UPPSALA UNIVERSITET

KULTURANTROPOLOGISKA INSTITUTIONEN

The Real Arctic:

Truly Wild, Wonderfully Retro Imaginaries and tourism in Svalbard

Höstterminen 2019 Författare: Frida Mård

C-Uppsats Handledare: Vladislava Vladimirova

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1 Background 2

1.2 Purpose and aims 3

1.3 Method and Material 4

1.4 Theory 5

1.5 Disposition 7

2. Data and analysis

2.1 Adventure Tourism and the Expedition Dream 7

2.2 Outnumbered by Polar Bears 13

2.3 Looking for charming rust 16

2.4 Conclusion 18

3. Literature 21

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1. Introduction

1.1 Background

It’s usual for people to dream about travelling to places otherwise unknown to them, and the

arctic seems unknown to many. This is not new. Since stories of Roald Amundsen, one of the

most famous explorers from the heroic age of polar exploration, and countless others who

went into the high north all the way to modern times, the idea that there are things we know

not of has created a need to seek and to find. This may not have changed over time, but the

accessibility of these unfamiliar and previously less explored places have. It is easy to take a

flight to even the most remote corner of the world, roads lead almost everywhere, and climate

change makes it easy to go where it has before been nearly impossible thanks mainly to

melting sea-ice (Thomas Nilsen 2018). All these factors play in when it comes to the

ever-growing tourism to the Svalbard archipelago, which belongs to Norway. The biggest

village on Svalbard lies at 78 degrees north, making it the northernmost permanent settlement

with a larger population in the world (Huggan & Jensen 2016: 45). Over the last few decades,

tourism to Svalbard has flourished. With the popularization of so-called Adventure Tourism,

which the self-proclaimed educational website Tourism Notes define as “the movement of the

people from one to another place outside their comfort zone for exploration or travel to

remote areas, exotic and possibly hostile areas” (Tourism Notes 2019), Svalbard has become

a hub for modern-day explorers longing for the otherworldly. This is promised to us by a vast

amount of media and publications made by photographers and Travel agencies who try to

capitalize on the unique setting which is Svalbard. VisitSvalbard welcomes you to their

website with the words “Svalbard: The real arctic” (VisitSvalbard.com 2019), while

LonelyPlanet writes this about Svalbard:

Svalbard is the Arctic North as you always dreamed it existed. This wondrous archipelago

is a land of dramatic snow-drowned peaks and glaciers, of vast ice fields and forbidding

icebergs, an elemental place where the seemingly endless Arctic night and the perpetual

sunlight of summer carry a deeper kind of magic. One of Europe's last great wildernesses,

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this is also the domain of more polar bears than people, a terrain rich in epic legends of

polar exploration. (Lonelyplanet.com 2019)

This way of marketing Svalbard as a product for us prospective tourists to utilize is common,

almost overflowing. On Instagram, Svalbard has been hashtagged in over 338 000 photos,

and as you scroll through these photographs you see that they all seem to confirm these

descriptions. Almost every single picture shows snow stretching to the horizon, wild animals

such as the native arctic fox and Svalbard reindeer, and of course, polar bears. Very, very few

show any other side of Svalbard and almost none for commercial purposes (Huggan & Jensen

2016: 45ff).

Another important point to bring up from Huggan and Jensen’s book is the fact that Svalbard

has grown into a multifaceted area. It is no longer only an area beneficial for mining or

hunting (Ibid:10). The archipelago now hosts a prevailing academic presence as a research

centre for climate studies, there is a University, as well as the Global seed vault containing

almost all known crop varieties that exist. The area, being situated in the high Arctic is also a

place of interest for geopolitical reasons. As such, Svalbard has through the years come to be

mainly described by people from the outside, being, as Huggan and Jensen write about the

entire Arctic region, “the scientists who study it, the politicians who want to control it, [and]

the oilmen who want to exploit it” (Huggan & Jensen 2016:32-33). Now, on top of all these

factors, one can now place tourism, as Svalbard’s economy has come to depend on it. The

narrative is now also decided by media, the photographs and the stories which are used as a

tool by these tourism companies to capitalise on prospective tourists imaginations and

expectations of the area, the experiences they have been told they can have there.

