Unsettling Production: Affective Geographies of Contested Commodities in Sápmi

Abstract

Indigenous culture is often commercialized for the benefit of non-Indigenous communities. Yet it is also important to examine the ways in which Indigenous agency shapes these markets. This article implements ethnographic mappings of production to nuance understandings of politicized commodities. It follows material networks of the “fake” souvenir Sámi hat—a highly contested symbol of cultural appropriation in the Finnish state areas of Sápmi, the Sámi transborder Indigenous homeland. The materiality of these objects reveals a complex production landscape in which small- and large-scale producers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, enact agency in making souvenirs. Meanwhile, spatial patterns of production and distribution suggest that Sámi institutions and actors affectively disrupt the making of appropriative material culture by leveling social controls on touristic production. Countering ideas of global capitalist hegemony, mapping the making and sale of commodities illuminates the spatially affective ways that Indigenous politics shape market economies as informal modes of governance. We further show that understanding complexities in cultural commodification has the potential to support Indigenous strivings to self-determine representations.