| Summary: | The Sámi people of Scandinavia are a group of indigenous people who for the most part reside within an area known as Sápmi where they engage with their traditional, social and cultural realities while also being full participants in the modern day Nordic existence. When it comes to the Sámi youth, they are faced with a perplexing, extraordinary and distinctive negotiation of figuring out who they are within the overall coexistence of their traditional and modern selves. This thesis seeks to understand, describe, analyse and conceptualise the complex identities of young Sámi indigenous people through a long-term, cooperative, cross-section exploration into the contextual reality of a group of young Sámi existing within a certain time and space in the heart of Sápmi. In this study more than two years worth of ethnographic data collected in the field with young Sámi participants is processed in order to conceptualise the findings into a comprehensive understanding of the Sámi youth complex, multifaceted and dynamic identities. This gave rise to the novel idea and theory of the identity prism and its functionalities as a way forward for discussing and comprehending human identity. The identity prism as a superordinate unit of understanding the self offers an in-depth exposition of the anthropological meaning of the individual identity as created by both the private thought of the self and the social meaning of the shared environments in a dynamic system of interactions, exchanges, reflections, refractions and self-continuity. As part of the overall power hierarchy, the prismatic understanding of identity in terms of the self and the other proposes a way of perception of the modern, multicultural, globalised reality by considering the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of human identity.
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