Anthropological Perspectives and Political Agencies in International Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples: An Overview of the Case of Norway

International Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples as a Space for the Constitution of Nationalities and Ethnic Borders

International development cooperation [3] aimed at indigenous peoples can be understood as one of the contemporary spaces for the constitution of nationalities and ethnic borders, seen in turn as dynamic processes to which new elements are continually added. In the case under analysis, we can say that it was centrally involved in the inflection of the themes that made up the imagination of the Norwegian nation in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, opening up space for a new set of themes in the second half of the latter. In the first period, the Viking past, peasant folklore and the creation of the national language as key elements in the nation’s imagination could be highlighted, along with images of nature associated with the conquests of modern polar explorers and the constitution of the philanthropic and humanitarian traditions that asserted themselves after the First World War (Hylland Eriksen 1993, 1996).

The second period saw the emergence of new themes in this imagination, related to the ideology of development, human rights and multiculturalism, updated in the light of debates on indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the country. Within this period, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by the debate around the rights of the Sami people and the claim to their status as ’indigenous’ [4] (Paine 1991 ; Minde 2003). In the 1980s and 1990s, in turn, it was the presence of immigrants and political refugees that dominated the media and was established as an ’issue’ associated with the discussion of Norwegian national identity (Wikan 1999 ; Hylland Eriksen 2002) [5].

The development of Norwegian international cooperation has played a strategic role in defining these issues, in that it has brought the country’s internal agendas for indigenous peoples, immigrants and political refugees into dialogue with its external agendas, combining the themes of development and human rights in a rather peculiar way. Norway has specific historical conditions as a European country without a colonial past outside its borders, and has itself had an experience of political subordination [6]. This combination, and, at the same time, the presence of a minority population – that of the Sami – who obtained the status of indigenous people in the 1970s, had decisive consequences for the country’s involvement in the construction of international mechanisms for the recognition and defence of indigenous rights and, therefore, for the affirmation of ethnic identities beyond its national borders.

If we look at the issue of international cooperation with indigenous peoples in order to locate the set of agencies and actors involved in Norway with this universe, we come across a complexity and variety of perspectives and forces. This tends to question analyses that see it univocally, as a propagator of the same set of values and reproducer of a single cosmology – that of the hegemonic capitalist forces on the international stage. By looking relationally at the actors involved in Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples [7], it is possible to see it as a socially multidetermined phenomenon, dependent on the intersection of different bureaucratic, academic and political agencies, and implemented by a group of actors who are often in dispute (Oliveira 1988). In this sense, analysing the role of state bodies, multilateral organisations such as development banks and UN agencies, as well as transnational and local NGOs, becomes an important guiding principle for unravelling the agencies involved in this field. It can also shed new light on the studies of ethnicity that have favoured the analysis of these forces (Williams 1989 ; Souza Lima 1995 ; Barth 2000 ; Oliveira 2004 ; Barroso Hoffmann 2009, 2011).

The case of cooperation with indigenous peoples is particularly fertile for understanding that the apparatus of international cooperation has not only been linked to the construction of mechanisms for governing and managing populations, but has also lent itself to questioning these mechanisms and to proposals for their reformulation. Thus, although it is undeniable that analyses concerned with demystifying the benefits of development, the ethnocentric nature of its actions and the evolutionist perspective of its proposals are pertinent (Sachs 1999 ; Rist 1999), analysing Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples allows us to highlight another set of issues. In addition to the issue of the asymmetry of North/South relations and the denunciation of the ’failure’ of actions undertaken under the aegis of the development ideals, it is possible to see the formation of a varied set of transnational communities of interest that transcend these divides, with projects that do not always converge with mainstream proposals. The work of Norwegian and Sami anthropologists has been centrally involved in the debates and creation of these alternative paths within Norwegian cooperation, while at the same time being associated with the theoretical developments of the anthropological discipline in the country.

The Involvement of Norwegian Anthropologists in the Field of International Cooperation

Although the involvement of anthropologists in the field of international cooperation began in the 1950s in Norway, it was only in the second half of the 1980s that it intensified, when development studies departments grew in the country and the UN established a debate on the inclusion of the cultural dimension in development. In relation to the UN’s proposal [8], it was concerned with showing the plurality of points of view involved in the issue, drawing attention to the difficulty of defining the concept of ’culture’, and what ’culture’ they were talking about in the field of ’development assistance’ (Hylland Eriksen 1989). The interventions of anthropologists in this field have thus been associated, in the first place, with the exercise of relativising concepts and understanding their meanings in different contexts, starting with the relativisation of the concept of culture itself (Gray 1989 ; Melhuus 1989 ; Mlama1989 ; Klausen 1989). In this sense, instead of using the most common-sense views of ’culture’, such as equating it with the notion of ’cultivation’ or with ’Western’ forms of expressing this dimension, such as cinema, theatre, museums, etc., a need was identified to incorporate the perspectives of the target groups about this subject in all phases of the projects, from their conception to their evaluation (Klausen 1989) ; or to recognise the validity of different ways of knowing, abandoning the view of the superiority of ’donor’ knowledge over ’local’ knowledge (Melhuus 1989).

In the same vein, the need to implement the principle of ’assistance focused on the target populations’ own premises” (Gray 1989 : 75) was in line with principles similar to those formulated by Sol Tax in the 1950s, in the context of the ’anthropology of action’, i.e. the need for projects to meet the demands formulated by the target populations, rather than ’creating solutions’ to problems not perceived by them as such. In this context, the disastrous effects of technology transfer processes were denounced, whether due to the creation of dependency on ’donor’ countries, or simply due to the ecological, social or cultural inadequacy of the negotiated solutions. Criticism also drew attention to the fact that ’assistance’ clearly enriched certain groups, both in the ’donor’ and ’grantee’ countries, instead of favouring the ’most vulnerable’ groups in the latter. In this sense, contrary to what many analyses said, it was seen more as a pact between elites than as a space for the subalternisation of actors from the ’South’ by actors from the ’North’ (Mlama 1989 : 163).The plurality of points of view of those involved in the implementation of ’development assistance’ projects in Norway pointed out by anthropologists, on the other hand, questioned the construction of one-sided images of this terrain, offering instead a multifaceted portrait of its operators and analysts. In the case of projects aimed at educating local populations, for example, it has been shown that they have been analysed both as an instrument of liberation from colonialism (Dahl 1989 : 48), and as an element that introduces asymmetries between peoples with an oral tradition (Fuglesand 1989 : 30), or even as a necessary condition for the target populations of the ’assistance’ to be able to participate in an informed way in all its stages (Gray 1989 : 75).

