Paper short abstract:

This paper examines motivations and skills of Lulesámi women’s everyday crafts production as dialogues between multiple forms of relations such as the body, morality, and material. These relations will be of anthropological interests embodying particular values and actions interpreted as a form of aesthetic system.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the motivations, skills and consequences of Lulesámi women's everyday crafts production in Norway. Through ethnography, I demonstrate that the making and using of crafts is a dialogue between multiple forms of relations embodying particular values and actions which can be interpreted as constituting a system of aesthetics. "How can this aesthetics be defined?" and "In which ways does it come into being?" By focusing on the weaving of an avve (belt) for the gappte ('folk-costume'), these questions are discussed through the interconnectedness of the body, material, tools, techniques, politics, morality and history as they emerge in the present. Through the entanglement of these processes, an aesthetics materializes as a way of being and thinking. Learning processes and skills are considered actions becoming and being made within such an aesthetics. Craft is described as enabling people to do certain things. The maker has to learn what the craft is enabling people to do, and how to create this enabling into being. Whilst this is a process that demands skills in inter-personal communication, execution, and community consent, a craftswoman emphasises that "You learn by yourself!" The paper will examine aesthetics as a willingness to learn through ongoing processes of highly personalized engagement within the social environment and with one's own body. This also puts into question the recent division within the Sámi language between dájdda (art) as an individual expression, and duodje (crafts) as utilitarian objects merely representing collectively shared traditions-understood as 'ethnic', as these seem to merge ethnographically.