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Desiring the indigenous: affective commodification of the Sámi Social Semiotics, : 1-18
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Desiring the indigenous: affective
commodification of the Sámi
Gustav Westberg
To cite this article: Gustav Westberg (2021): Desiring the indigenous: affective commodification of
the Sámi, Social Semiotics, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2021.1942824
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1942824
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Published online: 21 Jun 2021.
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Desiring the indigenous: a
ffective commodification of
the Sámi
Gustav Westberg
School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro Universitet, Örebro, Sweden
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the multimodal enactment of affect plays a key role in the commodification of indigenous cultures. Departing from an understanding of affect as integral to discourse, the paper investigates how indigenous cultures are construed as an object of consumerist desire by employing subject formation, strategic perspectivation and affordance as conceptual starting points. As a case in point, affective meaning-making is studied as it is semiotically materialized in the commodification of Sámi culture by the predominant actor in marketing indigenous experiences in Sweden. By pondering the social force of affective meaning-making from the perspective of the perceived consumer, the analysis reveals that consumers are invited to affectively encounter the Sámi through curiosity, tranquility and excitement. However, the paper contends that the representations not only enable positive emotions; they also work their social force by constraining engagement in any disturbing, conflicting or uncomfortable emotions that are associated with the post-colonial heritage of the Sámi.
KEYWORDS affective practice; multimodal critical discoursestudies ; sámi; sápmi; indigenous tourismi
Introduction
The desire to experience something genuine and different lies at the heart of global capital-ism and, in its circulation of commodities, identities and ideologies (Appadurai1996), multi-modal discourse is used to profit on emotions and values associated with authenticity (Aiello and Pauwels2014). In particular, this pertains to different niches of indigenous consumption in which notions of“indigenousness” are capitalized on in order to profile brands as different and desirable (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes2013; Kauppinen2014; Dlaske2015; Viken and Müller2017b; Archer and Westberg2020). Heller and Duchêne emphasize that such profiting practices not only have a fundamental socioeconomic impact on the way indigenous people organize their livelihood, but also on how people“make sense out of and feel about things” (2012, 8). This accentuates the relevance of investigating how the semiotic design of authen-ticity allows consumers to affectively engage with ’he indigenous other’ and, in this paper, affective meaning-making is explored as it is instantiated in contexts in which Sámi culture is commodified through discourse. By approaching Sámi authenticity as discourse
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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CONTACT Gustav Westberg gustav.westberg@oru.se School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro Universitet, Örebro, Sweden
– as something that is socially construed, signified and organized through multiple modes of communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen2001)– the paper delves into the performative role of affect in its focus on how Sáminess is construed as desirable. As a case in point, affective meaning-making is studied through the lens of the leading actor operating in the market of Sámi tourism in Sweden.
In the literature that addresses discursive profiting on indigenous heritage, the primary focus has been on how semiotic resources can be employed to balance authentic differentiation with global mobility (e.g. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes2011), whereas the affective dimensions of authentication have not been given any in-depth attention. However, critical Marxist-based research on advertising has long acknowledged appeals to the consumer’s desire for authentic and captivating experiences as a means of ideological manipulation (e.g. Barthes1977; William-son1978; Goldman1992). Yet, the critical impetus here is not to criticize discursive appeals to emotions because they disrupt communicative rationality, but rather to contemplate the perfor-mativity of affective meaning-making in its own right (cf. Milani2015). Thus, by approaching indigenous authenticity as a case of affective meaning-making, the paper sensitizes the under-standing of how the commodification of indigenous heritage not only carries a promise of buying the real thing but, importantly, also works its social force by positioning transient custo-mers emotionally. As will be revealed, when Sáminess is construed as desirable, consucusto-mers are invited to engage in emotions that have exclusively positive connotations, whereas issues and aspects of indigenous heritage that might engender strenuous affective engagement are sup-pressed, especially those related to the post-colonial history of the Sámi.
With theoretical inspiration from the field of affective-discursive studies (Wetherell
2012; Fleig and von Scheve2020; Milani and Richardson2020), affect is here conceived of here as being neither “in” nor “outside of” the individual and the social, but rather as circulating between different contexts, objects and bodies (Ahmed 2014, 10). In terms of methodology, a framework I propose in Westberg (2021a) has been applied in order to unpack Sámi authenticity as an affective practice. The framework distinguishes between subject formation and the technique of strategic perspectivation combined with the concept of affordance as a starting point for studying affect as a multimodal prac-tice. By implementing the framework, the paper further answers Milani and Richardson’s (2020) call to investigate how affective meaning-making can be analyzed in material instantiations of discourse. In this regard, Ahmed’s (2004) writings on“the emotionality of texts” engender reflection on affective subject formation as enacted through the use of various semiotic resources, i.e. “the actions and artefacts we use to communicate” (Van Leeuwen2005, 3). Thus, the affordance-driven analysis undertaken here continues the ongoing investigation into the social semiotics of affect (Björkvall, Van Meerbergen, and Westberg2020; Milani and Mortensen2020; Milani and Mortensen2020; Motschen-bacher2020; Richardson2020; Thurlow2020; Thurlow2020; Zieba2020).
