Groupismi alkuperäiskansan määrittelyssä : tapaustutkimus Suomen alkuperäiskansakonfliktista

Författare

• Jarno Valkonen
• Sanna Valkonen
• Timo Koivurova

Abstract

The article addresses the problems of defining an indigenous people by deconstructing the Sámi discussion of Finland, aggravated by the aim to ratify the ILO Convention No. 169. We argue that the apparent ethno-political conflict engendered by this aim is a consequence of groupism by which we mean, following Rogers Brubaker, the tendency to take discrete, bounded groups as chief protagonists of social conflicts, the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations, and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed, and the tendency to reify such groups as if they were unitary collective actors with common purposes. The aim of the article is to deconstruct groupistic thinking related to indigenous rights by analytically separating the concepts of group and category. This enables deconstructing the ethnicized conflict and analyzing what kinds of political, social and cultural aspects the conflict contains. Our article concludes that indigenousness is not an ethno-cultural, objectively existing fact or substance but rather a frame of political requirements.