The article discusses the activities of both indigenous people and religion online, and introduces the pair of concepts indigeneity-online/online-indigeneity as a means of analysing this activity. This concept is new, and leans heavily on the pair of concepts religion-online/online-religion that is used in religious studies. The second part of the article consists of an analysis of the website www.osko.no, a site for the Christian education of Sami children and youth. I treat this as an expression of, or a medium for, the contemporary formation of Sami identity, and argue that it can be seen as an indigenous website. The Church of Norway, as an institution with a strong history of colonization and Norwegianization, has developed into an institution that seeks to integrate, implement and strengthen the Sami voices and traditions to such extent thatSami Christians use it as platform for the communication of a Sami kind of Christianity. www.osko.no is an example of a certain articulation of Sami identity. What seems to be the preferred or idealized Saminess is related to nature and a particular past, and is distant to modernity, urban culture and Norwegian culture.
In Norway, historical sources which yield first-hand information about how different
ethnic groups defined themselves are scarce. Second-hand information on the other hand is available in the population censuses undertaken from 1845 onwards. The first
part of this article gives a brief description of the source material, and in order to evaluate the strength of the ethnicity variable given in the population censuses a comparison is carried out with J.A. Friis’s population table attached to his
ethnographic map of 1861 and his estimate of the Sámi population (Friis 1861: 1-5).
In the second part of the article the focus will be on the instructions given to census takers and how they carried out their work in pract ice. There will also be a discussion of the usefulness of a reorganisation of census data into household units and how this strengthens our understanding of ethnic registration. A key finding here concerns the degrees of ethnic homogeneity and heterogeneity in households. The extent of mixed
marriages, both in time and space, will also be an
important issue for discussion.
Mixed marriages can be a key variable in understanding social interaction between
different ethnic groups.
During the last part of the nineteenth century, Finnmark province and the Northern part of Troms experienced a decline in intergenerational coresidence. This article discusses what impact ethnic affiliation and economic activity had on the living arrangements of the elderly, and what contributed to the change. Logistic regression shows that ethnicity played a role, but its effect disappears after controlling for economic activity. Intergenerational coresidence was positively associated with being a married Sámi male with an occupation in farming or combined fishing and farming. As such a person grew older, he was increasingly likely to live separately from an own adult child. This pattern changed towards the end of nineteenth century. By the close of the century, ethnic differences had disappeared, and headship position, irrespective of marital status, was strongly related to coresidence.
Presentation at the 6th annual Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples, which commenced in 2005. The Centre for Sámi Studies hosted the conference at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Full conference report available at http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2999