In some cases, an attempt was made to share responsibility for the “failure” with the “grantees” of the development projects, also attributed to the fact that they had absorbed certain local sociocultural characteristics, such as the lack of organisational capacity and the ’culture of helping’ close relatives, which was pointed out as a continuous source of corruption (Hylland Eriksen 1989a : 62). There were also those who pointed out the contradictions inherent in the ’development’ proposal – defined as an ethnocentric project linked to maintaining or recreating colonial ties in new guises – summarised by the popular saying, often quoted in African countries : first raiders, then traders, now aiders (Kromberg 1989 : 177).

Thus, in the case of Norwegian anthropology, there was a tendency for the discipline to take on a reflexive role with regard to the presence of different perspectives and projects from the actors involved in the social situations they were analysing and intending to act upon. In the specific case of indigenous peoples, Andrew Gray, a British anthropologist on the staff of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs – IWGIA, an organisation of defence of indigenous rights largely funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation – Norad, argued that international cooperation could be seen as an option for underprivileged sections of the Third World population. It was presented as a channel of support for self-determination in the case of indigenous peoples, as it enables their independence from institutions such as the Church and the state, which were seen as sources of clientelistic and paternalistic relations, especially in the context of Latin America (Gray 1989 : 85) [9].

Norwegian Anthropology and the Sami

While the participation of Norwegian anthropologists in actions in the Third World was growing, their work with indigenous peoples was also building up, initially linked to a national debate on the situation of the Sami people in Norway, which began after the publication of a research carried out between 1948 and 1953 by Harald Eidheim on the Sami populations of the country’s northern coast. Its conclusions, presented in the country’s mainstream press in 1958, were a scathing indictment of the racism practised against the Sami, whose situation was studied by Eidheim using the theoretical contributions of the American sociologist Erving Goffman on the mechanisms of representation of the self in everyday life. The publication of this research had a profound impact on Norwegian public opinion, which at the time was obsessed with the ideals of social equality (likhet) promoted by social democracy. It led to an appeal to the Norwegian parliament and strengthened the Sami political demand movements that had begun to take shape in the 1950s (Klausen 2005 : 189).

In this context, it is worth remembering that Eidheim was one of the participants in the seminar organised by Fredrik Barth at the University of Bergen in 1967 on the constitution of ethnic groups (Barth 1969) and was responsible for one of the contributions on the Sami question discussed there (Eidheim 1969). On that occasion, drawing once again on the theoretical contributions of Erving Goffman, Eidheim described the mechanisms of masking Sami identity that indicated the condition of social stigma in which they lived. This was especially the case since the processes of modernisation of the northern region of Norway promoted during its post-war reconstruction with funds from the Marshall Plan, when drastic policies of assimilation of the Sami were implemented. Eidheim’s data was later confirmed by anthropologist Ivar Bjørklund’s (1985) studies of population dynamics on the north coast of Norway in the 1950s. According to Bjørklund’s research carried out in Kvænangen Fjord, a region traditionally occupied by the Sami, it was shown that the sudden ’disappearance’ of the Sami population, which went from 863 inhabitants recorded in the 1930 census to just five in the 1950 census, was not the result of any process of migration or the extermination of individuals during the war, but simply a change in the self-identification of the inhabitants ; they began to recognise themselves as Norwegians rather than Sami, in the course of an accelerated process of assimilation (Bjørklund 2000 : 15). The author describes this process as follows :

The [post-war] reconstruction meant that the Sami population became part of the wider national community in cultural terms as well. Norwegianisation implied ⎯ in both ideological and practical terms ⎯ that all Norwegian citizens were obliged to share the same cultural skills on which the reconstruction government bureaucracy relied, namely the Norwegian language, culture and identity. The 1950s and 1960s were marked by a belief in the growing prosperity associated with modernisation. A great national endeavour was set in motion, and any attempt to question the place of the Sami in Norway’s future seemed completely irrelevant. A society of equality was the order of the day ; there was no room for difference, whether economic or cultural. Issues relating to the Sami were only dealt with in the context of discussing topics such as ’poverty’, ’disease’, or ’illiteracy’, and preferably in relation to the reindeer herding population in the hinterland of Finnmark province. (Bjørklund 2000 : 15-16)

It is striking that the way the Norwegian government treated and conceived of the Sami in the 1950s was very similar to the way the government perceived and treated the Third World. The mechanisms put in place during that period, aimed at ’development assistance’, were also based on the idea that the Third World should ’modernise’ and ’progress’ in order to become equal to the First ⎯ in the same way that the Sami should become equal to the Norwegians ⎯ defining, among the issues to be ’solved’, the same ones perceived among the Sami, especially in the case of ’poverty’. It is no coincidence that the Sami mobilisations to assert their ethnic identity quickly took on an anti-colonialist perspective, running parallel to the African decolonisation movements and absorbing many of their ideals and perspectives [10]. In this context, it is worth highlighting the fact that, although Norway did not have a colonial past linked to the formation of overseas empires, the experience of internal colonialism practised by the Norwegians on the Sami was a formative event in many ways, not only in the experience of conceiving of an ’other’ as inferior and subaltern and therefore in need of ’help’, but also in the experience of creating mechanisms to deal with it.

In the following decades, the stance of Norwegian anthropologists shifted from denunciation to direct involvement in the struggles in favour of Sami rights, playing a strategic role in the transition from their definition as an ethnic minority to their self-conception as an indigenous people. The anthropologists’ new stance was related to the emergence of what has been called socially relevant anthropology in Norway, which arose from the involvement of anthropologists and other social scientists in projects aimed at the populations of the northern region of the country, including the Sami, formulated from research carried out at the University of Tromsø (Bjørklund 2005).