1.2 Purpose and aims

The purpose of this essay is two-fold. One purpose is to analyse and understand the process

in which tourist agencies and media create and use people’s imagined worlds as capitalist

products. The other focus will be on how the place is perceived and by what means this

perception is maintained and/or transformed. The essay will discuss the tourist activity in

Longyearbyen and Barentsburg, seeing as Longyearbyen has worked for a longer period of

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time to establish itself as an attraction while Barentsburg is still at the beginning of the

process. I believe that the marketing of these two places contributes greatly to how a place is

understood and experienced by tourists. I mean to explore how this altering and recreating of

the international conception of the villages as well as the archipelago as an entirety is carried

out through material means, marketing, and advertisement. The questions which are to be

answered will revolve mainly around how former tourists, as well as prospective tourists,

perceive the destination before, during and after their stay, if it has already been completed,

as well as which tools and means tourist agencies and media apply to create these perceptions

according to their will in order to work financially in their advantage. In essence, the essay

will be about how imaginations made for the consumption of many presents itself as the

imaginaries of the individual, and the effect these imaginaries themselves had on the actual

experience. The main questions will be as follows: By what means is Svalbard as a tourist

destination recreated as imaginative worlds by media and how does this effort reflect in the

perception of prospective and former tourists?

1.3 Method and material

In order to find as nuanced and detailed an answer as possible to the questions, I will focus

mainly on a theoretical analysis drawn from the extensive research already done on tourism,

arctic geopolitics, imaginary worlds, and history of the Svalbard archipelago. The main

source of information will be the book Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High

North (2016) by Graham Huggan and Lars Jensen, which discusses extensively the historical

contexts as well as the geopolitical dimensions of Svalbard in relation to tourism and the

prevalent mining industry, as well as several articles on sovereignty, media distribution, and

advertisement strategies. In addition to the literary analysis which I will conduct, I will look

at the many different tourist-oriented websites as well as Instagram pages, forums and

Facebook pages which focus on Svalbard. Then I will analyse the way in which these

online-places distribute media and which types of images and texts they post.

I myself will fall into the category of people who are planning to go there in the future as

tourists, and I am aware that I myself am attracted to the very same created concepts which

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media and tourist agencies have made for me. Another focal point will be interviews and

forms with questions which will be asked to people who have themselves been in Svalbard or

are planning to go there in the future. The informants are people who were there either

recently, many years ago or who want to go there as tourists, and I have been able to contact

them through asking everyone I could if they fit the category or whether or not they know

someone who might. Throughout my search for informants, I contacted around 10 to 15

people, some on social media and some through mutual connections, and three informants

responded, and I was lucky enough to be able to interview a photographer who had recently

visited Svalbard as a tourist, a Scientist used to work in the archipelago during several

periods in time, and an individual who had no connection to the place whatsoever. These

informants will be anonymous and thus given new names for this paper because the

interviews may reveal personal information which does not need to be associated with one

specific individual person, but rather with their world view and experience. All interviews

will be face-to-face interviews lasting for approximately half an hour with ten main

questions. I will ask them about their reasons for choosing the destination, which

expectations they had of the trip, and whether or not the reality of the destination lived up to

those expectations. It is also worth mentioning that all interviews were conducted in Swedish

and that the quoted words and expressions have been translated as directly as possible to

English for this essay. The interviews which are done in person will also go deeper into the

sensory experiences of the tourists, meaning the various feelings of the trip and place. This is

because a big part of the questions asked are focused not only on the strategic means by

which various companies create profitable imaginations, but also how they are lived by the

tourists who are subject to them. In order to more efficiently answer my questions in this

essay, I will focus more on the similarities of their perceptions, so that patterns may be more

clearly pronounced. I believe that a conversation discussing these experiences will lead to a

more profound understanding of the correlation between the creation of the concepts and the

concepts themselves.

1.4 Theory

The theoretical framework for this essay will be based on the concepts of Imaginaries

described in Noel B.Salazar’s book Envisioning Eden (2010). Salazar means that we all live

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in imaginary worlds, which are the product of individual first-person subjectivities which

may create implicit patterns and cultural expressions for entire groups and/or societies in the

forms of, for example, legends and stories. This idea of imaginaries declares that imaginaries

are always felt individually from one’s own point of view, created by each experience a

person has had and every bit of information they have gathered. Even if the imaginaries of

several people might collectively create the realities for entire groups, the imaginary worlds

themselves are not collective. They express themselves implicitly within the people in which

they inhabit (Salazar 2017:6ff). This approach allows the study to focus more deeply on

individuals and the worlds that have been created for them, by media and corporations which

mean to exploit these worlds for capitalist gain, rather than focus on the representative power

of their information to depict mutual thoughts of any specific group of which they are part. It

can, however, also help me find patterns. If the very same idea or expectation is repeated by

people from different places with their own respective concepts of reality, then it is easy to

draw the conclusion that these ideas have been otherwise created, or in any case curated,

especially if none of the informants had any previous ties with the place. In other words,

these first-person subjectivities do not stem from first-person experiences, but at best

second-hand ones.

