One of the most consequential transformations for many aboriginal societies was that from a foraging economy to a pastoral economy. Among arctic and subarctic reindeer-herding peoples in northern Eurasia, it manifested from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in a movement that implied a radical shift in economic focus. People went from living foremost on fishing-hunting and gathering, with small numbers of domesticated reindeer mainly for transport, to reindeer pastoralism with large reindeer herds. The geographical scale of the transformation was huge, as it took place among culturally divergent reindeer-herding groups throughout northern Eurasia, spanning from the Chukchee by the North Pacific in northeastern Asia all the way to the Sami by the Atlantic in northwestern Europe. It was also a fairly swift process; in just a couple of centuries almost all reindeer-herding societies in this vast area had either become pastoralists or disappeared. Although it was a massive transition, rather close to our time, remarkably little is known about what consequences it had on local governance and social relations for the groups involved, as well as on their relations to outsiders.
The presentation will address how the transformation of the economy impacted social relations by focusing on early modern Sami in Northwest Fennoscandia. Of particular interest is how the economy developed for foraging and pastoralist households. Did different way of utilising the commons lead to an economic gap between the groups? And if so, how was this inequality manifested?
