Natalia Magnani – författare

Silent Knowledge explores a contemporary example of Indigenous cultural revival in Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, to investigate issues of embodied cultural memory.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, Natalia Magnani follows a collaboration between Finnish builders and Sääʹm (Skolt Sámi) reindeer herders and fishers of northeastern Finland to build a traditional Petsamo root-sewn boat. As these makers adjust their environmental perceptions and relearn barely remembered root-sewing and woodworking techniques, their restoring of material production suggests a "loud" silent, or tacit, knowledge: uncodified skills and wisdom gained through experience that are socially meaningful and politically empowering.

Silent Knowledge unpacks the social and political dynamics of crafting cultural memory for future generations. Magnani demonstrates embodiment as transformation, showing that embodied practice can mediate tensions over who has the right to shape culture by positioning non-Indigenous participants in supporting roles, while keeping Indigenous people firmly at the centre of their own distinct history.

The Craft of Belonging explores the role of craft and its mediation of social boundaries, particularly in communities that are under state pressure. Anthropologists Matthew Magnani and Natalia Magnani blend anthropology and archaeology to explore the role of craft in community-making from prehistory to present with the Sámi, the Indigenous peoples of Northern Europe. Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, has sat at a material crossroads for millennia. Forests, tundras, and extended social networks offered raw materials autochthonous and imported. Wood, antler, cloth, and silver were crafted to cope with Arctic climates and state incursions. Integrating archaeological, ethnographic and Indigenous perspectives to reveal the transformative nature of material culture, The Craft of Belonging shows how long-term perspectives accentuate the shifting meanings and malleability of material social boundaries. Local agencies intersect with changing trade networks, colonialism and climate change, to resonate through the production, uses and signals of Sámi craft (duodji). This book thus contends that ancestral material cultures, far from static cultural domains, are innovative sites of social transformation used to assert rights to land, water, and community belonging.

The Craft of Belonging explores the role of craft and its mediation of social boundaries, particularly in communities that are under state pressure. Anthropologists Matthew Magnani and Natalia Magnani blend anthropology and archaeology to explore the role of craft in community-making from prehitory to present with the Sámi, the Indigenous peoples of Northern Europe. Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, has sat at a material crossroads for millennia. Forests, tundras, and extended social networks offered raw materials autochthonous and imported. Wood, antler, cloth, and silver were crafted to cope with Arctic climates and state incursions. Integrating archaeological, ethnographic and Indigenous perspectives to reveal the transformative nature of material culture, The Craft of Belonging shows how long-term perspectives accentuate the shifting meanings and malleability of material social boundaries. Local agencies intersect with changing trade networks, colonialism and climate change, to resonate through the production, uses and signals of Sámi craft (duodji). This book thus contends that ancestral material cultures, far from static cultural domains, are innovative sites of social transformation used to assert rights to land, water, and community belonging.