Commodifying Sámi culture in an indigenous tourism site

Helen Kelly-Holmes, Sari Pietikäinen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 Sámiland. 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 host - in terms of the interplay between English as a tourist lingua franca, Finnish as national language, and to a limited extent the local Inari Sámi and Northern Sámi languages. We argue that the stakes involved in producing cultural tourism are potentially higher in indigenous, minority language sites.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)518-538
Number of pages21
JournalJournal of Sociolinguistics
Volume18
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sep 2014

Keywords

  • Commodification
  • Cultural tourism
  • Indigenous languages
  • Periphery
  • Scripts
  • Sámi

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Commodifying Sámi culture in an indigenous tourism site'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this