The Craft of Yoiking: Philosophical Variations on Sámi Chants

American Anthropologist, 2022

This article approaches an Indigenous singing tradition, the yoik, practiced by the Sámi people in the north of Europe, as a way of knowing the environment through presence rather than meaning. The yoik consists of short unaccompanied melodies, often without lyrics, sung in everyday life, associated with a specific being (typically a person, an animal, or a place), and intended to make that being present. By exploring this capacity to invoke and intensify the environment's presence, this article seeks to take the yoik seriously and thereby offer a counternarrative to both semiotic and logocentric understandings of knowledge and human/nonhuman relationships.

Cahiers de littérature orale, 2020

The yoik is a vocal technique used by the Sámi people in the northernmost part of Europe. It consists in short circular melodies chanted a cappella and intended to make a person, an animal, or a place present. In the view of many “yoikers,” it is a gift received from the environment that you learn through participation and experimentation. This paper uses the concept “enchantment” as a conceptual bias to comment on two encounters: an anecdote about a yoiker who managed to frighten a couple of elk by chanting the bear’s melody and a Sámi poem about the yoiking wind. These encounters address, in turn, the way humans can yoik to animals and the way non‑humans can yoik to humans, displaying in both cases how chants may affect the perception of a place.

Ung Uro: Unsettling Climates in Nordic Art, Architecture and Design , 2021

Can a human become a bear? Starting from an analysis of Sami yoik, this chapter suggests how the notion of becoming-animal could shed a light on this musical practice and bring out some relevant ethico-aesthetical implications. The concept of becoming-animal, as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, emphasises the proximity of the human and the non-human realm and, along with the yoik, shows the illusory nature of their division. The chapter discusses this theoretical-practical nexus and examines the potentialities of music and sound worlds in fostering a different arrangement of the way we perceive the world—freed from anthropocentrism’s chains and contiguous with a non-human sensitivity.

Speki. Nordic Philosophy and Education Review, 2024

2023

Why Sámi Sing is an anthropological inquiry into a singing practice found among the Indigenous Sámi people, living in the northernmost part of Europe. It inquires how the performance of melodies, with or without lyrics, may be a way of altering perception, relating to human and non-human presences, or engaging with the past. According to its practitioners, the Sámi "yoik" is more than a musical repertoire made up by humans: it is a vocal power received from the environment, one that reveals its possibilities with parsimony through practice and experience. Following the propensity of Sámi singers to take melodies seriously and experiment with them, this book establishes a conversation between Indigenous and Western epistemologies and introduces the "yoik" as a way of knowing in its own right, with both convergences and divergences vis-à-vis academic ways of knowing. It will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Indigenous studies.

The problem of universals in cross-cultural studies, 2021

This article offers a critique of the notion of "universals" in cross-cultural studies on music and emotions based on empirical observations and philosophical arguments. The empirical material comes from experiments with songs evoking animals and belonging to the Indigenous Sámi "yoik" tradition. Participants from the Belgian Ardenne untrained to the yoik (N = 114, age 4-79) listened to recordings and tried to guess which animal was evoked. While their scores were significantly above chance level, additional data about their own environment and relationships to animals illustrate that interpretations in terms of "universals" would obscure the interrelational processes and (productive or unproductive) "misrecognitions" at work during the experiments. By analogy, this illustrates the need for a down-to-earth approach in cross-cultural studies on music that acknowledges the creative role of experimental designs and laboratory conditions in the production of universals. This approach may imply a move away from the nature/culture divide and a renewed attention to experimental subjects in a postcolonial context, with the aim of informing us on the entanglement of human musicality in "relational places" and the productive biases these offer to relate across different environments.

2009

Abstract This study extends a previous study concerning melodic expectations in North Sami yoiks (Krumhansl et al., 2000) in which a comparison between expert and non-expert listeners demonstrated the existence of a core set of principles governing melodic expectancies. The previous findings are reconsidered using non-Western listeners (traditional healers from South Africa) in a modeling investigation.

Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North. Senses, Media and Power, 2024

This chapter focuses on the sonic aspects of dhikr, the ritual of “remembrance” of Allah, as performed by a Sufi brotherhood inside a Roma camp in Florence, Italy. The collective act of remembrance involves specific bodily techniques pertaining to different sensory registers (including the sonic, breathing, visual, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, and imaginative spheres), weaving a net of correspondences able to generate an all-embracing aesthetic/synaesthetic coherence, and generating a heightened sensitive experience, or hyperaesthesia. The sonic gestures, simultaneously enacted and perceived, are means to, and instantiations of, the experience of embodied remembrance, which is found at the meeting point of corresponding dichotomies: unity and multiplicity, self and other, eternal and contingent, steadiness and movement, repetition and variation, soloist singing and collective chanting.

2010

Recently, I read an essay by Tina Deschenie, the editor of the Tribal College Journal, on her memories and experiences of learning and teaching literature. She reminisced how, in her childhood, her father used to tell them – the children – stories about the Coyote in the Dine language. At home, she learned oral, traditional Dine stories and songs. However, she never got a chance to hear or learn them in school; neither was she ever taught anything about the written literature of the Dine. The stories they read in school were the ones that are found in famous American or European children‘s and young people‘s books and the so-called classics. She did not get to learn about traditional Indigenous narratives and works written by Indigenous people themselves until she began her studies at her tribal college of higher education (Deschenie 2007: 19).

2001

Music is ubiquitous in the social life of the Y olngu people of northeast Arnhem Land in northern Australia. Not only does it accompany virtually every phase of ritual, including dance, painting, and the production of sacred objects, but it is frequently performed in non-ritual contexts as well, purely for the enjoyment of performers and listeners alike. As such, an understanding of music provides a unique and privileged point of entry into the study of Yolngu culture as a whole. The ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger has written that an anthropology of music examines the ways in which music is an integral part of culture, while in contrast a musical anthropology examines the ways in which culture is musical and aspects of culture are created and re-created through musical performance. This dissertation is a work of musical anthropology. I provide a detailed examination of the form, content, and meaning of the songs of one particular group of Yolngu, the DhaJwangu people of the commun...