Perforated and Fractured Territories

Abstract

The thesis explores the socio-territorial orientation of Finnmark, northern Norway, in relation to the growing international interest for the development of the mineral industry. This interest is met locally with directly opposing views, favouring on the one hand the cultural development related to land-based practices, and on the other hand exploiting Finnmarks high resource potential for the benefit of municipal growth and job development. Difficulties arise with the geographic distribution of ethnicities. Proposed developments of the mineral industry find more support in coastal areas and although most indigenous Sámi find their home inland, they depend to a large degree for their livelihood on this coastal areas. The current fractured political landscape is highly related to and tied up with the complex history of internal center-periphery dynamics, colonization and stigmatization, which took (and in a way are still taking) place under the flagship of national assimilation policies of ‘norwegianization’, sustaining Finnmarks not-so-postcolonial present. In this perspective, three mining cases are of interest, due to the different social and political responses to the mining plans: Nussir in Kvalsund, Bidjovagge in Kautokeino and Sydvaranger in Sør-Varanger. Motivations behind decision-making on these cases illustrate clearly the conflicts of interests and demonstrate the difficulties for coexistence of directly opposing world views. Through an understanding of the formation of societal strata, the argument of the thesis unfolds over an in-depth spatiotemporal and on-site analysis of the cases and their specific socio-territorial setting in Finnmark. I argue that we should look more critically at the tendentious role of the modus operandi of urbanists and geologists (more specifically of resource mappers), in their way of influencing decision-making and framing and shaping cultural life, especially in contested territories. The thesis then moves towards a possible way forward through redesigning our conventional tools and methods for a more inclusive territorial-based endogenous growth model, such an inclusive growth model has the potential to bring together on the long term the opposing visions and ideas on the future of the mining industry and the preservation of indigenous culture. I end by arguing that knowledge building from a combined perspective has the potential to evolve the acceptance amongst cultures abiding by different worldviews. Effectively, the newly proposed geological era of the Anthropocene, proposes also the updating modern science with cultural diversity, asking for renewed responses away from the modern tradition.