The work of anthropologists on issues related to the Sami’s clashes with the Norwegian government has led to a type of specialised consultancy, such as the studies by Ivar Bjørklund and Terje Bratenberg on the reindeer herders’ transhumance system in the province of Finnmark. These studies, published in the early 1980s, made it possible to challenge the reports presented by the Norwegian government on the number of reindeer that would be affected by the construction of the Alta hydroelectric dam. The conclusions of the authors, who had the collaboration of Harald Eidheim, although not enough to prevent the project from going ahead, forced the Norwegian government to admit the error of the impact studies carried out by agricultural technicians and to negotiate a series of compensatory measures with the Sami, which, among other things, included the creation of the Sami Parliament (Bjørklund 2005).

In this context, it is worth highlighting the problems faced by Harald Eidheim in publishing a collection of articles on the Alta episode in the Tromsø Museum’s Ottar magazine, on the grounds, according to the magazine’s editors, that the subject had to do only with ’politics’ and not ’science’ (Bjørklund 2005). The publication of the collection, finally released in 1981 under the title Altasak - Samesak - Urbefolkningssak (The problem of Alta : a Sami problem, an indigenous problem), thus marked an important turning point in what Sami historian Henry Minde described as the passage of the Sami question from the field of ethnography to the field of history (Minde 2000 : 31) – something that, significantly, in the case of Norway, took place with the help of anthropologists. It is thus worth emphasising once again the contribution of Barth’s theoretical formulations to this transformation, since it was they who, by focussing studies on ethnic groups on the constitution of their borders, guaranteed the ’scientific’ legitimacy of studies on the contemporary political processes of affirming the ethnic identity of the Sami within Norwegian society.

In the following decades, this legitimacy was consolidated with the work of anthropologists hired by the Tromsø Museum, under the direction of Harald Eidheim, to recreate the museum’s exhibitions dedicated to the Sami. These exhibitions no longer showed the Sami only as ’noble savages’, that is, as an exotic population crystallised in time, about whom only objects of material culture were displayed, but also the history of the people’s political struggles. According to Bjørklund, the negotiations between the anthropologists and the museologists at the institution were fundamental to this, allowing the latter to ’[...] become accustomed to a processual approach to culture, in which it is seen not as something that is, but as something that happens’ (Bjørklund 2005 : 227, transl. from the original in Norwegian).

Norwegian Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples

The involvement of Norwegian anthropologists with indigenous questions was related not only to the internal struggles of the Sami, but also to the internationalisation of these questions, which was one of its developments. Another participant in the Bergen Seminar organised by Fredrik Barth in 1967, Norwegian anthropologist Helge Kleivan, a researcher of the Inuit in Greenland, played a key role in these developments, together with Swedish ethnographer Lars Persson, when they founded the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs – IWGIA, in 1968. The creation of the IWGIA, whose funding initially depended on resources from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation – Norad and the Danish International Development Agency – DANIDA, marked a new type of relationship between anthropologists and the world of development cooperation. We could consider this to be marked by a counter-cultural bias, in the sense that the work proposed by the organisation did not endorse the ’developmentalist’ assumptions of the mainstream development agencies involved in this field.

The creation of the IWGIA took place in the context of denunciations of the genocide of South America’s indigenous peoples, largely as a result of development projects undertaken by authoritarian governments with funds from multilateral banks. The late 1960s and early 1970s were marked by the emergence of a broad anthropological literature aimed at denouncing the consequences of these projects, concomitant with the formation of an international network of anthropologists committed to defending indigenous rights. The IWGIA was one of the forerunners, along with other organisations created at the same time, such as Survival International in England in 1969, Cultural Survival in the United States and Amazind in Switzerland, both in 1972.

It is worth noting that, in the same way as with the Sami, anthropologists moved from an initial position of denunciation to one of active involvement in indigenous mobilisations aimed at building arguments in favour of their rights within national states. These rights were signed at successive international meetings, conferences and seminars, many of which, following the model inaugurated at the Chicago Conference by Sol Tax in 1961, brought indigenous and non-indigenous actors face to face in dialogue. Among these meetings was the Symposium on Interethnic Contact in South America, organised by anthropologists from the Department of Ethnology at the University of Bern (Switzerland) with funding from the World Council of Churches’ Programme to Combat Racism. In it, anthropologists from various parts of the world involved in denouncing the threats to indigenous peoples in South America produced the First Barbados Declaration. This document established the principle of supporting the autonomy of indigenous peoples that would, in the following decades, guide much of the mobilisation of anthropologists, church members and jurists committed to defending indigenous rights : ’Indians must organize and lead their own liberation movement otherwise it ceases to be liberating’ (Barbados Declaration 1971 apud Dostal 1972:381). In the Declaration – which sought to define the responsibilities of states, religious missions and anthropologists in relation to indigenous peoples – it can be noted, in the case of anthropologists, a clear stance in favour of advice committed not to government authorities, but to the Indians, who were no longer seen as objects of study, but as subjects of political action. Anthropology should dialogue and cooperate with them. Thus, in one of the excerpts from the declaration, it is stated that :

The anthropology now required in Latin America is not that which relates to Indians as objects of study, but rather that which perceives the colonial situation and commits itself to the struggle for liberation. In this context we see anthropology providing the colonised peoples with the data and interpretations both about themselves and their colonisers useful for their own fight for freedom and re-defining the distorted image of Indian communities current in the national society, thereby unmasking its colonial nature with its underlying ideology (Declaration of Barbados 1971 apud Dostal : 380).

This clearly outlined an anti-authoritarian perspective in relation to indigenous peoples, followed by the recommendations directed at religious missions in the document. It concluded that the suspension of all missionary activity was the best policy to be followed for the good of indigenous societies and the ’moral integrity of the churches involved’. In particular, it recommended the suspension of the ’dispute for souls’ between religious groups and confessions, the suppression of the secular practices of separating indigenous children from their families to educate them in orphanages, the abandonment of the offer of goods and services to the Indians in exchange for their submission, the end of the practices of displacing populations for the purposes of evangelisation or assimilation, and the suspension of the criminal practices of intermediating the exploitation of indigenous labour (Barbados Declaration 1971 apud Dostal 1972 : 378-379).

