| Summary: | In 1993, Sweden instituted the Sámi Parliament (Sámediggi) as a state agency with the main purpose of representing the indigenous Sámi people externally, as well as monitoring internal cultural affairs, governed by a popularly elected assembly. In the absence of official statistics on the Sámi population, or any formally recognized approaches to define who should count as Sámi, one of the challenging tasks was to create an accurate register of all those who would be eligible to take part in the elections. The idea was to design an electoral roll that would be normatively neutral and have no other functions beyond its core function of being a list of eligible voters, a concept that had already been put in use during the previous initiations of the Sámi Parliaments in Norway and Finland. Previous research from similar contexts, most prominently Norway, shows that electoral rolls of this sort might be attributed other functions by indigenous populations, especially in the absence of other formal devices that can be used to confirm their indigenous identity. It appears that the electoral roll might, under certain circumstances, assume an important and far-reaching role in indigenous institution building. In Sweden, however, similar research is missing. In this study, I examine perceptions within the indigenous Sámi community regarding the central functions of the electoral roll using a constructivist, discourse-theoretic approach. A systematic mapping out of the discourse surrounding the electoral roll, as reflected in public records from within the political sphere of the Sámi Parliament and relevant accounts in Sámi media, reveals that the electoral roll is attributed functions by the Sámi population that go far beyond its original, formalistic design. The act of formally defining a people, regardless of the limitations of the purpose, can seemingly cause unintended and far-reaching consequences, especially when the people itself does not control the definition. The analysis shows a fundamental conflict regarding ...
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