The next section outlines the ideological context relating to the commodification of the Sámi. The dataset under investigation is then presented, followed by the analytical framework, methodology, the results andfinal comments.
Semiotic commodification of the sámi
The Sámi people are the only officially recognized indigenous people in the European Union and number approximately 80,000–100,000 individuals.1 The traditional Sámi
region is called Sápmi and covers Northern Scandinavia and Russia. Like the history of other indigenous groups, Sámi history is characterized by colonial dominance by nation states and subsequent racism and marginalization (cf. Mörkenstam2014). Since the nineteenth century, the Scandinavian nations have assimilated, segregated and deported the Sámi population from their habitats in Sápmi (Labba2020).
Since the colonialization of Sápmi in early modernity, Sámi culture has continually been construed as “something else” through multimodal discourse. Regarding Sámi material culture, the Swedish nation state collected, appropriated and displayed Sámi culture (tools, clothes, hunting, reindeer husbandry and ceremonial artefacts) and living Sámis as something exotic and deviant. Nordin and Ojala (2018) emphasize that such othering acts were not only practiced on the Sámi; they were a global colonial strategy that imposed Eurocentric order in which material culture and physiology were regarded as being anthropological evidence of the hierarchy between the races (Loomba2015).
Continuing along these lines, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Sámi people were used to represent their “exotic” lifestyle at museums, parks, zoos and circuses throughout the Western world in living exhibitions. Baglo (2011) contends that such exhi-bitions normalized and disseminated racist conceptions about the Sámi to a broad public. The exhibitions further coded capitalist ideals and market expectations, thereby helping to improve the semiotic representation of Sámi culture in a way that resonated with the desire of an audience that had purchasing power. Representations of the Sámi were thereby absorbed into a market rationality that gradually accentuated the awareness of the cultural expressions and semiotic signs that were interpretable as authentic “Sámi-ness” – and therefore profitable. Arguably, such historical commodification paved the way for semiotic acts of self-orientalism (Olsen 2008) and self-othering (Viken and Müller 2017a), which are currently key to livelihood development among indigenous people (cf. Pietikäinen 2013), as well as post-colonial struggles and politics pertaining to indigenous rights, self-determination and territorial claims (Lantto and Mörkenstam
2008). As Raibmon (2005, 206) states, “aboriginal people had good reason to “play Indian” in the nineteenth century, they have even greater reason to do so more than a century later”. Tellingly, these days, Sámi traditions are valorized as goods and services in many consumeristfields – for example, in the branding of hotels and spa treatments2, in the branding of clothes as inspired by the Sámi lifestyle3, in the marketing of traditional Sámi handicraft4, culinary traditions5and, of course, in heritage tourism (cf. Viken and Müller2017b; de Bernardi2019). Parallel to this, there is currently an upswing in main-stream Sámi pop music acts (e.g. KEiiNO and Jon Henrik Fjällgren), as well as more inde-pendent Sámi music acts (e.g. Kitok and Sofia Jannok).
In the literature on Sámi tourism and commerce, certain tropes are repeatedly being identified; the Sámi are represented as being detached from modernity and as passing down tradition and an unbroken link to history, as well as to the unspoiled nature and locality of the north; Sáminess is further associated with a nomadic lifestyle of hunting, fishing and reindeer husbandry and seasonal movement (Viken and Müller 2017b). Such tropes are articulated via semiotic regularities that have developed over time and space when semiotic resources have been used to represent Sámi authenticity for capital-ist reasons, including emblematic imagery of sceneries associated with the practice of
reindeer husbandry, handicraft production and Duodji artefacts (e.g. knives, jewelry and guksis), Sámi lavvos or huts, costumes, religious artefacts (e.g. ceremonial drums) and depictions of Nordic forests, mountains and rolling hills.
Viken and Müller (2017a, 17) contend that the culture of indigenous capitalism involves “both intellectual and emotional sides”. Feeling proud about indigenous heritage has therefore become key to the economic development of the Sámi (Dlaske 2014). Further, from a marketing perspective, what appears to be a challenge is representing indigenous culture as a competitive experience so that the representation responds“to perceived consumer desires for ‘the Other’”, while also avoiding the reproduction of stereotypes that carry negative connotations (Bunten2010, 288). Thus, Kramvig (2017:, 64) describes the economics of indigenous culture and identity as “the economics of difference and desire, where affect and interest, the emotion and merchandise, are linked together.”
