Incandescent Joik: Filming Chants of Resilience in Sápmi, Norway

Abstract

The article analyses how we, as a team of visual anthropologists from the University of Tromsø (Sápmi-Norway), worked with two young Saami musicians (S. M. Gaup and L. Somby) who are themselves researchers in the “joik” tradition. Sápmi is the term of the imagined nation of the Saami people, covering a territory that goes across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Northern Russia. The joik is the specific form of Saami chanting. It coveys lyrics, melody and throat singing techniques, with a high level of abstraction in rendering the relation to people, natural sites, places, animals and events,  that we attempted to understand contextually and historically.[more in the pdf]