Umeå University's logo

The author points out that Gill is clearly focused on disproving the historical existence of widespread ideas of a Mother Earth, and of the name Mother Earth and argues that this does not mean that the proper name Mother Earth is completely missing in ethnographic reports prior to Albrecht Dietrich’s Mutter Erdeand the Romanticists of the nineteenth century. The article explores two examples from ethnographies about the Sami people where terms that could reasonably be translated as "Mother Earth" are quite independent of a romantic image of ‘primitive‘ people.

Konsta Kaikkonens avhandling er en kildekritisk studie av noen av de historiske kildene til det forfatteren kaller noaidevuohta, dvs. funksjoner, tradisjoner og fenomener knyttet til de sentrale rituelle spesialistene (noaidit) i det nordsamiske området. Målet er å utføre «an autopsy on the concept of Saami shamanism», gjennom kontekstualisering av kilder og forfatterposisjoner i forhold til noaidevuohta, til det samiske, til andre tekster om samme anliggender, og til diskurser, paradigmer, idehistoriske strømninger og samfunnsmessige forhold

In this essay the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the concept ‘religion’ is analysed in relation to how it was applied to the so-called shamanism of the indigenous peoples of the Soviet North. The point of departure is the correspondence between the head of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults in the Soviet Far East and his superior in Moscow. Further, the legal consequences of the somewhat varying Soviet understandings of ‘religion’ for people adhering to indigenous worldviews and ritual traditions in the Far East is presented.The essay aims to exemplify how definitions of ‘religion’, as well as the categorising of something as ‘religion’ or not, rely on social and political circumstances, and whether one finds ‘religion’, as well as the entities classified as such, to be positive or negative for the individual and society.