Dataset
Numerous actors tout Sámi heritage in Sweden today, and to systematically explore the affective commodification of Sáminess, analytical focus has been directed towards the website of the predominant actor in Sámi tourism in Sweden: Swedish Lapland (SL). SL operates as a consortium comprising Norrbotten County and the municipalities of Skellef-teå and Sorsele in the north of Sweden. Its aim is to“support the industry’s ambition to use international and domestic demand for the destination’s supply of sub-arctic pro-ducts and experiences to do business by providing a cooperative platform based on trade and industry”. Thus, SL strives to profit from products and experiences in the north and Sápmi and is aiming to double its turnover“by 2020, from 2010 year’s level of 4.1 billion to 8.2 billion [SEK]”.6 Tellingly, SL is a prominent actor in an expanding market and its website, as its main channel of communication, has both a Swedish and an English version.
SL does not exclusively promote Sámi tourism, but also more broadly defined activities, goods and services related to sub-arctic experiences. Hence, as afirst step to empirically delimiting the study, a corpus was compiled based on two criteria: representation and communicative aim. The representation criterium was applied to only include English texts that explicitly tout tourist experiences in terms of Sáminess, thereby signifying Sámi authenticity as a discourse. Thus, the dataset was compiled from the section on SL’s website called Experience Sámi culture first hand, where Sámi culture is fully addressed. On a more detailed level, the section comprises a range of associated texts that are thematically organized around different aspects of Sámi culture (food, design, reindeer husbandry, nature, etc.). The second criterium – communicative aim – was implemented to delimit the corpus to focus exclusively on texts with the overall aim of instilling a desire to travel to Sápmi and experience Sámi culture through consumption. In terms of genre, this means that the dataset comprises texts that fulfill a similar role to travel guide books (Peel and Sørensen2016) in that they provide transient customers with inspirational facts about Sámi culture, combined with tips on what to do, consume and experience in Sápmi. Based on these criteria, a corpus of twelve texts was compiled (seeTable 1).
According to SL’s marketing department, there is a significant focus on “finding the right emotions” when representing Sámi heritage and Sápmi on its website,8 and as the analysis will show, the representation of Sáminess as desirable carries a promise of calmness, reflexive desire, together with curiosity and thrills. Before these findings are ela-borated on, the next sections introduce the analytical framework and methodology.
Analytical framework
The paper draws its overall conceptual inspiration from thefield of affective discursive studies (e.g. Wetherell2012; Fleig and von Scheve2020). Thefield is sustained by the con-viction that affect and emotions are fundamentally entangled in and enacted through dis-course and are therefore relevant to study regarding the diverse ideological and social work they can be discursively mobilized to perform.
This assumption highlights the relationship between discourse and affect. Despite previous observations that advertising and commodification hinge on semiotic appeals to the emotions, the role of affect has hitherto largely been left outside the discursive study of indi-genous tourism and commerce. In fact, until recently, affect has been neglected in (multimo-dal) critical discourse studies (Glapka 2019). This is partially because a Habermasian understanding of rationality has informed scholarly critique within critical discourse studies. Thus, and as previously indicated, when emotions has been considered in the critical analysis of advertising (Williamson1978; Goldman1992; Cook2001), as well as in the study of political discourse (Wodak2015), it has been regarded as a strategy of ideological manipulation.
Further, in Wetherell’s seminal work on affect as practice, the overall affective turn in the social sciences is described as having gained influence because it provides a new per-spective that allows the non-discursive and pre-cognitive aspects of social life to be studied. Here, however, affect is understood as a relational concept that signifies intersub-jective experiences and their role in the formation of collective subjectivities, identities and belongings. Guided by Wetherell’s (2012, 19) definition of affective practice as “a figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning-making and with other social and materialfigurations”, affect is differen-tiated from terms such as emotion and feeling by not emphasizing the individual but Table 1.Dataset
Title Link7
200 words to describe the soul of the snow. Muotha
https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/visut-a-story-of-the-reindeer/
A story of the reindeer. Visut https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/visut-a-story-of-the-reindeer/
Eight seasons https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/the-eight-seasons/
Experience the culture of the Forest Sámi https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/experience-the-culture-of-the-forest-sami/
Jokkmokk winter market https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/jokkmokks-market/
Kärkevagge. The secret stone valley https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/karkevagge-the-secret-stone-valley/
Padjelanta. The higher land https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/padjelanta/
Sámi design. 5 questions to 5 Sámi designers https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/5-questions-to-5-sami-designers/
Sapmi slow food https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/sapmi-slow-food-with-ingrid-pilto/
Stories told with names https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/stories-told-with-names/
The mindset of Geunja https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/the-mindset-of-geunja/
rather the collective and the social. In the unpacking of how Sámi authenticity is con-strued as desirable by invitations to emotions such as peace and thrills, these emotions are regarded as being materialized through the situated use of semiotic resources and will be interpreted with regards to the social work they perform.