The responsibilities attributed to the state in the Declaration of Barbados also represented a turnaround from the assimilationist policies practised until then by Latin American states, placing the following items among the obligations of national states : guaranteeing all indigenous populations the right to remain indigenous and to live according to their morals and customs ; recognising that indigenous groups had rights prior to those of other national groups, guaranteeing their right to land ; and giving Indians the prerogative to organise and govern themselves according to their traditions. This policy should not exclude Indians from the full exercise of citizenship, guaranteeing them the right to enjoy the services offered to the rest of the population, such as economic, social, health and education assistance, but at the same time freeing them from committing themselves to obligations that they felt would affect their cultural integrity, and protecting them from exploitation by other sectors of national society (Barbados Declaration 1971 apud Dostal 1972 : 377).

This set of affirmations contained in the First Declaration of Barbados marked the spread, at international level, of a counter-cultural current in relation to the mainstream development apparatus, formulating an anti-authoritarian perspective, understood as synonymous with an anti-colonial stance. It simultaneously repudiated the colonialist relations of subordination of indigenous peoples within the borders of national states and claimed the right of these peoples not to submit to the canons of development. However, it is worth noting that, due to a contradictory dynamic that marked the entire scenario of indigenous political struggles from then on, these currents became one of the faces of the development apparatus, since many of the indigenous organisations and organisations that supported the Indians, created by anthropologists, religious and indigenous leaders, would obtain their resources, albeit not exclusively, from this apparatus.

The First Declaration of Barbados thus constituted a strategic starting point for the transnational articulation of indigenous and non-indigenous actors in favour of indigenous rights. In the following decades, it gave rise to a long series of conceptual formulations in the fields of anthropology and law, aimed at responding to the various concrete contexts of political struggle involving indigenous peoples. Among these concepts were those aimed at defining the position of indigenous peoples in the space of national states, such as ’first nations’, or on the international stage, ’Fourth World’. Concepts have also emerged aimed at particularising indigenous demands in various social fields, such as ’ethnodevelopment’ – coined in the 1980s to define actions based on decisions taken by indigenous people themselves within their territories – or ’interculturality’, aimed at obtaining specific rights for indigenous people in the field of education, the use of which became widespread in the 1990s.

In the case of Norway, the currents linked to the international pro-indigenous movement took shelter first within the IWGIA in the case of anthropologists, an organisation with a global reach, and then successively within the Norwegian Programme for Indigenous Peoples – NPIP, whose area of activity was concentrated in Latin America ; the Rainforest Foundation Norway, an environmental organisation working with indigenous peoples, initially focused on the rainforest regions of Brazil, which later extended its activities to Oceania, Asia and Africa ; and the Remote Area Development Programme – RADP, a development programme implemented by Norad in Botswana aimed at the San people.

In the case of church members, the new pro-Indian stances would be taken up by Norwegian Church Aid – NCA, a Lutheran-based humanitarian organisation with close ties to the World Council of Churches, whose work on the indigenous issues, concentrated mainly in Africa and Latin America, would represent an important divide in relation to Norwegian missionary organisations, which did not adhere to the principles of the Barbados Declaration. Finally, in the case of the Sami, the pro-Indian mobilisations at international level were channelled by the Sami Council, at first, and later also by the Sami Parliament, which was notably active in UN forums and with indigenous organisations and universities and research centres focused on indigenous issues in Latin America and Africa.

Norwegian International Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples as a Space for Producing Knowledge on Public Policies, Political Activism and Anthropological Theory

The work of Norwegian anthropologists, made possible by their participation in programmes and organisations funded by Norwegian international cooperation, included the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs – IWGIA, the Norwegian Programme for Indigenous Peoples – NPIP, the Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples and the Remote Area Development Programme – RADP. These experiences have led to an examination of the relationship between the fields of ’theory’ and ’practice’ in Norwegian anthropology in the context of debates on the indigenous issues. Questions and dilemmas arose from a reflective dimension through which, in analysing their own activities, Norwegian anthropologists made explicit their perceptions of the role and limits of international cooperation with indigenous peoples. This was reflected, above all, in the discussions about the relations between these peoples, the national states where they are located and international cooperation bodies, in other words, about the links between local, national and international bodies involved in the indigenous issues. In this way, international cooperation can be understood as a space for the simultaneous production of knowledge on public policies, political activism and anthropological theory.

The Debate over the Use of the Category ’Indigenous’ among Anthropologists Involved in International Pro-Indian Activism

At the same time as this movement of reflection on the dynamics of pro-Indian mobilisations was taking shape, combining multi-local instances and the possibilities for dialogue between them, another community of argument was forming, composing an internal debate within the anthropological discipline, linked to the use of the concept of ’indigenous’ by anthropologists involved in international pro-Indian activism. The debate, which brought anthropologists of various nationalities face to face from the mid-1990s onwards, including Norwegians, represented by Sidsel Saugestad (2004), peaked with the publication in 2003 of an article by South African anthropologist Adam Kuper (2003) in the journal Current Anthropology, entitled ’The Return of the Native’, and spread to the pages of other specialised journals in the following years [22]. This debate can thus be read as an expression of the disputes between anthropologists in relation to pro-Indian political activism, based on a theoretical discussion about the use of the category ’indigenous’. What is striking in this case is that we are once again faced with an example of the inter-influence of the fields of ’theory’ and ’practice’ in anthropology.

Kuper, who was one of the theorists who contributed to the deconstruction of the term ’primitive’ in the discipline, tracing the history of the ’invention of the primitive’ (Kuper 1988), used the same line of reasoning against those who worked in the international pro-Indian movement using the category ’indigenous’. However, by equating the use of the category ’primitive’ with the use of the category ’indigenous’, Kuper depoliticised the issue, decontextualising their differential uses, the former associated with European projects of colonial domination and the latter with contemporary struggles against the post-colonial effects of colonialism. By granting the same theoretical status to both categories, Kuper equated the demands supported by the international pro-Indian movement with the demands of representatives of apartheid policies, ignoring – as pointed out by Brazilian anthropologist Alcida Ramos in the debate in the pages of the journal Current Anthropology – elementary issues of power differentials :

To put indigenous demands for legitimate difference, Nazi racism and South African apartheid in the same category is to miss the point of power differentials. In other words, to put Western powers of conquest on an equal footing with ethnic demands for recognition is either to ignore or to minimise the violence of Western expansion (Ramos 2003 : 327).