I will also, to a lesser extent, use Appadurai’s five-way approach to imaginative worlds as a

part of the global cultural economy in his book Disjuncture and Difference in the Global

Cultural Economy (1990). Specifically, two of these approaches discusses the movement of

people and media, as well as the correlation between the two, how they affect the economy,

and why they are made to be a part of it, to begin with. The first, ethnoscape, refers to the

shifting landscape created by human motion, such as tourism, in this case, generated by

people’s will to seek new places, experiences, lives, and the fantasies concerning them. He

writes that since many places and economies are dependent on human movement, they can

never afford people to let their imaginations sit on ice for too long, even if they would prefer

to. Mediascape, on the other hand, refers to the landscape of images, how ideas are

distributed through media to the rest of the world. He also mentions Imaginative worlds and

Imaginative communities. Appadurai means that entire imaginative worlds are created by the

contexts about, for example, a place, which people have become accustomed to. The terms

refer to the created concepts and perceptions which an individual or a group have come to

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apply to a place, in contrast to Salazar’s theory of imaginaries which are purely individual

(Appadurai 1990) (Salazar 2010).

1.6 Disposition

In the first part of my analysis, Adventure Tourism and the Expedition Dream, the focus will

be on the historical contexts and stories of arctic explorers and the ideas tourists may have of

following in their footsteps. It will discuss the stories and legends of polar exploration as the

collective expression of imaginaries and how they have come to affect my informants, as well

as tourism in Svalbard as a whole.

In the second part, Outnumbered by Polar bears, I will discuss the expectations and

attractions of wildlife and nature on Svalbard for Tourists. It will analyse the abundance of

wildlife media, as in photography, films, stories, and more. This part will find out more about

how and why so many people come to Svalbard looking for mainly polar bears, arctic fox,

Svalbard reindeer, as well as the mountainous landscape covered in ice and snow, and

whether or not the depiction is realistic or mainly created by media.

In the third part of my analysis, Looking for Charming Rust I will discuss the attraction and

expectation of materiality, especially on the subject of Barentsburg and the Soviet-style

architecture and media marketing.

2. Data and analysis

2.1 Adventure tourism and the expedition dream

Svalbard has often been mythologised as the end of the world, and as far as adventure

tourism goes, the end of the world is quite an attractive place. This can be seen in just how

often more remote arctic destinations are described this way, like for example Iceland (Morris

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2017) (Discover Iceland 2019) and Greenland (Visit Greenland 2019), to name a few. While

Svalbard is often marketed as a cold, unforgiving, and forbidding place, meant for those who

seek a venture far removed from the mainstream tourist experience, it never seems to be

marketed as inaccessible. It offers a comfortable way to experience the desolate and rare

which is the high north. The archipelago has, in spite of being branded as “untouched '' been

very much the centre of human activity and industrialization. Capitalism has been as present

here as anywhere else ((Huggan & Jensen 2016:48). The area has since the early 20th century

been riddled with short-term and semi-permanent villages and mining communities, such as

Advent City, Hiorthamn, and Tunheim, which all became settlements in the early

nineteen-hundreds. Longyearbyen started out as Longyear City in 1906, founded for the sole

purpose of housing a coal mining operation. Although there was a tourist-cabin at Hotellneset

not far from Longyearbyen already in 1896, companies only really started investing in

Svalbard’s tourism industry after the coal mine’s seams started depleting and it was clear that

the mining would stop being financially viable (Ibid:47ff). Longyearbyen was in every single

way clearly a company town, where the Norweigan coal mining company Store Norske

Kulkompani ran everything up until the mid-1970s. At this point in time Store Norske

became nationalized as a company and the Norweigan state began a process of so-called

“normalizing” Longyearbyen, which essentially meant modernising it and re-making it into a

place which offered the same living conditions and welfare as any other Norweigan village

(UNIS 2019). Today, this vision has been completely realized. Online you can easily find no

less than fourteen near five-star hotels, there are numerous high-end restaurants and shops,

making it ideal for the comfortable adventure at the end of the world.

