Sami Tourism and the Signposting of Spirituality. The Case of Sami Tour: a Spiritual Entrepreneur in the Contemporary Experience Economy

Abstract

The tourism industry provides an important insight into cultural heritage production and marketing. Therefore, it is also important to look at what elements and components are selected to represent a chosen culture in the context of tourism, where some cultural elements are placed at the forefront while others are silenced. There is an increasing tendency to highlight religious symbols and conceptions in the marketing of a tourist destination and many major tourist sites have developed largely as a result of their connections to sacred people, places and events. One of these sites is analysed, namely the location Sápmi as it is marketed on the tourism web portal www.samitour.no, where New Age spirituality in conjunction with local indigenous traditions are highlighted to promote Sápmi as a tourist site. The focus is on the signposting of religious symbols as a resource in a tourism context and the challenges connected with the merger of spiritual and commercial values.

Key Words:

• Sami tourism
• Spiritual entrepreneurship
• Indigenous spirituality
• Experience economy
• New Age

Notes

¹ An expanded goal of the project was to gradually widen the number of Sámi tourism entrepreneurs so that the portal would eventually cover larger parts of the Sámi tourism services in Norway, but the development of Sami Tour came to a halt in part because of challenges related to collaboration and further funding. The web portal has, until spring 2013, been available on the Internet and served as a virtual portal into Sápmi providing readers with knowledge about Sámi culture. It has also functioned as a net resource for schoolchildren searching for knowledge about Sámi people and culture (http://globussamfunnsfag.cappelendamm.no/c177555/artikkel/vis.html?tid=177571&strukt_tid=177555).

² Kramvig has long worked with issues connected to Sámi tourism and Sámi politics (see Kramvig 2006, 2011; Flemmen & Kramvig 2008).

³ This perspective might be contested by a view of the tourist industry as still highly characterized by Fordist production (Torres 2002).

⁴ A classic exception being sociologist Max Weber's theory on the relationship between the Puritan work ethic and the rise of Western capitalism (Weber 1930).

⁵ The project management on this portal page mentions having drawn inspiration from Odd Mathis Hætta's (1992) book The Sami: an Indigenous People of the Arctic.