ABSTRACT
Using the concepts of ‘sportification’ and ‘indigenisation’, this article sets out to analyse the development of lassoing as a competitive sport among the Sámi, an Indigenous population residing in Northeastern Europe. With a particular interest in deviations from the characteristic features of modern sport (such as universal measurability, fairness, and standardisation of rules and equipment), our intention is to depict alternate developments and new directions for how sports are organised and performed in a postmodern (and post-colonial) context. While lassoing has been ‘sportified’ within a process of decontextualisation – in which the logic of work was replaced by the forms of competition – Sámi lassoing simultaneously challenges the claims of the universality of modern sport. For example, lassoing is a sport open solely to the Sámi people, and one of its primary objectives is to reflect the traditional culture of Sámi reindeer herding. We conceptualise this process as the ‘indigenisation of sport’, which makes it possible to describe and analyse the differences between a general concept of sport (i.e. sportification) and a situational and contextual comprehension of sport (i.e. indigenisation).