One of my informants, Sven, a photographer who had been to Svalbard in the spring of 2019

for an excursion of mixed work and tourism, with the goal of finding polar bears and arctic

foxes, described his trip as “an adventure without it’s like”, calling it “a true expedition”. The

words adventure and expedition recurred several times throughout the thirty-minute

interview, even though each of his group excursions were led by a tour and they slept in a

high-end hotel or cruise ship at night. When talking about his expectations prior to arrival he

said that he had made an active effort to stay away from tourist agencies and media, hoping to

find the place fresh and untainted by his own thoughts and assumptions. Nevertheless, he did

mention that he thought of Roald Amundsen and his expeditions when he thought of

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Svalbard. This gives a nod to the heroic age of polar exploration and its key figures, just like

many of the tourist agencies and tourist-oriented websites do online (VisitSvalbard.com

2019) (Leadbeater 2011). This era is marked by explorers who went on expeditions to the

polar regions just like Amundsen, who was, and is, in every respect one of the most famous

polar explorers ever to have lived, and although he is mostly famous for his Antarctic

endeavours rather than his Arctic travels, it is he and explorers just like him who created the

image of the arctic as we in the west see it today (Alexander 2011).

The fact that the explorers who created the image of the arctic as we in the west know it was

mostly from Europe, especially the Nordic countries, and the Americas, such as Amundsen

himself, Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary, to name a few, is important to take into

consideration as well. The idea of the arctic has been largely shaped by those from the

outside who mean to exploit it in some way, like for example how the west has exploited it

for oil, coal, geopolitics, academic endeavours and over-all colonialist agendas for centuries

(McCannon 2012: 1ff). The legend of the arctic as the end of the world, for example, is

shaped to fit a specific image which the west has wanted to portray. This could mean that the

reason the arctic is attractive to many adventure tourists is because it is marketed as being

less known to the main group of interest for the companies which market them, to begin with.

The arctic landscape exemplifies many of the aspects which people situated further south are

unfamiliar with, because the few stories we have traditionally been told about it have been

told relatively far apart time-wise. The landscape has not been an easily definable part of our

mainstream western concept of geography simply because the stories and legends which

dictate the imaginaries of the west, in this case, are almost completely orchestrated by people

who exotified it themselves, layered through a long-term, complex process involving a

plethora of factors such as politics, geography, economics, and, well, time. In other words,

the stories and legends which the west have gained access to have largely been made by

western spectators, and the western narrative begins with the western explorers. For almost

the entire arctic, it begins with the west’s exotification and essentialization of the area and its

indigenous population. But this gives us another interesting aspect of Svalbard to consider.

There is no indigenous population on the archipelago, even though it has long been inhabited

in temporary settlements by European peoples (Ibid:43). The story of this place as we know it

begins and ends with the western ideas and concepts through the centuries which westerners

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have inhabited, worked, and travelled in the region. There is no other source for the west

which is easily accessible for the wider public perhaps slightly because of language barriers

and general marketing of ideas in this case; the West’s preferred imaginary is produced

mainly for the west, and indeed works best in the area for which it was produced. This is not

to say that people from other parts of the world do not attract to some or all of these very

same points, such as exploration, wildlife, and a promise of adventure. Like stated earlier,

imaginaries can express themselves collectively in larger groups through legends and stories.

Yet, imaginaries are always individual and cannot be generalised to the extent that they are

entirely truthful to each person’s reality, which also means that it is impossible to maintain

the same legends and stories across geographical areas. On a side note, one can also consider

the fact that every single proposed “tourist” on all the pictures on the websites of the Svalbard

tourist agencies and their Instagram profiles, and so on, are overwhelmingly light-skinned.

Without exceptions, as far as I picked up. Most also seem to be young people which I

perceived to be around the ages of 20 to 35, and children are rarely seen. Although it is

implicit and most probably not directly deliberate, I believe that this might reflect both who

the marketing is directed towards as well as who picks up on it. In a general sense, that is.

The imaginaries which the agencies and media try to create does not extend to everyone, not

only because it would be impossible, but also because they are simply not trying to market to

everyone.

