The Craft of Belonging

Material Culture and Social Boundaries in Sápmi

Tracing contemporary material culture back through the archaeological record demonstrates how the meanings of community belonging shift over time.

The Craft of Belonging explores the role of craft and its mediation of social boundaries, particularly in communities that are under state pressure. Anthropologists Matthew Magnani and Natalia Magnani blend anthropology and archaeology to explore the role of craft in community-making from prehistory to present with the Sámi, the Indigenous peoples of Northern Europe. Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, has sat at a material crossroads for millennia. Forests, tundras, and extended social networks offered raw materials autochthonous and imported. Wood, antler, cloth, and silver were crafted to cope with Arctic climates and state incursions. Integrating archaeological, ethnographic and Indigenous perspectives to reveal the transformative nature of material culture, The Craft of Belonging shows how long-term perspectives accentuate the shifting meanings and malleability of material social boundaries. Local agencies intersect with changing trade networks, colonialism and climate change, to resonate through the production, uses and signals of Sámi craft (duodji). This book thus contends that ancestral material cultures, far from static cultural domains, are innovative sites of social transformation used to assert rights to land, water, and community belonging.