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The paper suggests that cultural landscapes were permeated by religious
meanings in all pre-modern societies, including Sami societies before c.
AD 1600. We suggest that knowledge of this sacred landscape was not restricted
to an elite or to shamans, but was widely shared. For the Sami, religious rituals
and associated images (e.g. rock art) involv...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... site (bassevárre) and sacrificial site, becomes more secure. To substantiate this claim, we must reconstruct the main features of the 'sacred geography' of the Sami. An equivalent 'map' of Proto-Uralic cosmology has been con- structed by the Russian scholar Vladimir Napolskikh (1992) using a wide range of ethnographic and historical sources (Fig. ...
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This article describes two recently discovered rock painting sites on the northern shore
of lake Gaskávrre, in the mountain area of Arjeplog parish, western Lappland. The sites,
called Gaskávrre 1 and 2, are the most northerly rock art sites in present day Sweden
found so far and are situated at c. 550 m a.s.l. Gaskávrre 1 contains 17 distinguishab...
Citations
... Using anthropologists Barth (1969) and Eriksen (1994) as a foundation and approaching ethnic identity with a strong aspect of situationalism, scholars have identified social groups that may have possessed an in-between or creolized position between Old Norse and Sámi identities. Others, building on the scholarship of Said (1978) and Bhabha (1994) and in particular the work of archaeologist Siân Jones (e.g., Jones 1997), have approached this theme that emphasizes hybridity as a way of avoiding the latent essentialism suggested by creolization as a mixture of two entities (Amundsen 2017;Bergstøl 2004Bergstøl , 2008Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007;Nielsen and Wickler 2011;Spangen 2009). Similarly, cultural memory related to migration from Slavic areas into Scandinavia and the social setting of these groups within Scandinavian societies have been explored in relation to early urban as well as rural contexts. ...
This paper reviews the achievements and challenges of archaeological research on Viking Age northern Europe and explores potential avenues for future research. We identify the reemergence of comparative and cross-cultural perspectives along with a turn toward studying mobility and maritime expansion, fueled by the introduction of biomolecular and isotopic data. The study of identity has seen a shift from a focus on collective beliefs and ritual to issues of personal identity and presentation, with a corresponding shift in attention to individual burials and the “animated objects.” Network ontologies have brought new perspectives on the emergence of sea trade and urban nodes and to the significance of outfield production and resources. Field archaeology has seen an emphasis on elite manors, feasting halls, and monuments, as well as military sites and thing assembly places, using new data from remote sensing, geophysical surveys, geoarchaeology, and metal detectors. Concerns over current climate change have placed the study of environment as a key priority, in particular in the ecologically vulnerable North Atlantic settlements. Discussing future directions, we call for alignment between societal/economic and individual/cultural perspectives, and for more ethically grounded research. We point to diaspora theory and intersectionality as frameworks with the potential to integrate genomics, identity, and society, and to ecology as a framework for integrating landscape, mobility, and political power.
... В последние годы в литературе часто затрагивается тема «лиминальных зон», в ко-торых, как правило, концентрируются памятники первобытного искусства (Trubshaw 1995;Mulk 2007). Термин лиминальный (пороговый) восходит к формуле обряда, предложенной А. ван Геннепом: isolation -limеnreaggregation (разделение -порог -восстановление) (Геннеп 1999), где лимен означает порог между миром людей и миром животных/мертвых. ...