Svalbard has always been a point of exploration because it is the explorers who told us what

Svalbard is. When arctic explorers defined the area, it was actually largely untouched, it

didn’t really have established legends of its own as many other arctic areas had (ibid:46ff). So

not only is the area different than what the west is traditionally used to, inhabiting what most

of us would call inhospitable conditions, but Svalbard specifically is also only historically

characterised by western eyes. Since the Dutch explorer Willem Barentz first officially

“discovered” Svalbard in the summer of 1596 it has been in pretty constant use (ibid:91ff).

There is clear evidence that people had been there since 2000BCE (ibd:43), but Barentz

discovery was the beginning of a long and well-established industrial and academic career for

the archipelago, also known as Spitsbergen, which is dutch for Sharp-peaked mountains. The

men who followed in his footsteps as explorers and scientists in the 19th and early 20th

century were among the first to contribute to a nowadays common type of legend which

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essentializes the Arctic high north. For example, Fridtjof Nansen, a famous Norwegian arctic

explorer wrote an account of his travels with the boat Fram, which is the Norwegian word for

forward, in the book Farthest North, originally published in 1897. Throughout the more than

500 pages he writes of the everyday life as an explorer, recounting all the dangers, the

vastness of the ice, and the stunning beauty which is the arctic. He, like many other explorers,

wrote about and shaped the idea of the vastness, the loneliness, the grandeur of finding what

no one else has, writing about the arctic as “so awfully still, with the silence that shall one

day reign, when the earth again becomes desolate and empty”, which McCannon describes as

a common instance of essentializing the arctic for poetic effect (McCannon 2012:2-5). Today,

Hurtigruten, a Norwegian cruise ship company, has an “expedition ship” called MS Fram

which goes to Svalbard amongst other places, commemorating the travels Nansen did with

his ship in the area and beyond (Hurtigruten.com 2019).

Of course, everything has changed since the time Nansen travelled in the region, but the

legends of his travels and those of the other polar explorers mix well with the media’s

description of the area. It shows vastness, permanence. The tourist-oriented websites

themselves try to enforce this feeling of grandeur within ourselves, writing about Svalbard as

if it was still unexplored, untouched, alluding to the idea that if we choose to go, we will have

done what few have dared to. Salazar writes that imaginaries, although completely individual

at its base, can express themselves more explicitly in larger groups and communities in the

forms of stories and legends. So if this is about legends and people’s imaginations that they

can follow in the footsteps of these explorers, they would thus inhabit the grandeur they feel

were inhabited by the original explorers themselves, to do what they did, not as mimics, but

perhaps feeling as if they are parallels to their experience. They do not necessarily believe

that they are becoming the explorers themselves, but that they become like them, in their

likeness. Still, the reality seems to prove that Svalbard is not very untouched at all. Over the

last few decades tourism at Svalbard has grown rapidly, many thanks to these media and

photographs. The few villages scattered throughout the archipelago host approximately

40,000 adventure-seeking tourists every year on top of their regular population of 2,667,

becoming hubs for people drawn to the islands by the promises of a harsh no-man’s land.

Media and tourist agencies alike advertise a landscape largely untouched by human

interaction, teeming with wildlife, giving tourists hope to access more authentic experiences

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far from metropolitan society (Huggan & Jensen 2016:47ff). Yet, he claimed never to have

expected anything extraordinary. Sven mentioned that on the flight over to Svalbard, he and

his colleagues had had a conversation about the fact that they were staying in a Radisson

Hotel, which is a well-known high-end hotel chain. The question “Just how extraordinary can

it be?” arose because of this observation. This question was easily answered once they had

landed. To him, there was a slight divide in expectation and reality. He expected to find an

isolated place with only a few, old people living there. He expected people to stay only

because they could not leave. Instead, he found a vibrant community with families, with

children growing up and going to school and where people seemed to be overall happy. He

found, in his expedition to find something untouched, a “completely normal northern

Norweigan village”. This then led him to call the entire place “ambivalent” and “surreal” in

several instances. In some ways the place was exactly what he thought of it, it was cold,

inhospitable in many ways, and small. Yet, Sven did feel like this place he stepped into

through the snowstorm which was reigning when he arrived to be otherworldly and

somewhat bizarre, but not because it was very different from anything he had seen before, but

because he expected it not to be. Because of the boom in tourism and the Norweigan

normalization efforts, which he never mentioned himself, the place was modern, it seemed

almost, by his accounts, glamorous. Now, modern and sparse do not strike one as opposites

necessarily, but when the expectation of one thing, no matter how subtle, is contradicted,

such differences become more marked.

