Exploring the intersections between dark tourism and Arctic traumascapes in the Anthropocene: The case of Finnish Lapland

Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of people have experienced ecological grief due to significant changes in their environment, mourning the death of more-than -human entities such as glaciers or iconic landscapes. In the southernmost regions of the Arctic, like Finnish Lapland, water and rain is estimated to gradually dominate over ice and snow due to global climate change. However, in the last 40 years, the Arctic tourism industry has grown based on representations of snow and ice, and even today, keeps promoting Finnish Lapland with images of guaranteed white vistas (Herva et al., 2020; Varnajot & Saarinen, 2022). The increasing gap between the dynamic reality and the static promotion of the Arctic in tourism can be understood as the death of the iconic white landscape of Lapland, and, in some cases, leads to the production of Arctic traumascapes. Traumascapes are defined as haunting places “where visible and invisible, past and present, physical and metaphysical come to coexist and share common space” (Tumarkin, 2019, p. 5), and visits to these specific sites of trauma are often referred to as dark tourism (Kaelber, 2007). In the Anthropocene however, dark tourism increasingly encompasses places associated with the death of more-than-human entities, such as the iconic vistas of Lapland (Varnajot & Saarinen, 2021). In line with this, this conceptual chapter investigates the intersections between dark tourism and traumascapes raised by the shrinking cryosphere in the context of Finnish Lapland. Finnish Lapland provides an interesting case where we can already observe some previews of Arctic tourism products being challenged due to changes in seasonality and lack of snow and ice. Therefore, by exploring the production of dark tourism practices in Finnish Lapland, this chapter aims to shed new light on the production of traumascapes in tourism on the one hand and to provide new conceptualizations concerning the idea of ‘Arctic traumascapes’ on the other.