It is one of the quirks of Arctic studies that although the society and culture of the nomadic Lapps (Sámi) have been reasonably thoroughly documented by the field research of anthropologists, the life and social organization of the settled population of the same area has been little studied, and is generally not accessible to the scholarly world outside Fennoscandia. In this article I shall endeavpur to redress this imbalance to some extent, by discussing some aspects of the culture of the Finnish-speaking population of northern Torne Lappmark, paying particular attention to their relations with their reindeer-herding neighbours.

This article is based on studies of existing, rather limited, reports on health and disease among the Lapp population, and on my personal experience during 16 years of ‘front-line’ health work (1945–61) in northernmost Sweden. My work in Jukkasjärvi, Norrbotten county, some 300 km north of the Arctic Circle in the heartland of the Lapp world, provided daily contacts with Lapps and their problems; extensive travel and official field visits to camps and settlements helped to give me detailed knowledge of social and health conditions among the Lapp population.

On 28 November 1979 an Air New Zealand DC 10 aircraft on sight-seeing flight TE901 crashed into Mount Erebus, Ross Island in the Ross Dependency, Antarctica, killing all 257 people on board. The disaster and its subsequent investigation are of considerable concern not only for the New Zealand legal system, but also for the nascent discipline of Antarctic law (Auburn 1982).

The United States and Canada, like other northern industrial nations, are under considerable economic pressures to develop their indigenous resources of oil and natural gas. Incentives for exploration and development are provided by increases in the price of fuels on world markets and political instability in the Middle East, the major alternative source of supply. The Arab oil embargo of 1973–74 quadrupled prices per barrel from US$3.00 to US$12.00 in less than a year; since then the price on world markets has trebled and remains unstable. Searches for new sources of energy in the far north have led firstly to the discovery of major shore-based fields (for example those centred on Prudhoe Bay), and the extension of old ones (Norman Wells), and more recently to important developments off-shore. Many new sites are now being explored, and to date over two billion dollars have been spent by the US and Canada, to find and develop Arctic offshore wells. As yet not a cent has been earned in return, largely because there are at present no means of delivering the petroleum from offshore sites—no safe and reliable system of transportation equivalent to the pipelines from shore-based sites. Industry and government are considering alternatives, but no full-scale construction or procurement programmes have yet been launched.