ABSTRACT
The Smi are indigenous inhabitants of the northern most regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia's Kola Peninsula and have traditionally drawn a livelihood from hunting, gathering and fishing and from around the sixteenth-century reindeer herding and small-farming. Ingold calls this ensemble the taskscape. Hence, just as every place is situated within a landscape, every task is situated within a taskscape. Though Smi people may nowadays carry maps with them or even sophisticated GPS devices, these are seldom if ever used for the purposes of orientation. In normal life, and in activities unrelated to official public time-tabling, people are relaxed and flexible. Smi people have a flexible attitude to the relation between the time needed to accomplish a task and individual styles of accomplishment. The space of dwelling, in the experience of Finnish settlers and indigenous Smi. The Smi view, clearly, is that timing has to be judged not by the clock but by a particular conjunction of auspicious circumstances.