In order to contemplate the social work of affect, the framework presented in West-berg (2021a) has been applied. Inspired by Ahmed (2004;2014), the framework ident-ifies subject formation as the starting point for analyzing how affect entangles the individual with the collective. Affective practices unite the individual and the collective by articulating certain emotional ways of being, and the“stickiness” of such subject for-mation hinges on intersubjective engagement as well as ideological recognition (West-berg2021a). Thus, affect cannot be simply deduced from any semiotic materials since it is enacted between different social belongings and the situated use of semiotic resources. Because of this, the framework proposes that affective subject formation needs to be unpacked by employing the technique of strategic perspectivation and the concept of affordance.
Strategic perspectivation refers to a technique for establishing intersubjectivity as the basis of affective interpretation and targets the relationality of affective subject formation. The technique is inspired by Janks’ (2010) work on critical literacy, in particular the empha-sis on engaging with discourse through critical engagement as well as estrangement. By allowing both engagement and estrangement to enter the analytical work, diverse start-ing points for intersubjective interpretation are permitted. Thereby, the “stickiness” of affective subject formation can be contemplated from diverse and strategic subjectivities (Westberg2021b). For the purpose of the present study, the affective positions articulated by SL will be extracted from the perspective of an engaged position that buys into SL’s representations of Sámi authenticity as being desirable. In other words, the social work of the affective meaning-making will be interpreted from the perspective of the transient reader who visits SL’s website for vacation and shopping inspiration. Put slightly different, the analytical focus is on how SL regiments (Wee2016) the discursive prerequisites for tourists to emotionally encounter Sáminess.
The analysis is also guided by the concept of affordance, which encompass the semiotic constraints and possibilities that are determined by the properties of different semiotic materials (Kress2010; Machin2016). In the framework, affordance is understood as the “prompt of a semiotic material that enables certain affective actions and interpretations.” (Westberg2021a, 27). However, the emphasis on intersubjectivity indicates that affect is never independently inherent to any semiotic material. Because of this, strategic perspec-tivation is pivotal when analyzing affect as materialized through discourse.
Unpacking affective subjectivities
In terms of methodology, the analysis departs from the assumption that desire is a sen-sation that can engage subjectivities and signify emotions such as amusement, excite-ment and pleasure in relation to diverse objects in social life (Deleuze and Guattari
1987; Cameron and Kulick 2003). Objects of desire are understood as being what “promises us something, what gives us energy, and also what is lacking, even in the very moment of its realization” (Ahmed 2010, 31). This view allows reflection on the intersubjective effects that are at play when Sámi authenticity is construed as desirable.
In order to unpack how this is semiotically achieved, methods have been chosen with respect to the semiotic materials that are employed in the dataset, i.e. photography and language.
Firstly, the affordance of photography to evoke wider cultural associations without the need to specify that this or that resource signifies this or that value (Machin
2016) is considered as a means of affective meaning-making. The analysis draws on Barthes’ (1977) notions of denotation and connotation. The denotative layer of analysis targets what the images in the corpus depict – the concrete people, places, things or events we see – whereas the connotative layer of analysis targets the socially shared ideas, values and ideas that the denotations communicate. A representative pattern in the dataset considers how denotative depictions of Sápmi nature fulfill affective work by connoting Sáminess as an object of the perceived consumer’s desire for peace, calmness and freedom.
Secondly, the affordance of images to position viewers through symbolic interaction is considered (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006). More specifically, the analysis focuses on visual resources such as gaze, posture and facial expressions. In the dataset, such resources are utilized to allow the reader to feel welcomed and, ultimately, desired by Sámi people.
Thirdly, the analysis considers the affective work afforded by language. To this end, speech acts and their preferred responses (Halliday and Matthiessen2014) are analyzed in order to unpack how an engaged reader is prompted to desire Sáminess through a sense of interest and curiosity. Complementing this, attention is paid to evaluative language, i.e. expressions of “our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgements of behavior and evaluation of things” (Martin and White 2007, 35). Such expressions afford an intersubjective response; evaluative language is directive by inviting the readers to share certain attitudes and emotions (cf. Martin and White 2007, 63). To capture this, instances in which Sámi related things, places and experiences are appreci-ated have been analyzed. Appreciations construe the value of things (Martin and White
2007) and is therefore key to the construal of desirable objects. A pattern in the dataset is how Sáminess is appreciated in ways that position the engaged reader through a sense of wonder and thrill.
The dataset was initially analyzed on a text-by-text basis and also representatively regarding the affordances accounted for above. In this process, sampling and analy-sis have not been treated as separate phases (Wodak and Meyer 2016) and the evi-dence of affective subject formations has been reconstructed on the basis of representational patterns throughout the dataset. Thus, the findings in one text have motivated iterative re-examinations of other texts in the dataset, and the analytical work was finalized when the results started to repeat themselves, i.e. when theoretical saturation had been achieved. The excerpts that have been ana-lyzed in detail below have therefore been chosen to highlight the representational patterns in the dataset.
Desiring sáminess
The results in this section are structured with respect to how different semiotic materials afford certain affective ways of being.
