Meaning or presence? Ways of knowing of the Sámi yoik
This article approaches an Indigenous singing tradition, the yoik, practiced by the Sámi people in the north of Europe, as a way of knowing the environment through presence rather than meaning. The yoik consists of short unaccompanied melodies, often without lyrics, sung in everyday life, associated...
| Published in: | American Anthropologist |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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2022
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10852/101109 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13742 |
| Summary: | This article approaches an Indigenous singing tradition, the yoik, practiced by the Sámi people in the north of Europe, as a way of knowing the environment through presence rather than meaning. The yoik consists of short unaccompanied melodies, often without lyrics, sung in everyday life, associated with a specific being (typically a person, an animal, or a place), and intended to make that being present. By exploring this capacity to invoke and intensify the environment's presence, this article seeks to take the yoik seriously and thereby offer a counternarrative to both semiotic and logocentric understandings of knowledge and human/nonhuman relationships. [knowledge, singing, semiotics, nonhuman, Sámi] |
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