Welcome to the end of the world! Resignifying periphery under the new economy: a nexus analytical view of a tourist website

Abstract

Accompanying the rise of the globalized new economy, the heritage tourism industry is expanding ever further into the global peripheries. One such ‘peripheral’ site is Sámiland, home of the indigenous language minority Sámi people, in the north of Lapland. Here, tourism is emerging as an opportunity for the Sámi to challenge their longstanding marginalization by mobilizing the periphery and signifying their peripheralized identities in new ways. These processes may look encouraging but they call for critical interrogation. To gain a deeper insight into these processes, the present study draws on a nexus analytical approach combining discourse analysis and ethnography to examine an illuminating case: discursive construction of ‘the periphery’ on a website advertising guesthouses in northern Lapland run by a Sámi woman who is an artist and entrepreneur. The investigation shows how, drawing on a variety of local, global and personal sources of signification, ‘the periphery’ is constructed as a hybrid and polycentric space, a construction that challenges persisting conceptions of peripheral regions as homogeneous and immutable. An examination of the material factors underlying this discursive construction leads to the question of how these emerging possibilities are actually linked to socioeconomic conditions and suggests implications for future research.

Keywords:

• globalization
• multilingualism
• new economy
• nexus analysis
• periphery
• Sámi

Notes on contributor

Kati Kauppinen is a post doctoral researcher in discourse studies at the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She earned her PhD in German Language and Culture at the University of Jyväskylä in 2011. Since then, she has been working as a researcher in the Peripheral Multilingualism project funded by the Academy of Finland. Her research interests include issues relating to multilingualism and minoritized language communities, new economy and neoliberal governmentalities, gender and (new) subjectivities as well as theoretical and methodological questions relating to critical multimodal discourse studies.

Notes

1. This article was produced in the context of a research project ‘Peripheral Multilingualism; sociolinguistic ethnography of contestation and innovation in multilingual Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh indigenous and minority language contexts’ (www.peripheralmultilingualism.fi), funded by the Academy of Finland.

2. The study has been carried out following the ethical guidelines of the Academy of Finland. The location and the names of the guesthouses are mentioned with the explicit permission of their owner.

3. Figures 1–4 are reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder of the website.

4. The interviews were conducted in Finnish. The extracts in the article are the author's translations.