The promise of sápmi nature
Within Sámi tourism and commerce, depictions of Sápmi nature are repeatedly used to brand Sáminess. Figure 1 contains a collection of images from SL representing Sápmi nature, which are given detailed and systematic attention below.
The images (1–15) contain denotations (“what we see”) that are typically associated with Sápmi nature: we see panoramic vistas in all the images; rolling hills (except in 13); cloud-covered mountain peaks (7–10), low-lying vegetation (5, 7–10, 12, 14, 15); forests (6, 11); lakes (6, 11); free-range reindeer (5, 13–15) and sunlit green landscapes (5–12, 14–15), as well as landscapes draped in snow (1–4, 13). Nature is denoted as not being imprinted by human activity; rather, humans are emplaced in the unspoiled nature and are depicted at a great distance (1, 3, 7–10, 13).
By considering the depictions from the perspective of a reader who loyally buys into SL’s representations for inspiration, their connotations are possible to ponder. The resources clearly resonate with a photographic canon of use wherein nature has evolved as a sign that connotes certain values, ideas and moods for capitalist purposes (cf. Ledin and Machin 2018a, 45–46). Specifically, it can be argued that the imagery feeds into a commercial canon in which the emplacement of individuals in a seemingly
unspoiled, uninhabited, summer-green and winter-white nature in combination with semiotic resources such as high visual saturation and backlight, are employed to code sensations of’freedom’, ’peace’ and ’calmness’. This is particularly salient in tourism dis-course and indigenous consumption (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2011; Heller and Duchêne 2012; Archer and Westberg 2020), but the denotations also have a wider cross-cultural resonance. They can be traced back to commercial stock images, for example, in image banks such as Getty Images (cf. Zieba 2020). On Getty Images, the search tags “nature”, “peace”, “calmness” and “freedom” generate images that clearly resemble the images in Figure 1. In particular, the stock images generated by such search tags tend to include the emplacement of individual women in relaxed postures and facial expressions (typically facing the sun or sky), a pattern that is also apparent in
Figure 1(7–10; see Westberg2021afor a detailed analysis of image 10). The canonical resemblance to visual representations of“peace” and “freedom” from elsewhere invites the reader to share a common (and urban) lifestyle desire for nature as a beautified promise of recreation and freedom (cf. Olafsdottir2013). However, this does not imply that SL´s construal of Sápmi as a desirable site for recreation should be regarded as fake or inauthentic, but rather that the transtextual resemblance augments the construc-tion of Sápmi as an object of desire from the perspective of the transient tourist.
Furthermore, the images in Figure 1 can also be considered regarding the spatial resources denoted, given the affective affordance of spatiality (Björkvall, Van Meerbergen, and Westberg2020). The panoramic views of Sápmi convey the impression that nature is endless and eternal and that Sápmi appears to go on forever. In the images, Sápmi is rep-resented without any demarcating horizontal planes and with no, or only natural, vertical lines (e.g. mountainous hills in 1–3, 6–12, 15) to demarcate the horizontal dimension. Thus, Sápmi emerges as a strongly unbound site that affords feelings of ’freedom’ (Sten-glin2008).
By treating the affective invitations as an object of tourism desire, it becomes possible to contemplate the social work being enacted. Regarding the possibility of recognizing the current affective desires, the resonance of the representations of Sápmi in other com-mercial contexts directs the reader’s expectations of nature as a promise of what the reader is assumed to lack. Continuing this argument, the visual representations of Sápmi nature are associated with a promise of satisfaction, a promise that positions the consumer as not experiencing a sense of peace, freedom and calmness in the present. Thus, the positioning power of the affective subject formation lies in the presupposition of what the perceived reader lacks and therefore desires. For the subject formation to function as an object of desire, not only do emotions need to be recognized as being attainable through consumption; the social force of desire is also associated with the assumption that the reader is engaged in contrasting emotions such as stress, bustle, and entrapment. Bearing these observations in mind, the next section explores how Sámi people are represented as desirable.
Desiring sámi people
When SL represents people as Sámi, a representational pattern emerges in relation to how the perceived reader is positioned. Generally, resources such as angles, proximity and gaze are employed to position the reader as a source of joy to Sámi people. In the
images, people who are represented as Sámi are typically individualized (Van Leeuwen
2008) through close ups and medium shots of single people (unlike the persons depicted in image 1–3 and 7–10 inFigure 1). Alternatively, people who are represented as Sámi are made salient by blurring the setting and surroundings. In addition, the individualized people are typically culturally categorized (Van Leeuwen2008) as Sámi through the depic-tion of emblematic clothing, tools and accessories or by being categorized through language. SeeFigure 2for an example.
