Managing Sámi culture-based tourist experiences in northern Fennoscandia: A case study about working in Indigenous tourism

Abstract

This exploratory research aims to understand what is needed to bring Sámi culture-based tourist experiences in northern Fennoscandia to a success, seen from a managerial point of view. It does so by identifying the different internal and external experience components that require management by the experience hosts to ensure goal attainment, how these components interact, as well as the context in which experience delivery takes place. This question is answered by ways of a case study, taking a predictor-criterion approach to the research.

The research identifies three main goals hosts have in providing their experiences, which serve the overarching goal of attaining agentic representation of Sámi culture in the Indigenous tourism sector of northern Fennoscandia. These goals are knowledge dissemination about Sámi culture, experience memory building, and allyship building. Management takes place at an in vivo experience level, focused on shaping and regulating its human-to-human elements before and during the provision. It further takes place on a broader scale when it comes to cooperating with other actors in the (Indigenous) tourism sector and positioning the work vis-à-vis communal and national contexts.

Representation is found to be local and sectoral in nature. It firstly results from the act and outcomes of providing experiences by an individual host or actor. Secondly, it results from the accumulated effects of individual actors and their behavior, in terms of placemaking and marketing while reinforcing imaginaries and signifiers. Agentic representation is argued to enable change in portraying Indigenous culture towards more inclusive forms on a sectoral level. This inclusiveness speaks to aspirations to become more diverse and multi-dimensional in signifier-low forms of representation. Representation is agentic when it happens in line with ethical tourism, against the backdrop of a host, connect, share framework, and as such denotes Indigenous cultural self-determination. Concurrently, however, relying on an imaginary heavy depiction of culture – as the act and outcome of individual and collective representation – can not only harm how Sámi people are perceived by guests and the public but also bar the development towards inclusive representation.

Key words: Sámi tourism, Indigenous tourism, management, predictor-criterion variable approach