The Sámi are Europe’s only recognized indigenous people living across regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola peninsula. The subjects of a history of Christianization, land dispossession, and cultural assimilation, the Sámi have through their self-organization since World War II worked towards Sámi political self-determination across the Nordic states and helped forge a global indigenous community. Accompanying this process was the emergence of a Sámi music scene, in which the revival of the distinct and formerly suppressed unaccompanied vocal tradition of joik was central. Through joiking with instrumental accompaniment, incorporating joik into forms of popular music, performing on stage and releasing recordings, Sámi musicians have played a key role in articulating a Sámi identity, strengthening Sámi languages, and reviving a nature-based cosmology. Thomas Hilder offers the first book-length study of this diverse and dynamic music scene and its intersection with the politics of indigeneity. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Hilder provides portraits of numerous Sámi musicians, studies the significance of Sámi festivals, analyzes the emergence of a Sámi recording industry, and examines musical projects and cultural institutions that have sought to strengthen the transmission of Sámi music. Through his engaging narrative, Hilder discusses a wide range of issues—revival, sovereignty, time, environment, repatriation and cosmopolitanism—to highlight the myriad ways in which Sámi musical performance helps shape notions of national belonging, transnational activism, and processes of democracy in the Nordic peninsula. Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe will not only appeal to enthusiasts of Nordic music, but, by drawing on current interdisciplinary debates, will also speak to a wider audience interested in the interplay of music and politics. Unearthing the challenges, contradictions and potentials presented by international indigenous politics, Hilder demonstrates the significance of this unique musical scene for the wider cultural and political transformations in twenty-first-century Europe and global modernity.

Northernness, Northern culture and Northern narratives are a common aspect of popular culture, and the North of England, like other Northernnesses in Europe, is a collection of narratives, myths, stereotypes and symbols. In politics and everyday culture, Northern culture is paradoxically a site of resistance against an inauthentic South, a source of working-class identity, and a source of elite marginalisation. This book provides a key to theorising about Northernness, and a platform to scholars working away at exposing the North in different aspects of culture. The aims of this book are twofold: to re-theorise ‘the North’ and Northern culture and to highlight the ways in which constructions of Northernness and Northern culture are constituted alongside other gender, racial and regional identities. The contributions presented here theorise Northernness in relation to space, leisure, gender, race, class, social realism, and everyday embodied practices. A main thematic thread that weaves the whole book together is the notion that Northernness and ‘the North’ is both an imagined discursive construct and an embodied subjectivity, thus creating a paradox between the reality of ‘North’ and its representation. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Advancing Music Education in Northern Europe tells the story of a unique organization that has contributed in profound ways to the professional development of music teachers in the Nordic and Baltic nations. At the same time, the book offers reflections on how music education and approaches to the training of music teachers have changed across recent decades, a period of significant innovations. In a time where international partnerships appear to be threatened by a recent resurgence in protectionism and nationalism, this book also more generally demonstrates the value of formalized international cooperation in the sphere of higher education. The setting for the discussion, Northern Europe, is a region arguably of great importance to music education for a number of reasons, seen, for instance, in Norway’s ranking as the “happiest nation on earth”, the well-known success of Finland’s schools in international-comparative measures of student achievement, how Sweden has grappled with its recent experience as “Europe’s top recipient of asylum seekers per capita”, and Estonia’s national identity as a country born from a “Singing Revolution”, to name but a few examples. The contributors chronicle how the Nordic Network for Music Education (NNME) was founded and developed, document its impact, and demonstrate how the eight nations involved in this network – Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – are making unique contributions of global significance to the field of music education.

A cultural history of Sápmi and the Nordic countries as told through objects and artifacts Material objects—things made, used, and treasured—tell the story of a people and place. So it is for the Indigenous Sámi living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, whose story unfolds across borders and centuries, in museums and private collections. The objects created by the Sámi for daily and ceremonial use were purchased and taken by Scandinavians and foreign travelers in Lapland from the seventeenth century to the present, and the collections described in From Lapland to Sápmi map a complex history that is gradually shifting to a renaissance of Sámi culture and craft, along with the return of many historical objects to Sápmi, the Sámi homeland. The Sámi objects first collected in Lapland by non-Indigenous people were drums and other sacred artifacts, but later came to include handmade knives, decorated spoons, clothing, and other domestic items owned by Sámi reindeer herders and fishers, as well as artisanal crafts created for sale. Barbara Sjoholm describes how these objects made their way via clergy, merchants, and early scientists into curiosity cabinets and eventually to museums in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and abroad. Musicians, writers, and tourists also collected Sámi culture for research and enjoyment. Displays of Sámi material culture in Scandinavia and England, Germany, and other countries in museums, exhibition halls, and even zoos often became part of racist and colonial discourse as examples of primitive culture, and soon figured in the debates of ethnographers and curators over representations of national folk traditions and “exotic” peoples. Sjoholm follows these objects and collections from the Age of Enlightenment through the twentieth century, when artisanship took on new forms in commerce and museology and the Sámi began to organize politically and culturally. Today, several collections of Sámi objects are in the process of repatriation, while a new generation of artists, activists, and artisans finds inspiration in traditional heritage and languages. Deftly written and amply illustrated, with contextual notes on language and Nordic history, From Lapland to Sápmi brings to light the history of collecting, displaying, and returning Sámi material culture, as well as the story of Sámi creativity and individual and collective agency.

Investigates the significance of a range of digital technologies in contemporary Indigenous musical performance, exploring interdisciplinary issues of music production, representation, and transmission.

Music has long played a prominent role in cultural diplomacy, but until now no resource has comparatively examined policies that shape how non-western countries use music for international relations. Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy, edited by scholars David G. Hebert and Jonathan McCollum, demonstrates music's role in international relations worldwide. Specifically, this book offers "insider" views from expert contributors writing about music as a part of cultural diplomacy initiatives in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria, Japan, China, India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Nigeria. Unique features include the book’s emphasis on diverse legal frameworks, decolonial perspectives, and cultural policies that serve as a basis for how nations outside “the west” use music in their relationships with Europe and North America.

This edited book brings together leading scholars in the field of Indigenous religions working with Indigenous Peoples from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe to examine various Indigenous discourses, practices, and politics of movement, as they intersect with issues of religion and spirituality. Indigenous Peoples and their religious traditions have always been mobile and adaptive. Scholars of Indigenous religions have tended to focus their theories of Indigeneity and religion on Indigenous Peoples’ cultural and historic connections to particular land-bases, not always attending to the full complexity of Indigenous Peoples’ mobile lived realities. Attention to mobility within the study of Indigenous religions reveals the many ways Indigenous religions, in addition to being grounded on the land and situated in shared pasts, are expansive, relational, innovative, and future oriented. The contributions to this volume highlight the centrality of mobility to cultivating personhood, maintaining networks of affinity and belonging, fostering political alliances and solidarities, and generating religious meaning. This book will be a key resource for scholars and students in the fields of religious studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, and history, as well as to a broad general audience interested in larger questions around the politics of decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, and self-determination. It was originally published as a special issue of Material Religion.