The image inFigure 2, taken from a text introducing the culture of the forest Sámis,10is a medium shot of a single man in which the denotation of the traditional shirt (kolt) and stocking cap in traditional Sámi colors together with reindeer boots (nuvttagat) and the belt connotes traditional Sámi handicraft and artisanry (Duodji). In the text, the depicted person is individualized as“Lars Eriksson” and described as “born and raised in a Forest Sami family that had been herding reindeer in the same place for generations”. Visually, the categorization is supplemented by denotative resources such as a winter forest setting and the emplacement of the man in front of a woodshed, which, together with the linguistic description, jointly connote values of historicity and localness. The man faces the perceived reader and, from his facial expression– cheeks raised, eyes narrowed and corners of the mouth pointing upwards– he is represented as ’joyful’ (Martinec2001; Feng and O’Halloran2012) which, from the perspective of the loyal reader, affords a sense of feeling’welcomed’. This invitation is also anchored by language, where a “rugged log fireplace” is said to give rise to “a welcoming smoke”.
This is a representational pattern that repeats itself in the dataset: people who are indi-vidualized and introduced as Sámi in written text and culturally categorized as Sámi by visual means typically make eye contact with the reader, thereby realizing their level of symbolic social engagement with the perceived reader (Kress and Van Leeuwen2006). Using proximity, the demand for engagement is further supplemented by close-up shots; the reader is symbolically positioned as being in an intimate or social relationship with Sámi people, which contrasts how the reader is positioned in relation to people who are not being represented as Sámi (Figure 1).Figure 3illustrates this tendency using an image from a text that presents Sámi designers and artisans.11
The person depicted inFigure 3is individualized as“Erica Huuva Simma” and categor-ized as a“Sámi designer”. Visually, connotations of symbolic attributes supplement the categorization: the symbols on the colorful scarf have a provenance in the iconography
of Sámi religion, whereas the large silver pin connotes Duodji. Furthermore, the person is depicted at a medium distance, with raised cheeks, corners of the mouth pointing upwards and narrowed eyes. Again, the perceived reader is invited into a socially intimate engagement with the Sámi through positively connoted emotions of’joy’, whereas the slightly forward direction of the tilted head suggests’interest’ (Martinec2001). Thus, it can be argued that the expressions and the direction of the gaze in bothFigures 2and
3construe a perceived“you” as being the object of Sámi joy and interest.
Using proximity, gaze and facial expressions together with emblematic symbols of clothing, tools and colors, the images appeal to the desire of the perceived consumer. In contrast to how Sápmi nature is construed as the object of the consumer’s desire, here, the perceived consumer of Sáminess is positioned as someone who engenders posi-tive emotional reactions to individuals who are represented as Sámi. On a related note, Ahmed (2010, 29) explains that “happy objects” are directional in that they index a promise of happiness, and may therefore refer to “anything that we imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, styles, as well as aspirations”. Here, the consumer’s gaze is coded as the object of positively connoted emotions expressed by people who are represented as Sámi. Thus, the reader is posi-tioned as creating joy and interest for indigenous others. By aligning with this represen-tational perspective, a reader who buys into the representations is positioned as feeling welcomed. This further suggests that the direction of the perceived consumer’s desire is construed as reflexive; the reader is positioned as someone who triggers positive emotions in Sámi people, and thereby as desirable and appreciated. Moving on, the next section explores the affective work afforded by language.
The call of the wild
In the dataset, Sáminess is linguistically construed as desirable by being represented as something unfamiliar, as well as being appreciated in ways that signify emotional values associated with supernaturalness, amazement and uniqueness.
In the act of promoting Sáminess as desirable, SL utilizes a knowledgeable sender pos-ition to teach a transient reader’exciting’ facts about Sámi culture. This position is initially Figure 3.Welcoming Sámi designer
reflected in how the organization of the texts provides a thematic inventory of Sámi culture. Regarding the enactment of the knowledgeable sender position, informative speech acts and relational processes (Halliday and Matthiessen2014) are used to define essentializing "truths" about Sáminess (cf. Machin and Mayr2012, 110). Speech acts are pivotal to the performative power of texts (Van Leeuwen 2005) and the perceived reader of SL is constantly offered information about Sáminess through essentializing and non-modalized statements. In this way, SL explains and defines what Sáminess ’is’ – and the lack of epistemic modalization comes with the affordance of closing any nego-tiation about the probability or usuality of the ’truths’ (Machin and Mayr 2012, 187). This pattern is illustrated below:
The Sámi culture is traditionally strong, and since the Sámi have lived and worked in northern Sweden for millennia, the culture is a big part of our Arctic lifestyle in Swedish Lapland. (https://www.swedishlapland.com/stories/sapmi-the-land-of-the-sami/)
Snow is something more than frozen water to the Sámi people. It’s a way of expressing the foundation of their existence– the migration of the reindeer. (https://www.swedishlapland. com/stories/muohta/)
Different speech acts further afford different preferred responses; statements are pre-ferably responded to by agreement or acknowledgement. Following a social semiotic the-orization of speech acts (Halliday and Matthiessen2014), this suggests that the afforded responses to essentializing statements such as“The Sámi culture is traditionally strong”, “Sápmi […] holds a richness of tradition, religion, knowledge and culture … ” and “Snow is […] a way of expressing the foundation of their [Sámi) existence”, would be something along the lines of ’Oh, is it?’ or ’Oh, does it?’. By prompting the reader to accept such non-modalized definitions, the reader is perceived as someone who finds the facts ’inter-esting’ and perhaps ‘inspirational’. In terms of desire, it can be argued that the perceived reader is positioned as being‘curious’ to the essentializing facts that are presented.
