Landscape memory in Sami reindeer herding: System of Sami reindeer herders’ cultural knowledge in the Jávrrešduottar district in Northern Finland

Abstract

This review demonstrates how the theory landscape memory can be used in anthropological research within local communities. This case study analyzes how Sami reindeer herders gain and use their professional skills and reindeer terminology and how their skills develop into landscape memory. The case study is based on field work done in Jávrrešduottár, a Sami community in northern Finland. Landscape memory is at the core of the reindeer Sami cultural knowledge system and it includes a community’s history, language, values, livelihood patterns and cultural ways of perceiving the landscape. The study challenges the idea of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge as a suitable method for studying indigenous peoples and emphasises the local humanenvironmental relationship as a basis for understanding local culture. The study wants to raise into theoretical discussion the idea of landscape
memory as method for studying environmental relations. The study suggests, that although new technologies and vehicles have changed reindeer herding towards a more market oriented approach, the basic function of reindeer herding has stayed the same. Reindeer herding in the research area has maintained its cultural core within changing environmental, economic and
bureaucratic processes. For the future of reindeer herding it is important that herders see reindeer herding as a way of life.