Trude Fonneland

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.

The Festival Isogaisa: Neoshamanism in New Arenas

“In Bardufoss, the war drum is replaced by the Sami drum (runebomme),” NRK Sami radio announced on September 8, 2010. A stone’s throw away from the fenced and guarded military area near the welfare arena Istindportalen, green-clad young soldiers have company. People donning traditional Sami garb from Russia and Norway as well as 150 excited festival goers have found their way to the festival area. Three big lavvu (Sami traditional tents) are raised on the field outside, and smoke from the bonfire lies over the area. In the middle of the crowd, a man starts to joik (a traditional Sami way of singing). A Sami drum is passed along from hand to hand and ends up by an opening near the bonfire. This is where Mayor Viggo Fossum and festival leader Ronald Kvernmo take over; with a beat of the drum, they declare the first Sami shamanic festival in history to be open.

The Rise of Neoshamanism in Norway: Local Structures-Global Currents

Prior to the late 1990s, neoshamanism in Norway differed little from neoshamanisms found elsewhere in the Western world. Since then, practitioners of neoshamanism in Norway have been increasingly engaged in working to recover the indigenous traditions of their country and ancestors. A Sami version of neoshamanism has been established, along with a new focus on Norse traditions as sources for the development of neoshamanistic practices, notions, and rituals.

Introduction: Nordic Neoshamanisms

During the mid-1970s, Ailo Gaup, then a young Sami journalist from Oslo, traveled to Finnmark, the homeland of his ancestors, in search of a Sami shaman. Gaup had studied scholarly accounts of the pre-Christian Sami religion, commonly understood as a form of shamanism, but had not found descriptions of how — in practical terms — to initiate a trance and embark upon journeys. At the Tourist Hotel in Kautokeino, he met Ernesto, a Chilean refugee with the necessary qualifications from South American contexts. Gaup’s first visit to the spirit world of his ancestors took place with the help of Ernesto, Chilean traditions, and an African djembe-drum (Gaup 2005:86–98). Over the next decade, he further developed his skills, through training at Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Esalen, California. By the late 1980s, he was back in Oslo, established as a professional shaman and ready to take up the task of reviving the spiritual practices of his ancestors. There is, according to Harner’s perspective, a core content in the multitude of traditions that together constitute “world shamanism.” Each of these should be recovered and reconstructed, in order for their richness and complexity to come forth, and each of them offers unique contributions to the common source.

Spiritual Entrepreneurship in the High North: The Case of Polmakmoen Guesthouse and the Pilgrimage “the Seven Coffee Stops”

In order to frame the relationship between tourism and New Age spirituality, I identify actors in the tourism sector who draw inspiration from New Age as spiritual entrepreneurs. A spiritual entrepreneur is a tourist entrepreneur promoting a New Age philosophy and spiritual values such as ‘self-development’, ‘holism’ and ‘deep-values’, and who present a vision of crossovers between religion, local development and tourism, combining local traditions with global trends. The article is an analysis of two chosen spiritual entrepreneurships, namely Polmakmoen Guesthouse and the pilgrimage ‘The Seven Coffee Stops’ in Tana municipality in Finnmark, northern Norway. The article’s aim is to examine how values central within New Age here emerge as key terms in the production of unique experiences.