charles Sanders Peirce’s insights regarding the dynamics he associated with the concept of habit, so that we might periscope into some realms he left under-explicit: first, culture itself, and then, addiction, the forms of which are necessarily relative to particular cultures at particular times. Peirce’s groundwork on habit includes deliberations on instinct, habituescence (the taking of habits), the habit of habit-taking, and the changing of habits, enabling us to think through individual habits that are both marked and unmarked (that is, noticed or not), and how these feed into contemporary cultural practices whether deemed to be innocuous or extreme. With respect to extreme habits, we use the term “addiction” as a suitable gloss for behaviors marked by actual or perceived dysfunction, regardless of any involvement of use or abuse of substances. Finally, we propose that Peirce’s reflections on habits (perhaps colored by his own habits-unto-addictions), and particularly his phanaeroscopy (phenomenology) of thirds—moving from vagueness to generality, from belief to doubt, from habit-taking to habit-breaking—suggest paths for exploring the debate surrounding the “reversibility” or “irreversibility” of addictions, including implications for self-control, and in turn, for our increasingly domesticated 21st-century society.

Preamble—Peircean Habit Explored: Before, During, After; and Beneath, Behind, Beyond

Charles Sanders Peirce, far more than any scholar in recent centuries in the West, devoted much of his productive life to probing the idea of and behavior of “habit”. In order to do so, he both narrowed and widened his focus on the notion. Otherwise an ordinary term in quotidian use in English, habit suggests regularity, usually pertaining to individual human behavior—but Peirce also focused on habit’s utility for understanding behavior beyond the human, and even processes beyond the organic world. In pursuit of refining and operationalizing habit, Peirce drew on any number of disciplines, close to and far from his expertise—these spanning from logic/philosophy, biology and psychology to theology and cosmology. Peirce’s foundational work on habit continues to be irresistible for contemporary humanities scholars, social scientists, scientists, and for practitioners beyond the academy diagnosing the ills of self and society, as Peirce’s oeuvre in its infra-dialectical form (frequently in fragmentary paragraphs), cannot be satisfactorily appreciated through any rear-view mirror. Rather, one might say that, in recognizing the habits behind habits and habit-change—whether confirming them through belief or challenging them through doubt—Peirce still invites us to permute, expand, contest, and refine his explorations of a century ago.

The quest for coordinates in space and time

Hall, Edward T. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1984. 250 pp. including appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Dialectics of intensivity and extensivity in saami reindeer management: A review article

15.95 cloth;

Circumpolar Religion and Ecology: An Anthropology of the North

5.50 paper. Pinxten, Rik, Ingrid van Dooren, and Frank Harvey. Anthropology of Space: Explorations into the Natural Philosophy and Semantics of the Navajo. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. xi + 240 pp. including appendices, bibliography, and name and subject indices.

From Predator to Pet: Social Relationships of the Saami Reindeer-Herding Dog

32.50 cloth.

Mobility and bilingualism in North Norway

Reindeer‐Herd Management in Transition: The Case of Tuorpon Saameby in Northern Sweden. Hugh Beach (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis/Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 3). Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1981. xix + 542 pp., fold‐out map, other maps, figures, charts, index.