There are numerous complex scenes, including images of people and deer, among the rock paintings of Northern Europe and Siberia. Some of them can be interpreted as rituals (Alta, Glosa, Surukhtakh-Kaya, etc.). We consider them in the context of the deer cult, which developed in deer hunter societies and survived at a later time. Totemic and cosmological myths were the essence of this cult, they were inextricably linked with rituals — calendrical, which correlated with natural and economic cycles, and liminal, conditioned by the life cycle of people. Archaeological materials and rock paintings of the Mesolithic-Neolithic of Northern Europe and Northern Asia indicate that the cult of the deer played a leading role in the myths and ritual complex. We used the method of ethno-archaeological reconstruction for the interpretations of the compositions. We compared some narratives of rock carvings in Northern Europe and Siberia with totemic rites of the indigenous peoples of the subarctic zone. These ceremonies were supposed to guarantee success in hunting and, at the same time, the reproduction of deer. Imitating deer, creation of models of deer, killing of a sacrificial deer, dismemberment, joint eating and preservation of the remains for further restoration – those were the main elements of the rituals. These ritual actions are reflected in the rock art of Northern Eurasia.
... Sturt 2006). These theories were based on Evenk-a group resident in eastern Siberia, Mongolia, and the north-eastern PRC-cosmological structures, wherein a river connects our world to the underworld (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007;Tilley 1991, p. 134). Rock art is suggested to have marked liminal points that straddle the boundary between this world and another (Rozwadowski 2017, pp. ...
Change to rock art has been treated as an unforgiveable act in many contemporary cases; however, rock art in many parts of the world was most likely not created with the intention that it would endure for eternity unaltered. This paper highlights three ways in which the rock art creation process has been ‘replicated’ in the past and present. These forms of replication behaviours—of form, place, and action—are identified in the case study of the rock art of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Mongolian Altai. Additionally, examples of modern imagery that represent continuity of tradition are also presented. I argue that the cognitive processes suggested by these forms of replication have been influential in forming the rock art record, and they can be used to explore contemporary, regional worldviews. In eastern Eurasia, replication behaviours in rock art reference place-making strategies and regional cosmological traditions that see the landscape as occupied by non-human beings. The goal is to provide a constructive framework by which alteration and change can be considered innate aspects of the archaeological record, as opposed to mere vandalism, in our interpretation of prehistoric rock art.
... vironment, making the landscapes laden with religious significance (Bergman et al. 2008, 1). Due to the hunter-gatherer structure of Sámi society, knowledge of the sacred landscape was no elite phenomenon of religious experts ('shamans' called noaidi /noajdde), but widely shared as a perceived anomaly and liminality (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007). Sámi religion, thus, is characterized by a more egalitarian structure than the overemphasis on the role of the shaman would suggest. ...
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’ famous scientific expedition to Lapland (1736-1737) had a considerable impact on Enlightenment thought, but not only due to its groundbreaking results in the fields of geodesy and physics. Given the popularity of his journey, the few and rather prejudiced references to the Sámi people and their religion also gained some significance. In his reports and in his self-presentations, Maupertuis used certain elements of Sámi life and religiosity in order to communicate his scientific and social message to the academies and the salons of Paris. Accordingly, the references to the Sámi are indispensable elements of the self-representation and self-reference of Enlightenment mind, intended to enhance and clarify its own standing. The article examines a situation of contact of a formally and religiously operating language of scientific polemics with religious phenomena that it interprets as ‘primitive’ or ‘curious’ and that it appropriates to its particular form of discourse. Here, intellectual religion meets a ‘primitive’ one as an object of description, and makes an innovative use of its alien elements. The case study is concerned in particular with a special kind of application of the transcendence-immanence distinction involved in the contact situation, relating to the phenomenon of knowledge in form of the relation of the known and the unknown.
... For Joe, a survey of an old village site and beach ridge was also a visit to a populous place, inhabited by the ancestors. These interactive ancestral or totemic landscapes are common to many of PNG's language and culture groups (e.g., see Ballard, 1998;Bonnemaison, 1994;Feld, 1996;papers in Rumsey and Weiner, 2001;Weiner, 1991) and to various Indigenous societies worldwide (e.g., see Basso, 1996;Bradley, 2000: 5-13;Colwell-Chanthaponh and Ferguson, 2006: 153-157;Layton, 1999;Mulk and Bayliss-Smith, 2007;Two Bears, 2003). ...
The Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea, is a rapidly changing geomorphic and cultural landscape in which the ancestral past is constantly being (re)interpreted and negotiated. This paper examines the importance of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features for the various communities of Orokolo Bay in the Gulf of Papua as they maintain and re-construct cosmological and migration narratives. The everyday practices of digging and clearing for agriculture and house construction at antecedent village locations bring Orokolo Bay locals into regular engagement with buried pottery sherds (deposited during the ancestral hiri trade) and thin strata of ‘black sand’ (iron sand). Local interpretations and imaginings of the subsurface enable spatio-temporal interpretations of the ancestors' actions and the structure of ancestral settlements. These interpretations point to the profound entanglement of orality and material culture and suggest new directions in the comparative study of alternative archaeologies.
... In the context of the Sami animist religion and worldview, stones are part of the living world, on the same level as animals, plants, human beings, and divinities. Some are invested with a spiritual meaning, such as places called siejdde (Lule Sami), and used to invoke spirits during offering rituals (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith, 2007). Rock formations or boulders are often distinguished as sacred sites (Vorren, 1987;Roué, 2015). ...
For the Sami people, place names provide the basis for the transmission of a cultural landscape, through an oral way of mapping built around narratives and the designation of specific landmarks. Based on interviews with members of a mountain-based reindeer herding community in Sweden, we found that their transmission is today ensured through continued oral tradition but also by the increasing use of maps. However, because they follow the western cartographic tradition, official maps are unable to express the continual renewal of Sami place names and the land features that are meaningful to the Sami, and thus fail to convey toponymic knowledge. Inscribing place names on maps transforms them into mere labels: toponymic knowledge has to be transmitted along with its context of emergence, situated at the crossroads of cognitive, perceptive, emotional, and social dimensions. There is an urgent need to conceive new forms of cartography that can guarantee the transmission of toponymic knowledge to future generations, maintaining the relationship that binds the Sami to their environment.
... Whereas one of the Looptroop Rockers posits nature as inspirational in terms evoking a nineteenth-century nationalist narrative that comes across as naïve within a Sámi context, their collaborator, Wimme Saari, turns the environment into a musical source, making acoustic recordings of his own heartbeat for the track as well as recording the lapping of gentle waves on the lakeside. Water has a particular significance in Sámi cosmology, being not only a source of life, but also marking potential doorways between the realms of the living, the spirits and the dead (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007). Moreover, as famously recounted in the multimedia exhibition at Sápmi Park in Karasjok, in the Sámi creation myth a reindeer's heartbeat is audible within the earth and provides a sonic guide for humans. ...
... Sámi cosmologies, myths and traditions also emerge in telling dialogues among the featured artists. In one episode, the camera team accompanies Inga Juuso and Markus Krunegård on a walk to a sieidi, a rocky outcrop which would have acted as a sacrificial site and marked a doorway into the realm of the spirits and the dead within Sámi indigenous cosmology and shamanic practices (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007). On the way, Krunegård asks, concerned, 'Isn't it sacrilegious [to walk to the stone]? ...
Indigenous arts, simultaneously attuned to local voices and global cultural flows, have often been the vanguard in communicating what is at stake in the interactions, contradictions, disjunctions, opportunities, exclusions, injustices and aspirations that globalization entails. Focusing specifically on embodied arts and activism, this interdisciplinary volume offers vital new perspectives on the power and precariousness of indigeneity as a politicized cultural force in our unevenly connected world. Twenty-three distinct voices speak to the growing visibility of indigenous peoples' performance on a global scale over recent decades, drawing specific examples from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific, Scandinavia and South Africa.
An ethical touchstone in some arenas and a thorny complication in others, indigeneity is now belatedly recognised as mattering in global debates about natural resources, heritage, governance, belonging and social justice, to name just some of the contentious issues that continue to stall the unfinished business of decolonization. To explore this critical terrain, the essays and images gathered here range in subject from independent film, musical production, endurance art and the performative turn in exhibition and repatriation practices to the appropriation of hip-hop, karaoke and reality TV. Collectively, they urge a fresh look at mechanisms of postcolonial entanglement in the early 21st century as well as the particular rights and insights afforded by indigeneity in that process.
