Antiphony

The novel presents a wonderful picture of Sami culture in transition and in the face of inevitable outside forces. In this sense it is a much more universal work demonstrating how an indigenous culture reacts to a dominant culture and what happens over the course of a relatively short period. The novel is also an anti- or non-ethnography in a sense, blurring the lines between the center/periphery (narrator/Sami women). Stien has set her novel in a Sami village at the end of the 20th century. The narrator is a young woman from Oslo who travels to Finnmark to gather material a book.