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<P align="justify"> Lappology was th … <P align="justify"> Lappology was the traditional study of Lapland and the Saami people. It was vitiated by numerous scientific and social prejudices, such as a search for the exotic, a Romantic concept of man, → social Darwinism, and so on. Generally Lappology described Saami culture from the outside, a fact which is expressed by the very word from which its name was derived, → Lapp, an exonym for Saami. That is why modern scholarship has adopted the name Saami Studies.</P> <P align="justify"> Lappology can be considered to have begun with Johannes Schefferus work [[Lapponia (a book)|Lapponia]] (1673). From then up to the breakthrough of Romanticism (starting in 1810), research had no intrinsic scientific value; its aims were political (Schefferus) and above all religious (von Westen, Pehr Högström, etc.) It was thought that a knowledge of Saami culture was important in order to facilitate the religious conversion of the Saami (Missionary work, history). Missionaries also distinguished themselves by confiscating shamans drums, which because of the curiosity value of the Saami ended up in faraway European museums. One of the favourite themes of the earliest phase of Lappology was the attempt the discover the origins of the Saami (Theories of origin (pre-scientific)) In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries research and the collection of cultural objects produced a group of studies that are considered the classic sources of Lappology; their particular value lies in the fact that the Saami pre-Christian view of the world was still part of a living tradition. However, problems related to the reliability of these sources are considerable because the writers tended to borrow from one another without attributions; thus only some of the classic sources can be considered primary. This is a problem to which Saami Studies has only recently begun to pay sufficient attention. During the Romantic period (1810 40), folklore material was often regarded as a document of natural religion (Lars Levi Laestadius), an image of the character of the people or then as a blurred historical source (A. Fjellner).</P>
<P align="justify"> Modern Lappology can be considered to have begun somewhere around the middle of the nineteenth century. It then formed part of comparative anthropology and ethnography. At the same time, its interpretations began to be influenced by whatever scientific and social paradigms prevailed at the time. Especially after Darwin s On the Origin of Species (1859), anthropology and ethnography, and the social policy that was based on them, soon shifted from a Herderian conception of nationhood to an evolutionist approach. Associated with this was the interpretation of the pre-Christian religion of the Saami according to the theory of the development of religion, for example as an expression of animism and ancestor worship and as a proof of the validity of these theories. The interest in Saami culture, on the other hand, was often based on devolutionism, which represents the obverse of evolutionism in the scientific theory of culture. Because the products of a folk culture were considered to belong to the early primitive stages of its historical development, they were assumed to degenerate and disappear (devolution) as the people itself developed. Since the Saami had undergone evolution as a result of their contacts with neighbouring peoples, from the point of view of Saami culture this was considered to entail devolution. As the Saami were regarded as a less developed people, it was natural to assume that many of the features of their culture had been borrowed from more highly developed neighbouring peoples (diffusionism); consequently it was believed that Saami culture could reveal something about the early stages of the dominant culture. The presupposition was that primitive cultures were conservative in character, i.e. unwilling to renounce features once they had adopted them. This was based on the idea that folklore products were isolated objects living independent existences without any connection to the culture that bore them. They were seen as dysfunctional relics. Support and scientific legitimacy for the disparagement of Saami culture was provided the geographical-historical school (also known as the Finnish school) of Julius and Kaarle Krohn that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it charted the geographical shifts of folklore elements and the concomitant changes in them. Alongside this mainstream, which at the time was considered scientific, there was a romantic tributary in twentieth-century literature dealing with the Saami that was devolutionist in approach but positive in attitude: the Saami, living as they did on the periphery, were seen as the last uncorrupted people.</P>
<P align="justify"> The founder of modern Lappology can be considered to be Jens → Friis (1821 96), who in 1859 published the first collection of Saami folklore, and in 1871 a work about Saami folk religion. Friis already had a typical devolutionist attitude to Saami culture, which he considered to be less developed than Scandinavian culture, and which he believed would soon disappear according to the laws of cultural evolution. As a theologian and a clergyman, however, he was concerned about the religious education of the Saami; therefore in practice, he not only did not demand the active Norwegianization of the Saami but in fact opposed it. Another factor that softened his attitude towards the Saami was that he saw the Saami through the idealistic prism of the Romantic age as some kind of noble savages . The works, and particularly the social activities, of Norway s greatest Lappologist, Just Knut Qvigstadin (1853 1957), are marked by some extreme evolutionist-diffusionist views. However, his strong devolutionist conviction drove him to undertake the energetic collection of folklore items, the valuable fruit of which was born in his four-volume collection of folklore Lappiske eventyr og sagn Lappish Tales and Stories (1927 29). Modern Norwegian Lappology, in particular, attempted to derive practically the whole of Saami culture from Scandinavian models. Although the same social and scientific paradigms prevailed in all the Nordic countries, Norwegian Lappology took on a more hostile attitude to Saami culture because scholarship there aligned itself with the policy of Norwegianization (→ Assimilation). Many Swedish, Danish and Finnish scholars, such as Uno Holmberg (later: Uno Harva, 1882 1949) also supported the diffusionist paradigm. On the other hand, in retrospect one can regard the theory-governed explanation of the ancient religion of the Saami as the besetting sin of Swedish and Finnish scholars; for example, the Swede Edgar Reuterskiöld (1872 1932) attempted to argue for the theory of animatism (the personification of nature), and a book Samefolkets religion The Religion of the Saami by the Swedish-speaking Finn Rafael Karstenin (1879 1956) was part of his overall attempt to find the origin of primitive religions in animism (the ascription of psychic qualities to nature). Again, a post-Rousseauesque approach was represented by the most important Nordic folklorist of the nineteenth century, Samuli Paulaharju (1875-1944), whose manuscripts are redolent of admiration and respect for the Saami people. However, his material reflects his attempt to find an ideal type, a genuine man of the people , and this constitutes a problem with regard to its reliability as a source. The same problem applies to Erik Therman. This romanticizing of Saami culture with its accompanying problems relating to the critical treatment of sources similarly besets the work of the ethnographer V.V. Charnoslussky, who was working in Russian Lapland at the same time. The Swedish ethnographer Ernst Manker (1893 1972) and the Finn T. I. Itkonen can be regarded as positive exceptions to the theoretically and ideologically governed approaches of the golden age of Lappology, which lasted from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, although their interpretations, too, are limited by the fact that they are based on the perspective of outsiders; and the same can be said of the Norwegian Örnulf Vorren (1916).</P>
<P align="justify"> Although the evolutionist-diffusionist approach constituted the dominant paradigm in Lappology for almost a century, at the end of the twentieth century scholars doing research into Saami culture renounced theory-oriented attitudes and adopted a culture-internal perspective, rejecting the term Lappology in preference for a new name: Saami Studies . This development was triggered by the practice of some earlier scholars, such as the above-mentioned Rafael Karsten and particularly the Swedish Saami ethnographer, Israel Ruong, who replaced the exonym Lapp/Lappish with the ethnonym Saami . In this context, a culturally internal perspective also entails the significant contribution of the Saami themselves in scholarship about their own people. From the point of view of Saami research, one can distinguish Lars Levi Laestadius (1800 1861) as an early exponent of an internal point of view within Lappology and the forerunner of the whole of modern Saami Studies (Laestadius Fragments of Lappish Mythology).</P>Fragments of Lappish Mythology).</P> +
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