International Human Adaptability Studies in Skot Sami Societies in the 196os

Abstract

This article investigates the work of a group of scientists who spent their summers in Sami villages in Northern Finland researching a then-emerging topic: human adaptability. Although their research began as a Finnish endeavour, based on the assumption that the people they examined – the Skolt Sami, Säʹmmlaž in their own language – constituted a primitive genetic isolate, it was incorporated into the International Biological Program’s Human Adaptability section (IBP – HA). As the program’s only common Nordic human adaptability project it attained a prominent place in Nordic adaptability studies. By aligning with this large and ambitious program Nordic researchers gained access to a growing scientific environment that programmatically claimed to have left behind old racial thinking, while at the same time classified research subjects according to pre-war definitions of racial types. Old concepts used in former studies of race were similarly maintained. The project made intrusive claims on the populations under investigation ranging from taking blood to collecting information about mentalities and private lives. Defining indigenous peoples as primitive and isolated influenced every stage of the research conducted on the Sami, and that image was also transmitted to the wider society.