... some new images came to light at the Badjelánnda site discovered in 1990 (mulk 1998mulk and Bayliss-smith 2001mulk and Bayliss-smith , 2006mulk and Bayliss-smith , 2007. these images require us to examine sami cosmological and religious ideas, particularly the mother earth concept (Máttaráhkká) which is also represented in the motifs painted on drums and the metaphors found in myths. in the person of Mát- taráhkká the sami had a symbol of mother earth that has close parallels to similar figures found within the religious ideas of indigenous people all over the northern euro-Asiatic region (ränk 1955;simčenko 1978;Gimbutas 1982;Bäckman 1982hultkrantz 1996;eidlitz Kuoljok 1999). ...
... however, the object of worship or sacrifice at such places was not the particular stones or rock forma- tions, cliffs, springs, lakes, animals, the wind or thunder. these elements of na- ture were thought of as manifestations of particular gods or spirits or souls, and hence they were 'liminal' places where access could be gained to the supernatural world (mulk 1994b;mulk and Bayliss-smith 2007). ...
... these figures can be seen as representations of the same earth mother figure (mother of Mjandasj, or Máttaráhkká), a cos- mic power which embodied the earth and its ma- terial production, and whose help was therefore ac- knowledged in a range of contexts -for example, hunting reindeer, taking soapstone from the earth, or consigning the dead to the underworld. All three activities took place at and around the Badjelánnda site (mulk and Bayliss-smith 2001(mulk and Bayliss-smith , 2006(mulk and Bayliss-smith , 2007. ...
Artists as shamans: Historical review and recent theoretical model.
The following review presents the trajectory of thought linking artists and shamans, followed by important findings from a recent study presenting a theoretical model of contemporary artists as shamans. The literature is primarily drawn from Western sources. As such, the ideas are mostly productions of the “Western mind,” which, as explained by Tarnas (2003) encompasses the evolving “major world views of the West’s mainstream high culture, focusing on the crucial sphere of interaction between philosophy, religion, and science” (xiv),
where also resides mythology, iconography, anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and, I will add, art.
... Inom hällbildsforskningen har man omtalat detta som ristningarnas "liminalitet". (se även Bradley 1991Bradley , 1998Bradley , 1999Coles 2005;Barrett 1999;Nordenborg Myhre 2004;Mulk & Bayliss -Smith, 2007;Goldhahn 2010;Ljunge 2010). ...
The mythological subjects of Deer-Mother or Deer-Wife, who play roles such as the ancestress of people and animals, the protector of game, and the patroness of hunting can be found throughout Eurasia. One such manifestation of this Mistress of Animals is the Antlered Mother who appeared in the Stone Age. This character was widespread in north Eurasian rock art in Neolithic times and persisted into the Bronze and Iron Ages. The totemic myth about the origin of humans and animals from a common ancestor was one of the most important and widespread mythological subjects of the Northern peoples, who, until modern times, were deer hunters. The most ancient story talks about a giant female being: the “Animal-Mother.” Over time, the image of this totemic ancestor, the Great Mother, developed more human characteristics. There was a Saami, a mother-ancestress or Myandash-maiden, who had marital relations with reindeer. The Kirgiz tell stories about this Antlered Mother. Moreover, myths about Deer-Woman—the hostess of animals—have survived in Caucasian mythology. The subject of the Antlered Goddess is extremely popular in Britain. The character of the British Deer-Woman reflects all developmental stages of the ancient totemic ancestor image. Despite their origins in antiquity, stories about these mythological beings have been preserved in folk traditions and some persist to this day. This investigation mines the existing archaeological and mythological datasets in an effort to shed light on these animal masters.
