Valerie Stalder

The Lapp people are a strange phenomenon, aren't they? I have a little book by Valerie Stalder called Lapland. It was part of a series called This Beautiful World, published in 1971 by Kodansha, Tokyo. I love these old series. I've seen a few and own a couple. They usually deal with different cultures, different countries (Time Life), the whole material world, animals, or the sciences.
In The Beautiful World series I have only Lapland. The cover shows an image of a reindeer looking quizzically at the camera as it stands prepared to pull a sled. It is a beautiful creature, and looking at it now I feel quite sorry for it that it is thought of so objectively by the Lapp people. Nevertheless, the Lapps probably treat their herds better than any other people on earth. The reindeer mostly roam free, herded by Lapp dogs, but able to graze as they like. They are prized by the Lapps, and treated accordingly, although without much feeling.
I wondered how a people can spend their lives with a group of animals and still kill them. It is a curious way of thinking that people have cultivated so that they can exploit the animal for its resources.
The Lapps are also quite strange looking. There are a helluva lot of photos in this book, and none of them show the Lapps as anything but a gnome-like people with a penchant for dressing identically. Their facial expressions are often aloof, suspicious, or simple.
I do like that they have retained a culture amidst the changes that happen around them. But what is a culture? It is a human-made construct. A way of living and behaving and communicating with each other in a group. I am not overly keen on the Lapps, though they are a quiet peaceful type, when they're not slaughtering reindeer. They remind me of people who live in backward towns, who stick to their own way of doing things and never change, never aspire to know more. It is not the type of life I would ever want for myself. It is primitive and repetitive. And although we like to look romantically at these simple lives and say "wouldn't it be nice to live so simply", would we really? What you are asking for is a regression back to a closed limited community, and with one life why would I want to spend it living like that? No books, no movies, no technology, no explorations of anything. Their lives are: religion, coffee, reindeer, snow and custom. I could take some snow and reindeer, but the rest makes for a bloody awful time.
Of course, this book was written in 1971. Much of what is recounted in it hasn't changed for some Lapp people. The Lapps are now known as Sami, and they have expanded their culture to include Universities, pop music and other forays into the rest of modern society. You can see many people identifying as Sami but without any distinguishing cultural features. The Sami are allowed sole rights to reindeer herding in Lapland and, according to Wikipedia, some 2800 people still live their lives with the deer.… (plus d'informations)