The ’technification’ of the theoretical debate suggested by Kuper has added very little in terms of understanding the political clashes at stake, as it has attempted to ignore them, as if they were not part of the game of using concepts. Anthropologists such as Fredrik Barth have produced a theoretical tool that has made it possible to understand the political dynamics of ethnic phenomena, as well as to perceive essentialisations as political mechanisms that are part of the processes of constructing ethnic boundaries (Barth 1969 and 2000). Kuper, meanwhile, has contributed in the opposite direction, pointing to theoretical aspects that plaster over the issues and are incapable of explaining the dynamic nature of the political disputes surrounding categorisations or, more importantly, the fact that categorisations are in themselves political acts.

Kuper’s ’denunciation’ of anthropologists working with the international indigenous movement, accusing them of practising ’old’ anthropology and rehabilitating the ’primitive societies’ of classical anthropological discourse, lumping together, without contextualising, the use of terms such as ’indigenous’, ’primitive’, ’tribal’, ’hunter’, ’nomadic people’ and the like, would itself be tainted by an ’old’ conception of political phenomena.

In the episode of the debate raised by Kuper, the ’indigenous question’ emerges as an arena for the construction of boundaries between anthropologists themselves, marking positions ’inside’ and ’outside’ academia, public administration and political activism ; between those who study the ’global’ and those who study the ’local’ ; between those who research ’culture’ and those who research ’politics’ ; between those who study the ’State’ and those who study ’society’ etc. All of these rather artificial differentiations are much more linked to mechanisms of distinction within the profession itself than to a real isolation between these domains, so that studying the indigenous question forces anthropologists to reflect on their own worlds, and to include themselves in a portrait of which they sometimes, inexplicably, place themselves outside.

The motivations of anthropologists for getting involved in work with indigenous peoples would merit a study in itself, which is not, however, within the scope of this text. However, some clues in this direction can be found in some of their testimonies, in which it is possible to detect at least two major and important lines of motivation : the first is linked to a moral feeling of correcting injustices, extremely well represented in this testimony by Sol Tax ⎯ one of the anthropologists who first became involved with the defence of indigenous rights to self-determination ⎯ about his relationship with the Indians :

Several Indians [...] offered me their friendship and I reciprocated. But is that enough to explain almost 60 years of trying to be useful [to them] ? There is pleasure and satisfaction in any opportunity to help a friend and, since childhood, I have sought out these opportunities. I felt a combination of emotions of anger and injustice ⎯ the wrong classmate being punished, the child being beaten up by the bully. But I grew to realise that, while it was individual acts of injustice that sparked anger and dismay in me, it was social injustice that struck deepest in my heart, producing lasting resentment. I was thus able to understand perfectly the Indians’ accounts of their feelings of loss (Tax 1988 : 15).

This line can undoubtedly be linked to the feeling of indignation against the genocide committed against indigenous peoples that led to the creation of numerous international pro-indigenous organisations from the 1960s onwards, including the IWGIA. A variant that is not so closely related to this, and which we have identified as a second line of motivations, is that related to the presence of a certain utopian thinking among anthropologists, including Alan Barnard, an expert on the San. He even compares the contemporary phenomenon of NGOs to the possibility of reviving the feeling of collective solidarity experienced by that group, in turn associated with the anarchist utopias of stateless societies (Barnard 2003).

In fact, the ideal of removing peoples and groups from state control, from the perspective of keeping them within communitarian societies where there is no presence of private property and where there is no centralised political authority, is also part of some currents in the indigenous movement, whose leaders have spoken out in favour of recognising not just indigenous peoples, but indigenous nations. Undoubtedly, less ’noble’ motivations, linked to interests and calculations of career and prestige and the mere chance of obtaining opportunities to enter the profession of anthropologist – whether in the academic field or in the growing labour market opened up in governmental and non-governmental bodies focused on indigenous issues – are also part of the game of possibilities that explains the transformation of anthropologists into ’interethnic mediators’, with greater or lesser legitimacy with indigenous peoples and their leaders.

Once again, the theoretical elaborations of Norwegian anthropologists are of use, allowing us to conceive the relationships that are established between Indian and non-Indian mediators in the international pro-Indian movement as another space for the construction of the ethnic frontier (Barth 1969). In this space there is also room for the processes of ’complementarisation’ and ’dichotomisation’ described by Norwegian anthropologist Harald Eidheim, in which collaborative relationships between different ethnic groups aimed at achieving common goals are accompanied by markings of distinction, in which the interest in highlighting differences in position and identity between individuals becomes clear (Eidheim 1971).

On the other hand, it is also worth remembering that actors who until recently were seen as ’others’ within the anthropological discipline, such as the indigenous peoples themselves and missionaries, to cite two examples, have increasingly appropriated the discipline’s instruments and formed a large part of its cadres within it. Missionaries have been important sources of feelings and attitudes linked to the involvement of Norwegian international cooperation actors with indigenous peoples, even though, as already pointed out, they have become the great ’other’ among these actors. This does not mean, however, that many of the values linked to their work ⎯ such as ’help for self-help’, valuing practical measures rather than doctrinal preaching, and ’education by example’ ⎯ are not part of the repertoire of other Norwegian actors.

In this sense, it is worth remembering that the work of missionaries in Norway has been considered by some to be the main factor in the country’s national unity from the 19th century onwards, by connecting countless isolated communities with their preaching activities, as well as having permeated a large part of individual values and attitudes, not only of the Norwegians, but also of the Sami. To give an idea of the extent of Christian influence among them even today, it is worth noting that the Centre for Sami Studies at the University of Tromsø has a translator of the Bible into Sami. It should be emphasised that Christianity, under the aegis of the Læstadian current, which emerged in the mid-19th century and is linked to the idea of building a ’proper Sami Christianity’, is something that forms a central part of the ethnic identity of many among the Sami people, even serving to identify them in some regions of Norway.

