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.