The invitation to curiosity is supplemented by the appreciations used to signify Sámi-ness. Appreciations evaluate both semiotic and natural phenomena (Martin and White
2007), and in the dataset, Sámi culture, as well as locations and natural phenomena in Sápmi, are appreciated. Through a systematic inventory of appreciative expressions, it is revealed that aspects of Sámi heritage (handicraft, reindeer herding, cooking traditions, storytelling) are appreciated as valuable by expressions that connote authenticity and related semantic tropes of historicity, uniqueness and sustainability. For instance,“Sámi culture” is appreciated as “traditionally strong”, “unique” and with “its roots very far back in time”.12On a related note, a story told by the Sámi person portrayed inFigure 2is appreciated as“genuine and told straight from the heart”.13Furthermore, Sámi handi-craft is elsewhere appreciated as“genuine” and “real” in contrast to “the muddle of see-mingly pointless” conventional commodities14, as well as “sustainable”. 15 Such appreciations construe the value of Sáminess by signifying it as worthwhile to experience (Martin and White2007, 56), thereby augmenting it as an object of desire that comes with the overall promise of experiencing and discovering an unfamiliar and authentic cultural environment.
Appreciations further signify locations and natural phenomena in Sápmi as desirable. Such appreciations are reaction-based and related to affection by construing Sáminess as pleasing (rather than worthwhile) (Martin and White2007, 57). A representative pattern
considers how locations and natural phenomena are reacted to by appreciations which, collectively, convey the impression that Sáminess is associated with supernaturalness. In the texts, the appreciated locations and natural phenomena are signified as Sámi by being given Sámi names. For instance, in a text touting a place called Geargevággi, nature is appreciated as “a landscape entirely beyond what’s ordinary, or ‘real’”, as a “magical place”, a “Wonderland”, and as a fairylike a place beyond “time and space”. 16 The pattern is also evident in a text thematizing the eight seasons of Sápmi. In the introduc-tion of the text, the distincintroduc-tion between the eight seasons is rooted in the Sámi experi-ence of living in close proximity to nature, and natural phenomena pertaining to the different seasons (referred to using Sámi names), are appreciated as “an amazing sen-sation”, “a stunning scenery”, and as “a truly magical experience”. 17 By appreciating natural phenomena as being magical, amazing and stunning, SL signifies Sáminess as pleasing with reference to outstanding beauty. In terms of affect, it can be argued that the appreciations of nature feed into the desire of the perceived consumer to experience something extraordinarily different that engenders a sensation of thrills.
In combination, the utilization of appreciation and non-modalized statements rep-resent Sáminess as something that the reader is both unfamiliar with and lacking and as something that carries a promise of instilled energy. By buying into the linguistic con-strual of desirable Sáminess, the life of the perceived consumer emerges as unexciting, mundane and even superficial. Such contra-emotions serve as an implicit backdrop against which the affective promise of Sáminess becomes desirable.
The construal of desirable Sáminess is, however, not unique to SL, but resonates with how authenticity is commodified through the strategic recontextualization of difference in other tourist sites (cf. Jaworski and Pritchard2005). This cross-cultural resemblance can be understood as a way of semiotically handling the pivotal balancing act between auth-entic differentiation and global mobility (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011). Whereas affective meaning-making afforded through photography and appreciations allows global mobility, the linguistic signification of locations and experiences with Sámi names in combination with visual elements with provenance in Sámi heritage (Figures 2and3) ensures authentic differentiation. However, whereas the interpretation of such visual differentiation depends on socially and culturally shaped knowledge and transtex-tual recognition, (Archer and Westberg2020), language does so to a lesser extent. Further, the appreciations fulfill crucial affective work in that they anchor the visual connotations in a way that reduces any affective ambiguity; Sámi authenticity emerges as a matter of pure, recognizable pleasure.
Final comments
The foregoing analysis has revealed how Sámi culture is semiotically construed as an object of capitalist desire. Departing from an understanding of affect as enabled through discourse, affective subject formation has been analyzed through a strategic per-spectivation that aligns with the representations in combination with an a ffordance-driven semiotic analysis. This has enabled an investigation into how Sámi culture is per-ceived as desirable from the perspective of the engaged consumer who loyally buys into the current representations of vacation and shopping inspiration.