The International Actions of the Sami in the Field of Indigenous Rights and in the Development Apparatus : the Debate between ’Solidarity’ and ’Self-Interest’

In the case of the Sami, it should be emphasised that all undertakings linked to the field of affirming indigenous rights at international level are considered to be part of their ’international cooperation’ activities, something I was able to deduce from interviews and exchanges of correspondence with Sami leaders [23]. They thus point to the particularities that the indigenous presence, under the aegis of ethnic identity affirmation movements and the construction of national and international mechanisms for political representation, has introduced into the more general debates on ’development cooperation’, considerably broadening the scope originally envisaged for its work, aimed at promoting economic development in ’Third World’ countries.

What is striking in this context is the debate between ’solidarity’ and ’self-interest’ in the early days of the Sami’s accession to the international indigenous movement, reproducing the discussions that took place in the context of Norwegian international cooperation in general. It is worth pointing out that, unlike what happened in the non-indigenous spaces associated with the universe of Norwegian cooperation, the term used by the Sami from their first connections with the international indigenous movement was samarbeid, which literally means ’cooperation’ or ’mutual help’ in Norwegian. The contrast is significant in relation to the other sectors of the Norwegian cooperation universe, which, at least until the 1990s, exclusively used the terms hjelp (aid) or bistand (assistance) to describe their relations with the ’grantees’. The term samarbeid only came into use when attempts were made, following the trends of the international development establishment from the 1990s onwards, to give a more egalitarian content to relations between ’donors’ and ’grantees’, which nevertheless maintained an asymmetrical and often subalternising bias.

Solidarity has been an important value both in the Sami’s actions in support of the international indigenous movement from the 1970s onwards, and in the Norwegian government’s actions aimed at the ’Third World’ from the 1950s onwards. Yet the former have always been seen as actions of ’cooperation’ because they involve a dimension associated with the common struggle for the conquest of rights by marginalised groups within their respective national states, thus allowing for the formation of a shared feeling of symmetry, forged from the construction of a joint political project. On the other hand, the solidarity expressed by the Norwegian government in its actions of ’aid’ to the Third World – with its genesis marked by the ’great divide’ established by Harry Truman’s speech in 1949, which placed ’poor’ and ’rich’, ’underdeveloped’ and ’developed’ countries on different sides – ended up establishing not a feeling of identification, as in the case of the indigenous peoples, but of contrast between the two groups.

As analysed by Norwegian historian Terje Tvedt, this second type of solidarity was actually based on a feeling of ’altruism’, in which it was assumed that one was acting only for the ’good of the other’. In this context, Tvedt highlights the fact that development cooperation actions have always been publicly presented under an aura of ’goodness’, which was the main self-representation of the Norwegian cooperation system (Tvedt 1998:2003). However, while the stated aim of the latter was linked to the ’good feelings’ of a group engaged in ’giving’ to others, what was actually at stake, according to this author, was the construction of a political project that established tutelary perspectives and was based on asymmetrical positions of power.

It is in this context that the demands expressed by the Sami in the early 2000s for an increase in the channelling of resources from Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples to Sami people’s organisations can be placed, according to what they defined as urfolk til urfolk samarbeid, i.e. cooperation from-indigenous-people-to-indigenous-people. According to a speech by Sami Council representative Half Halonen at the first meeting of the Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples, held in 2000 at the University of Tromsø, this type of cooperation allowed for the implementation of more symmetrical relations in the world of cooperation with indigenous peoples. It was highlighted that the Sami Council, unlike other actors involved in Norwegian cooperation, had never taken the initiative to propose projects, always waiting to be expressly consulted by indigenous organisations before getting involved in any kind of collaboration (Senter for Samiske Studier 2000:18).

According to Halonen, the Sami Council’s first cooperation initiatives began in the 1970s, during the civil war in Guatemala, when the organisation implemented agricultural development projects among groups of Mayan refugees with funds from Norad, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swedish International Development Agency – SIDA. He complained, however, that over time it became increasingly difficult to obtain funds from Norad, attributing this to the latter’s belief in the Sami’s supposed involvement in financing the guerrilla war in Guatemala, which was always denied by their organisations.

Regardless of these accusations, Halonen considered it difficult in general to obtain resources from the Norwegian agency, both as an indigenous organisation and for cooperation with indigenous peoples, calling for Norad to change their stance on this issue. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Sami Council had projects in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Panama and Tanzania (idem). With the restructuring of Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples in the 2000s, these demands were partly met, with the Sami Council being given resources to work with the San people and the organisation the First People of Kalahari – FPK, in Botswana. The Sami also obtained support to help structure a pan-African indigenous organisation, the Organisation for Indigenous People of Africa – OIPA, based in Tanzania.

The actions in the field of international cooperation promoted by the Sami with funds from the Norwegian government are not, however, limited to the field of law or development, but also extend to initiatives aimed at training international indigenous leaders and producing knowledge on indigenous issues. These activities are combined in numerous international agreements in the area of higher education, supported with funds from The Norwegian Programme for Development, Research and Education – NUFU (Nasjonalutvalg for utviklingsrelatert forskning og utdanning), administered by Norad, with the participation of Sami intellectuals from various academic areas, from Sami and Norwegian universities and research institutions [24].

The Debate on the Sami’s Demand for an Increase in Norad Resources for Indigenous-People-to-Indigenous-People Cooperation

The increase in resources for indigenous-to-indigenous cooperation (urfolk til urfolk samarbeid) demanded by the Sami was the subject of several challenges from non-indigenous actors linked to Norwegian cooperation. Arguments that disqualified this demand on the grounds that representatives of the Sami elite would have as little identification with poor Indians in Latin America as someone from the Norwegian elite were prominent. This type of objection was made clear, for example, by Indra Øverland, a Norwegian researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs – NUPI, who has participated in consultancies and evaluations on Norwegian international cooperation with indigenous peoples. Thus, according to Øverland’s talk at the Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples in 2002, it would be possible to distinguish between two basic positions in cooperation with indigenous peoples : one he called ’populist’ and the other ’technocratic’. In his view, both face problems in implementing actions aimed at strengthening the institutions of indigenous peoples and promoting their rights. Øverland, who associated the Sami organisations with a populist stance, commented (according to the summary of his talk in the proceedings of that event) that

