Paper proposal by:
Lukas Allemann
Researcher, PhD Cand.
Northern Cultures and Sustainable Natural Resource Politics Doctoral Programme
ORHELIA Project, Anthropology Research Team, Arctic Centre
University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
Mobile +358 40 4844418
Skype lukas.allemann
Personal home page
Blog arcticanthropology.org
Book septentrio.uit.no/samskrift
Presentation language: English
Individual paper:
“We were the incubator kids”: Narratives about education and family policy among Sámi people in the Soviet Union
People living in the Arctic have had decisions made about them far away in Southern capital cities, be it in Russia, Norway or any other Northern country. The ORHELIA (Oral History of Empires by Elders in the Arctic) research project, within which I have been working on my PhD thesis, aims to looking at state-individual relations in the eyes of Arctic indigenous elders, by using the method of life history analysis and oral history fieldwork combined with anthropological participant observation.
One of the common threads of all field sites of the ORHELIA project throughout the Finnish and Russian Arctic have been stories about boarding schools for indigenous children. In my paper, I will focus on the still little-known history of the so-called remedial boarding school in Lovozero, to which many Soviet Sámi children with ‘learning deficiencies’ have been sent. The comparison between oral history testimonies and documents from the archives reveals details about certain dynamics inside the boarding schools, which often were originally not intended by the planners in the higher authorities. The rigorous Soviet family policy, which was not focused on therapy but on admonishing, was blaming and punishing parents and children for social ills like joblessness and alcohol abuse. One can speak of a general strategy of shifting responsibility from the state to individuals for failures in societal experiments. In Lovozero, many Sami families have been exposed to this strategy, and the remedial school took a key role in these processes, to which I will take a closer look.
Paper proposal by:
Lukas Allemann
Researcher, PhD Cand.
Northern Cultures and Sustainable Natural Resource Politics Doctoral Programme
ORHELIA Project, Anthropology Research Team, Arctic Centre
University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
Mobile +358 40 4844418
Skype lukas.allemann
Personal home page
Blog arcticanthropology.org
Book septentrio.uit.no/samskrift
Presentation language: English
Individual paper:
“We were the incubator kids”: Narratives about education and family policy among Sámi people in the Soviet Union
People living in the Arctic have had decisions made about them far away in Southern capital cities, be it in Russia, Norway or any other Northern country. The ORHELIA (Oral History of Empires by Elders in the Arctic) research project, within which I have been working on my PhD thesis, aims to looking at state-individual relations in the eyes of Arctic indigenous elders, by using the method of life history analysis and oral history fieldwork combined with anthropological participant observation.
One of the common threads of all field sites of the ORHELIA project throughout the Finnish and Russian Arctic have been stories about boarding schools for indigenous children. In my paper, I will focus on the still little-known history of the so-called remedial boarding school in Lovozero, to which many Soviet Sámi children with ‘learning deficiencies’ have been sent. The comparison between oral history testimonies and documents from the archives reveals details about certain dynamics inside the boarding schools, which often were originally not intended by the planners in the higher authorities. The rigorous Soviet family policy, which was not focused on therapy but on admonishing, was blaming and punishing parents and children for social ills like joblessness and alcohol abuse. One can speak of a general strategy of shifting responsibility from the state to individuals for failures in societal experiments. In Lovozero, many Sami families have been exposed to this strategy, and the remedial school took a key role in these processes, to which I will take a closer look.