The wet province – Drinking in Lapland

Abstract

Lapland is the most contradictory county in Finland. There are many legendary stories about ‘the wild North’, like lumberjacks, gold diggers and Santa Claus. Lapland is a visitor's province for which tourism is very important. It has the reputation of a province with heavy drinkers. Alcohol consumption is a peak in Lapland in Finland. We can call it a wet province.

There are three zones of alcohol use in Lapland: fell tourist resorts, urban areas and rural areas. Due to heavy tourism especially during late winter, tourism-specific consumption of alcoholic beverages is very high. The idea of drinking is still the same as the idea of getting drunk as whole in Finland. In terms of abstinence and alcohol use, the population of the northern countryside covers three social generations. The first generation is the rural prohibition generation, who have spent their adulthood in a totally or partly dry countryside. The second, rural wet generation, covers the age groups that were born in the 1950s and 1960s. They were the first generation to use alcohol in a uniform manner in the countryside. The third generation was born in the 1970s and 1980s. I call it the casual alcohol generation. The third generation has reached the drinking age with alcohol being freely available.

This article is mainly based on my previous research which is in Finnish language ‘Ottako vai ei …… Raittiuden ja alkoholin käytön sukupolvittaiset muutokset moraalivallin murtumisen ilmentyminä Pohjoisella maaseudulla 1980–2000-luvulla’. Only very few researches have paid attention to drinking habits in Lapland and the Sámi area. Because of a lack of research, we do not know how northern alcohol culture has changed within Finnish culture and within the different parts of Finnish society. There is need to research on alcohol use and its environmental effects in tourism resorts.

Notes

Notice of correction

The Early Online version of this article published online ahead of print on 25 Aug 2011, and the acknowledgement section was left out of the article. It has been added on the second to last page before the declaration of interest statement for the current version.

Notes

1. The research title has been translated in English by Tarja Orjasniemi (2005; ‘To Drink or Not to Drink… Changes in the Abstinence and in the Use of Alcohol after the End of Normative Control in the Northern Countryside from the 1980s to 2000s’. Rovaniemi: University of Lapland).