Abstract
This chapter is reflecting on the relationship between traditional food, health and the body in the context of an elder Sami woman’s effort to maintain a traditional lifestyle threatened by an encroaching state politics and experts. The research approach is medical anthropology and sensitive listening in an ethnographic interview. The study findings shows that the meaning of health in everyday life to an elder Sami woman in rural North Norway was a silent struggle for corporal freedom, a struggling with nature, and the freedom to have control over own body and life. Consumption of food harvested direct from nature and a moderate diet and lifestyle is a way to give voice to the silent struggle. Within the context as a member of the religious Laestadian movement in the north, food emerges as a way to rehabilitate everyday life and express subjectivity and resistance towards suppressive politic.
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Notes
- 1.
The government’s assimilation policy towards the Sami was strictly controlling not only in school and language policy, but in a wide range of areas that impacted and violated individuals’ everyday lives (NOU 2000:3).
- 2.
The Sami are the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden and Finland ) and the Kola Peninsula (Russia ). The majority of the Sami inhabit the northern parts of the Scandinavian countries. The highest density of Sami people lives in the Sami areas of Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway in the municipalities of Karasjok and Kautokeino (Hassler et al. 2008).
- 3.
Gamme, north Sami goahti, a small building covered with peat.
- 4.
At that time, the priests in The Church of Norway were mainly responsible for supervising the boarding schools in Finnmark (Nergård 2006).
- 5.
The Reindeer skins were used to make clothes and to sit and lay on.
- 6.
The bark and sap were used in the diet as food. It was used to make bread.
- 7.
The translation from Swedish to English and all the quotations is mine, the author of this chapter.
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Acknowledgement
I acknowledge and thank the Sami women in Finnmark who shared their personal food biography. I thank Rune Flikke for his cooperation, suggestions and critical comments in the writing process. I also thank Jon Øyvind Odland, Jens Ivar Nergård and all those who have contributed with comments on earlier drafts.
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Kvitberg, T. (2019). “We Do Not Eat Luxury Food”: A Story About Food and Health in an Old Sami Woman’s Everyday Life in Norway. In: Naskali, P., Harbison, J., Begum, S. (eds) New Challenges to Ageing in the Rural North. International Perspectives on Aging, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20603-1_14
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