Scandinavian Anthropology, Eugenics, and the Post-Colonial Geneticization of Sami Culture
Scandinavian Anthropology, Eugenics, and the Post-Colonial Geneticization of Sami Culture

Summary/Abstract: Multidisciplinary Swedish/Sami religious reformer Lars Levi Laestadius, played a defining role in the medicalization of Sami and Swedish national identity in the development of colonial science in Scandinavia. Promoting a gendered concept of ‘nervousness’ inherent in Sami blood, a succession of eugenicists then popularized psychiatric theories of Sami inferiority late into the twentieth century. The ideologies emerged after a group of Sami Laestadians in Kautokeino, Norway murdered representatives of the government in 1852 in a revolt against trade practices and restrictions on reindeer herding. The hereditarian view of Sami mentality associated with female sexuality eventually led to the sterilization of Sami women and expanded medical research on Sami people. In transnational colonial experience, a cultural crisis was created among the Sami diaspora in North America. Emigrating to the United States and Canada in a mass migration between 1860 and 1920 to escape poverty, racism, and practice Laestadianism freely, Sami descendants are now reclaiming their indigenous identity. However, bio-identification through mtDNA as marketed by the current commercial genomics industry to those Sami assimilated into Scandinavian immigrant communities in North America may re-stigmatize the Sami as a collective. This article examines historical continuity between Swedish colonial medicine and contemporary eugenics impacting the Sami and argues a new cross-cultural scientific approach to major psychoses is required in psychiatry.

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