[...] it is not obvious that the educated and politicised elite of the indigenous peoples in rich countries would have very much in common with the indigenous recipients in partner countries. [...] this elite might be very different from other indigenous people at home. Indigenous-to-indigenous aid is closely related to a modern global indigenous ideology, emphasising the similarities between different groups that are marginalised in very different contexts. [...] [Thus,] one cannot automatically assume that the experience of marginalisation in one context makes it easier to communicate or work with peoples living in another marginalised context. An indigenous person from a rich country, with high wages, skills in English and Spanish, nice clothes and a Visa card travelling to Latin America is in a very different position from his or her local counterpart [in the grantee countries]. The Sami and other indigenous peoples with ’Western’ features may also be categorised very different from other indigenous peoples in many Latin American settings. (Center for Sami Studies 2002 : 13)

Øverland’s speech points to problems already identified by members of the Sami elite themselves (cf. Hætta 2000) and observed throughout the circuit of international cooperation with indigenous peoples, in the context of the transition from ’charisma to routine’ and the ’professionalisation of NGOs’ analysed by various researchers of indigenism in Brazil (Barroso Hoffmann 2009). It draws attention to other aspects that I believe deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, it gives us a good idea of the representations about indigenous peoples that circulate in the world of international cooperation, including the idea that indigenous intellectual elites with a good economic situation are a phenomenon restricted to ’rich’ countries, thus reproducing old stereotypes in which ’donors’ are always associated with ’wealth’ and ’grantees’ with ’poverty’. A brief contact with the reality of the indigenous intellectual elites in Brazil, for example, a country emblematic of the work done by Norwegians with indigenous peoples, would be enough to dispel this type of inference, showing that indigenous people in a good economic situation are not a privilege of the ’donor’ countries.

In addition, Øverland’s speech also warns of the difficulty of accepting the fact that indigenous peoples, just like any other political communities, depend on the formation of elites to address their demands within the national states in which they live. It is worth noting here the feeling that we are once again faced with a prejudiced view in which obtaining an education along the lines of other groups in the population, or reaching economic levels on a par with them, is something that somehow makes Indians ’less Indian’. This effectively denies the existence of a differentiated experience between those who belong to an ethnic minority and those who do not, regardless of the standard of living they enjoy, and the different ways of relating to the minority situation that these positions imply.

The desire to cooperate with other indigenous peoples is not unanimous among the Sami, nor is being Sami something that leads someone inexorably to want to publicly assume a collective identity that is different from the rest of the population, or even to consider themselves an ’indigenous people’. All of these attitudes involve, first and foremost, the political dimension of ethnic phenomena, so well identified by Norwegian anthropology, whose genesis and developments, particularly in relation to indigenous issues, we will examine below.

If it can be said that in the case of the Sami, participating in mechanisms linked to international cooperation – whether in the field of rights or development – was directly related to their contemporary mechanisms of social reproduction, the construction of ethnic boundaries and the production of new forms of political representation, in the case of anthropologists, involvement with cooperation was marked by very different injunctions. Among them, as we shall see are prominent mechanisms for the autonomisation of the anthropological discipline and issues linked to the political engagement of anthropologists and their involvement with ’practice’, as well as theoretical developments involving both the analysis of ethnic phenomena in general and the constitution of the category ’indigenous’ as an instrument of the struggle for political rights.

In Search of a Reflexive Stance on the Production of Indigenous Knowledge : the Case of Sami Anthropologists

The debates unleashed in the mid-1990s by Sami anthropologists trained at the University of Tromsø, which took over the pages of Norway’s leading anthropology journal, the Norsk Antropologisk Tidskrift (cf. Hovland 1996 ; Stordahl 1996 ; Thuen 1996), are a good example of what I am describing as a ’reflective tradition’ within the university. I refer to the meaning of these debates as a reflection on the political practices of the Sami and, in particular, on the process of ’taking over’ university and academic spaces by their intellectuals, which started with the creation of the Nordic Sami Institute – NSI, in 1974, in the city of Kautokeino. Since that time, it had already become clear to many Sami intellectuals that achieving the position of producers of knowledge about themselves was a central issue for advancing the struggles in defence of their rights within the Norwegian state. This perspective is explained as follows by Vigdis Stordhal, one of the Sami anthropologists involved in the debates in the journal :

The possibilities for the peoples of the Fourth World to take control of the field of knowledge rest on being able to establish their own knowledge institutions and to achieve a dialogical position, both from an organisational and academic point of view, in relation to the bodies and institutions of the majority society. (Stordahl 1996 : 177, transl. from the original in Norwegian)

Despite this favourable view of the constitution of academic spaces controlled by the Sami as described by Stordahl, the Sami intellectuals linked to the creation of the Nordic Sami Institute – NSI did not initially oppose the creation of a Sami studies area run by Norwegian researchers. This took place within the Institute of Anthropology at the newly created University of Tromsø – UiT, established shortly before the NSI in 1972, with the prospect of becoming a regionally orientated institution focused on solving the problems of the populations living in northern Norway, including the Sami [25].

The founders of the NSI were initially positive about the prospect of maintaining relations with Norwegian higher education institutions, especially those with an influence on the development of regions inhabited by the Sami, as was the case with the UiT. Before long, however, discourse began among NSI intellectuals questioning who should have the right of ownership and definition over research among the Sami. These questions eventually led to the dissolution of the Sami studies area at the UiT’s Institute of Anthropology, despite the strategic role that its researchers had played in favour of the Sami’s ethnopolitical movements, above all by challenging, as Stordhal put it, ’[...] the Norwegian universe of meanings through their analyses of Norwegian minority politics’, while also playing an unequivocal advocacy role in relation to the Sami’s demands (Stordahl 1996 : 183).

