Commodifying Sámi culture in an indigenous tourism site

Abstract

Cultural tourism has become an alternative economic activity in many indigenous sites, and local tourist providers compete globally by commodifying their culture in an efficient, attractive manner. This process is not however a straightforward one, because of the need to manage both the multilingual context and the interaction between host and tourists, and this can lead to tensions for all parties. We examine a Reindeer Farm in the indigenous language space of S amiland. Based on a long-term ethnography, we identify different scripts which are used within the tourist encounter to pre-empt and manage tensions around the legitimacy of the host, the collusion and cooperation between host and tourists, and the differing linguistic resources of tourists and hostin terms of the interplay between English as a tourist lingua franca, Finnish as national language, and to a limited extent the local Inari S ami and Northern S ami languages. We argue that the stakes involved in producing cultural tourism are potentially higher in indigenous, minority language sites.

Discourses of cultural heritage in times of crisis: The case of the Parthenon Marbles

“…Particularly in relation to tourism studies, scholars have addressed issues of commodifying authenticity in touristic heritage sites (e.g. Kelly‐Holmes and Pietikäinen ) and have shown the multiple and often contradictory discourses that construct the ‘in/authentic’ in promotional material and everyday discourses (Coupland and Coupland ). Much less attention has been paid to the construction of heritage in public political discourse, however, and our paper seeks to contribute to rectifying this omission.…”

“…In a neoliberal setting, the commercial heritage industry commodifies symbolic representations of the past into heritage products ‘as part of a modern consumption of entertainment’, such as strategically enacted neo‐ecotourism where people expect, for instance, to be photographed next to the ‘real’ Incas in Peru (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge : 1; Kelly‐Holmes and Pietikäinen ). Accordingly, the value of heritage becomes a quantifiable notion and a tradable one too (e.g.…”

A comparative corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of hosts in promotional tourism discourse

“…Since then, the research on tourism discourse has grown to include a variety of contexts, media and genres (e.g. Jaworski et al, 2003a;Jaworski et al, 2003b;Thurlow and Jaworski, 2003;Heller and Pujolar, 2009;Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010a;Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010b;Kelly-Holmes and Pietikäinen, 2014). These studies are mostly located in the field of Sociolinguistics and Social Semiotics and focused specifically on the role of languages and images in constructing the tourist experience.…”

“…Moreover, many of the studies make frequent references to linguistic concepts such as language, discourse or metaphor, but these tend not to be grounded in a systematic discourse-linguistic analysis. Unfortunately, linguists have shown little interest in the representations of hosts in tourism discourse, with the exception of work by Galasiński and Jaworski (2003), Jaworski et al (2003b) and Kelly-Holmes and Pietikäinen (2014).…”

Semiotic rural landscapes and the performance of community in villages

“…The advertising strategies of the local catering trade thus use the regional language as an indicator of tradition and quaintness, achieving the latter by applying diminutives such as the Low German diminutive suffix -ke or adjectives such as lüttje ("small"). Similar forms of linguistic commodification of smaller or minority languages can be observed in many tourist destinations across the world, albeit predominantly in the Global North, in order to create non-threatening cultural "otherness" for tourist consumption (see, e.g.,Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014;Heller, Jaworski, & Thurlow, 2014;Kelly- Holmes & Pietikäinen, 2014;Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Jaffe & Coupland 2016).…”