The analysis reveals that images and language afford different affective invitations. Images denoting Sápmi resonate with how nature is represented in stock images and other lifestyle media to connote values of peace, calmness and freedom. Furthermore, people who are multimodally individualized and culturally categorized and Sámi are con-strued as being engaged in positively connoted emotions of joy and interest in their visual encounter with tourists and consumers. In this way, the transient reader of SL’s website is construed as someone morally good from the symbolic perspective of‘the indigenous other’. Furthermore, the affordance of speech acts along with their preferred response is deployed to position the loyal reader as being curious about learning essentializing facts about Sámi culture. The invitation to curiosity is further supplemented by appreci-ations of Sámi culture, as well as locappreci-ations and natural phenomena in Sápmi. These appreciations signify Sáminess as desirable by both construing it as a worthwhile experi-ence with referexperi-ence to values of uniqueness, historicity and sustainability, and by repre-senting it as pleasing due to its outstanding beauty. Overall, this indicates how the engaged reader is allowed to encounter Sáminess through a sense of thrills and wonder. This analysis has attempted to illustrate that a representative analysis can never inde-pendently unpack multimodal discourse as affective practice, since affect is about inter-subjective meaning-making. Thus, desire has been treated as a matter of intersubjectivity, and by interpretating the affective meaning-making as the construal of an object of desire – as both a promise of energy and an index of what is lacking – the performative and social work of the current affective practice has been considered. Arguably, the life of the perceived consumer emerges as unexciting, mundane, superficial and entrenched in emotions of stress, bustle and entrapment. From such an intersubjec-tive horizon, the emotional experiences that are offered through the representation of Sáminess and Sápmi emerge as something that the perceived reader is lacking and there-fore desires, even in the moment of its realization.
Lastly, the findings offer insights into the ideological role of affect in indigenous tourism and capitalism. When Sámi culture is promoted as desirable through invitations to experience feelings of tranquility, excitement, amazement while the reader is also con-strued as an object of indigenous joy and interest, the perceived consumer is prompted to feel captivated and to encounter the indigenous other in a straightforward and purely enjoyable way. However, the representations not only enable positive emotions; they also constrain the reader not to engage in uncomfortable affective sensations that relate to the post-colonial situation of the Sámi, particularly those sensations of colonial guilt and national shame (Ahmed2004). Actors in indigenous tourism thereby appear to be restrained when it comes to affective meaning-making. With the intention of touting indigenous culture as desirable to transient customers and tourists, issues pertaining to indigenous history that run the risk of evoking any disturbing affective engagement are suppressed because they appear hard to tout as desirable. Thus, the discourse on Sámi authenticity works its social force by detaching consumers and tourists from any affective encounter that might disturb the conception of Sáminess as something that is purely pleasurable. The semiotics of contemporary indigenous tourism and capitalism , of which SL’s website is a prominent example, thereby enforce an emotional hierarchy on the consumer and the consumed; a hierarchy that is rooted in historical practices of indigenous commodification (Baglo 2011). Ultimately, this points to the relevance of further interrogation of the performative role of emotions within indigenous capitalism
and the critical contemplation of their social force from diverse estranged and engaged positions.
Notes
1. http://www.samer.se/samernaisiffror;https://www.iwgia.org/en/sapmi.html 2. https://ripan.se/spa/spabehandlingar/;https://hotelarcticeden.se
3. https://shop.stoorstalka.com/sv/sidor/allmanna-villkor.html;http://sarva.se/ 4. http://www.samer.se/duodji
5. For examples, seehttp://www.sameslojdstiftelsen.com/;http://www.slowfoodsapmi.com/ 6.
https://www.swedishlaplandvisitorsboard.com/en/the-destination/about-swedish-lapland-visitors-board/
7. Links accessible 2020-11-17
8. I am grateful to Anna Skogh, press and PR manager at Swedish Lapland, for kindly answering my questions.
9. The images inFigure 1,Figure 2andFigure 3have been reproduced according to the prin-ciples of fair dealing and fair use for the purpose of scholarly criticism.
10. Experience the culture of the Forest Sámi 11. 5 questions to 5 sami designers
12. Sapmi the land of the sami
13. Experience the culture of the Forest Sámi 14. Jokkmokks market
15. 5 questions to 5 sami designers 16. Karkevagge the secret stone valley 17. The eight seasons
Notes on contributor
Gustav Westberghas a PhD in Scandinavian Languages and is an Associate Professor in Swedish Language at Örebro university. His research is rooted in multimodal critical discourse studies and currently revolves around the material and affective dimensions of discourses of authenticity and political extremism. Recent publications include“Affect as a multimodal practice” in Multimodality & Society,“Affective rebirth: discursive gateways to contemporary national socialism” in Discourse & Society,“Establishing authenticity and commodifying difference: a social semiotic analysis of Sámi jeans” (with A. Archer) in Visual Communication and “Feeling safe while being surveilled: The spatial semiotics of affect at international airports” (with A. Björkvall and S. van Meerbergen) in Social Semiotics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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