Imagine, for a moment, that there are no borders, geopolitical tensions, political conflicts, or stringent visa regimes; a world where trails and paths fork out uninterrupted by states haunted by manifest anxieties over territory, sovereignty, and the reverberations of political cartography. In such a world, it would be possible for you, provided you possess extraordinary stamina, determination, and ...

In this discussion I want to focus the spotlight on what Historia Norwegiae (hereafter H.N.) reports on relations in the Far North, on the Sámi and on the interaction between Norwegians and Sámi, as well as additional peoples further to the east in the North Calotte.2 I shall concentrate on a summary of the peoples who were perceived, to a greater or lesser extent, as standing outside the Norse, ...

The first time I visited the Lenin Mausoleum was on an autumn day in 1971. Leaves blew over Red Square, and down in the sarcophagus Lenin was lying in dim illumination, immaculately dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and a red necktie. Despite his attire he made a dismal impression with his yellow, parchment-like skin. 20 years later Soviet society dissolved, without Lenin being offered a decent ...

The paper dwells upon everyday life, Soviet prisoners of war and Norwegians' memories during the Second World War in northern Norway. Characteristics of the ideological war against the Soviet Union, mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, civilian forced labour in northern Norway, Norwegians memories and contact with the Soviet prisoners, the politics of memory and repatriation are demonstrated. ...

A scientific field is a constant process, and, as all processes, it is defined by dialectics, since standpoints are only defined in opposition to something else. Saami archaeology is no exception, and this field emerged precisely because of oppositions, when political conflicts enforced the realization of a lack of consideration of the Saami presence in the prevailing understanding of the past in ...

While the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left a heavy legacy in the form of industrial towns, residential buildings, infrastructure networks, and ecological damage that extends the Soviet Union’s effective history into the present day. This paper explores this legacy through the perspective of contemporary archaeology to better understand how material culture from the Soviet period is being ...

13.3.2012 vart Sjamanistisk Forbund godkjent som eige trussamfunn av fylkesmannen i Troms. Godkjenninga innebar oppretting av ein sjamanistisk landsorganisasjon og eit fylkeslag for Tromsø kommune. I søknaden til Fylkesmannen går det fram at forbundet er særleg oppteke av å forvara den samiske og norrøne sjamantradisjonen. Forbundet ynskjer å opna for eigne sjamanistiske seremoniar knytt til dåp, ...

Between 1941 and 1945, 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war were sent to Norway. More than 90,000 of these Soviet prisoners were soldiers from the Red Army.1 Nearly 7000 of the prisoners were civilian Soviet forced labourers, or so-called ‘Ostarbeiter’. The prisoners were mainly used in the building of railroads, Highway 50, runways, and fortresses along the coastline.2 “Festung Norwegen” were built with ...

This article traces the development and narrative staging in Russian media of the so-called Russian-Norwegian patriotic memory tours that took place from 2011 to 2019 to celebrate a heroic story of WWII Red Army soldiers and Norwegian partisans in Soviet intelligence service. The article concludes that the tours were initiated by Russian state and state-affiliated actors who exported military-patriotic ...

In October 2006 a drum embarked on what is possibly the most extensive journey of any drum at any time. The journey’s ambitions were similarly grand: to serve as a wakeup call to the needs of Mother Earth by linking people, things, and places. What follows is my take on this project in the context of the reclaiming of drums in Sápmi and globalizing discourses on Indigenous religion(s), as well ...