At the same time, tensions had also arisen in the field of Sami studies between Sami students ⎯ including Vigdis Stordhal herself [26] ⎯ and anthropology professors at the UiT. While the latter’s main concern was to ’make the most unfamiliar parts of Norwegian reality, namely the Sami, understandable to individual Norwegians’ (idem:180), there was a huge lack of knowledge among the Sami students themselves about their reality, creating a gap that they claimed to fill by drawing on their specific background as Sami. For many of them, entering university represented their first concrete experience of contact with Sami individuals from regions other than their own, often with different linguistic forms and cultural habits, whose presence created the possibility of obtaining first-hand knowledge that did not simply reproduce the anecdotal character transmitted by the Norwegian school system about these differences. In addition, many were encountering the production of academic, especially ethnographic, knowledge about their groups for the first time. Stordhal describes the impact of the university experience on the Sami students of his generation as follows :

[...] we found a new world about the Sami in the libraries [...] in historical, pedagogical and anthropological analyses, and when we were introduced to social science studies. [In addition,] we students from Finnmark met Sami students from Ulsfjord, Manndalen and Skånland. It was liberating and painful at the same time. Liberating because we gained a new understanding of ourselves, and painful because we realised how excluded we had been from all this before. Our project then became a part of the wider Sami project of that time, which [Harald] Eidheim called ’the invention of selfhood and peoplehood’. (Stordhal 1996 : 181, trans. from the original in Norwegian)

Although this broader Sami project of ’self-invention’ coincided with the proposal spearheaded by NSI intellectuals, Sami anthropology students at UiT began to want the university’s Sami studies group to provide them with the theoretical tools they needed to critique the ’politics of knowledge’ proposed by the NSI. This advocated the creation of university institutions and research centres controlled exclusively by Sami, aimed at producing and disseminating knowledge about them.

In other words, the Sami anthropology students were calling for the development of the capacity to problematise ⎯ what I am calling ’reflexivity’ ⎯ the role played by the Sami in relation to the production of knowledge aimed at ’representing themselves’ ; and this from the analytical tools of anthropology and from the perspective of creating a dialogue between the members of the Sami community, and not just between the Sami and the Norwegians. In this sense, they criticised the retreat of the Norwegian professors from the Institute of Anthropology at UiT for having given up on maintaining the area of Sami studies, considering that this deprived Sami students of the possibility of cultivating this reflective perspective ⎯ a term used by Stordahl ⎯ which has become one of the hallmarks of anthropology among the Sami themselves (idem:184). In the words of the author analysing the situation :

The important consequences [of this retreat], both in terms of understanding what happened between teachers and students, and in terms of understanding what happened between the two competing producers of knowledge ⎯ anthropological circles and the Sami intelligentsia ⎯ were not taken seriously enough. This contributed, among other things, to Tromsø’s anthropology failing to develop an important side of its critical function, something that the discipline, at least ideally, should strive to develop. It exercised an important and constructive critique of Norwegian society and the latter’s understanding and administration of Sami society, but the same [...] did not occur in the case of the propositions about the new role of the Sami [intellectual] elite in the development of modern Sami society, including the role that this political elite assumed as a producer of knowledge (Stordahl 1996 : 184).

He goes on to assess the relationship between Sami students and anthropology professors as follows :

[...] anthropological circles could have paved the way for critical knowledge in relation to Sami society, building a relationship of trust between students and teachers in the work situation, in such a way that the students ⎯ who also had a cultural background that gave them legitimacy ⎯ could have gained the security to take on the role of cultural critics of the [Sami] knowledge producers. They could have developed the role of anthropologically informed intermediaries between the Sami knowledge world and the Norwegian academic world, functioning critically and liberatingly in relation to both. The point that Tromsø’s anthropology is situated in a field of tensions between the Norwegian academic world and the context of Fourth World knowledge politics must be accepted as a fact. There are, however, new aspects in this context that could give Tromsø anthropology and its partners in the Fourth World a new chance to build mutual relationships of trust. (Stordahl 1996 : 184-185)

The relationships of trust envisaged by Stordhal, if not fully established, took shape from the 2000s onwards, largely thanks to the implementation of a series of initiatives linked to the field of international cooperation. These depended on the joint efforts and dialogue of a significant number of UiT anthropologists, located both at the Institute of Anthropology and at the Tromsø Museum, with Sami professionals from various fields, distributed in other UiT institutes and departments, as well as at the university’s Centre for Sami Studies, created in 1993. These initiatives include the aforementioned Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples, which has been held annually since 2000, and the Master’s Programme in Indigenous Studies, which began in 2003 and is managed by the Centre for Sami Studies. It features the collaboration of Sami and Norwegian anthropologists, historians, lawyers and professors of literature from UiT, as well as guest professors from other countries linked to the debate on indigenous issues.

The role of this university as a space for intercultural dialogue in Norway contrasts with that of other higher education and research institutions, such as the Nordic Sami Institute and Sami University College, which take a much more ’isolationist’ stance towards exchanges and joint work between Sami and Norwegian researchers. Although this stance can be understood according to the logic of Sami ’knowledge politics’, in which the university is seen at the same time as a field for producing knowledge and a political field for constructing the ethnic border, I would draw attention to the risks of ghettoisation arising from such a policy ; it has implications for the quality of the knowledge produced and for closing important doors for dialogue and forging alliances that the history of the international indigenous movement has shown to be a strategic and often decisive element in the conquests of rights by indigenous peoples.

Conclusion

In this paper we looked at the construction of the field of international cooperation for indigenous peoples in Norway, seeking to identify how discussions on national and ethnic issues in this Scandinavian country were linked to those that shaped the transnational indigenous movement from the second half of the 20th century onwards, as well as the strategic role that Norwegian and Sami anthropologists played in these processes. The inclusion of the definition of rights for indigenous peoples in the field of development assistance, accompanied by the debate on the category of indigenous itself, was one of the central marks of the contribution of these anthropologists. It followed on from the theoretical efforts of the anthropological discipline in Norway to think about ethnic groups, both from the domestic debates on the Sami people and the international debate on indigenous peoples, which, as we have seen, fed back into each other on several occasions.

To the extent that Norway has taken a place as a ’donor’ in the development world, Norwegian international cooperation has helped to build up relations of power and asymmetry between the ’North’ and the ’South’, the ’First World ’ and the ’Third’, and so on. However, in the case of cooperation with indigenous peoples, we are faced with the emergence of a different kind of perspective, one that has opened up fissures within these dichotomies, both on a symbolic and practical levels. This perspective makes it possible to affirm identities that escaped them, and which have affirmed anti-tutelary stances that have been gaining expression in the contemporary political struggles of subalternised groups, both in national spaces and in international arenas of dispute. In the affirmation of these identities, the transformation of former objects of study into subjects of knowledge has been a central feature, opening up more than welcome prospects for the renewal of the anthropological discipline.

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