Hot emotions in cold landscapes. Towards spatial-emotional methodologies of interest development. Why research on Arctic winter tourism can ill afford to ignore the emotion of interest.

Abstract

The dissertation explores tourist encounters with two Arctic winter tourism contexts in Northern Norway. Through three ethnographic fieldworks on the coastal steamer Hurtigruten, and a small peninsula of eastern Finnmark called Ekkerøy, learning experiences are scrutinized. As tourists visit a region they know relatively little about beforehand, how important is the external scaffolding of these learning experiences? Through analyses of the emotion of interest (Silvia 2006), this work offer new insights for the domain of experience economy in tourism research (Dahl 2013). A spatial-emotional methodology is introduced combining knowledge from the disciplines of psychology and anthropology. As the candidate is an anthropologist this dissertation is a contribution in the social science domain, despite its obvious reliance upon psychological theory. It is argued that emotions are constructs that includes both heterogeneous and material environments and particular subjectively experiencing bodies (Lazarus 1991). As such, traditional ethnographic approaches to the study of emotions, which mainly emphasized the exogenic (environmental) aspect of the construct of emotion, needs to be expanded to include the endogenic (embodiment, subjective experience, motivation etc.). The dissertation thus contains a multi- method triangulation ethnography and an analytic autoethnography in addressing these demands as such approaches includes both self-reports as well as participant observation over time. Together they provide a temporal approach to the emotion of interest describing complex body-environment interplays that is previously not undertaken in interest research (Silvia 2006, Renninger and Hidi 2015).