Magdalena Koschmieder 
Indigenous People and Tourism through the example of the Sami 

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: 1, 0, , language: English, abstract: In this paper, I will present what tourists expect from their visit at indigenous peoples at the example of the Sami people and why they expect that. This will be based on an analysis of tourism advertisements of the Sami. Finally, there will be shown some ideas of how indigenous peoples tourism could be improved.

The Sami are an indigenous people living in northern Norway, Finland, Sweden and the Kola-Peninsula in Russia. When walking through the streets in Alta, Finnmark, you usually do not recognize them as such, unless they wear the kofte, their traditional clothing. Nevertheless, they are present among the Norwegians living there even if there is no obvious cultural representation. Hall (1997) defines representation as “using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people” and says further that “representation is the production of meaning through language”. Thus, the meaning about something like culture is just constructed.