The spiralling life of Sámi children: whirls of organism and Indigenous relational philosophies

Abstract The article investigates how meaning unfolds in the movements and entanglements of children, of teachers, of researchers, of animals, and of land—emerging in lived relations of meaning and otherness through the concrete whirls, swirls, and spirals of living together. It is grounded in an ethnographic narrative of an occasion when children from a Sámi Early Childhood Centre visited a reindeer gathering place in the mountains. With this narrative the article explores Stanley Cavell’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life as ‘whirls of organism’, alongside anthropologist Tim Ingold’s reference to such whirls. The whirl and the spiral are read as movements of relationality, as emphasized by Indigenous scholars such as Jo-Ann Archibald, Margaret Kovach, Rauna Kuokkanen, Shawn Wilson, and the Sámi poet Inga Ravna Eira. Through this discussion the article extends some of Cavell’s writings about otherness in terms of what relations between we, I, and you can mean when land is regarded as a first form of relation. Thus, the article portrays how Indigenous forms of thinking in practice provide grounds for thinking with Cavell’s whirls in relation to otherness in such a way as to involve relational life with the land.