Sven found Longyearbyen to be “cliché”. Everything was incredibly made-up for the tourism

industry, and when I asked him whether he felt like the place had been made that way for the

actual inhabiting population or the temporary tourists, he said that he felt it was completely

made for the tourists. He felt as if all this added glamour was there to make money, like how

the mall he described sold a lot of expensive sportswear which the typical inhabitant would

not need for everyday life, but would be attractive for the tourists which mean to explore.

This idea also extended to the tourist gift shops and souvenirs, the many high-end restaurants,

and of course expensive hotels which, for obvious reasons, would not appear very necessary

for the inhabiting population of just over two thousand. While this glamour did not really

extend to the exterior of the village, the architecture style or house facades, the insides of the

shops and the hotel made him feel as though he might as well be anywhere. It looked so

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much like anything else, which did not seem to be anything special to him, that he did not

feel as though he was specifically in Longyearbyen when glossing the experience over in his

memories. The actual activity on the inside of these buildings did not let him forget where he

was though, as everything sold and marketed was directed towards tourism.

2.2 Outnumbered by polar bears

Anyone who would find Svalbard interesting from a wildlife and nature aspect would be right

to, to be sure. National Geographic published a piece on Svalbard's biodiversity on their

website, aptly named Ice Paradise by author Bruce Barcott, who at one point explained that

thousands of polar bears inhabit the region, alongside millions of seabirds, several types of

seals, a dozen types of whales, a specific type of short-legged reindeer and unrivalled arctic

foxes (Barcott 2009). In addition, the landscape offers open tundra as well as snow-clad

mountains and various geographical formations, as apparent in every tourist-oriented media I

have come across. This is far from fiction, it does not stem from any sort of particular

world-view or capitalist thought, but the fact that this biodiversity has become a focal point

for the tourism industry and its marketing reflects the wishes and imaginaries of the group of

people it wishes to appease and attract. They understood the assets and capitalised on the

natural products which they had to work with, to begin with.

Looking at media and tourist agency websites, one can see that the image portrayed is almost

exclusively an image of untouched wildlife and nature. Instagram pages such as GoArctica,

which is a tourist agency based in Barentsburg, focus their photography on wild animals,

dogs, snow-covered mountains and vast ice-fields, as well as a few pictures of their

Soviet-style architecture. Other businesses though, such as the Longyearbyen-based

self-proclaimed “Photo Guide” which has the Instagram page “See & Explore” focus

completely on wildlife and nature. Out of their 530 posts at the time of writing this, only two

depict any sort of settlement (See & Explore 2019). While this ties in with the feeling of

vastness and a feeling of something explored for you to experience, it deserves to be analysed

more deeply because it handles more of what a person wants to see, the environment they

would find rewarding, rather than acts they would personally like to carry out, such as written

above (see part 2.1). Here, one can also again consider Arjun Appadurai’s five-way approach,

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mainly on the subject of mediascapes. Appadurai makes it clear that he believes that

mediascapes are most prominent as the lines between places that are far removed from each

other, such as between metropolitan lives and the imagined authenticity of remote Svalbard.

The media which enforces the idea of this “otherness” is then a main driving force of the

creation of the prominent ethnoscape of tourism to the area (Appadurai 1990)

The first thing my informant, Tova, who has of yet never been to Svalbard, said in our

interview as a response to when I asked her about her initial thoughts and impression of the

archipelago, was “polar bears”. She also mentioned that she thought it would be a “really

isolated place, like if there is anything you would want to get rid of, you could just put it

there”. While these all seemed to be reasons for this place to become attractive for Tova, as

isolation and polar bears were desirable traits for a short vacation to clear your mind and

disappear for a short while, what she seemed to be really fascinated by were mountains. To

be sure, there are many mountains on Svalbard, or Spitzbergen as I mentioned earlier. She

told me that she had lived in a very flat area for a year and a half now and that she had

become so tired of it that anything but a flat area would excite her. Tova did then find the

otherness of this place as exciting simply because it has been presented to her as having the

attributes which she found lacking in her current environment, which is also a mindset which

the tourist-oriented websites I have mentioned often try to enforce in their marketing. This

can easily be seen to fit within Appadurai’s theories, in which he means that peoples

imaginaries, in this case, are created and reproduced for the profit of both the economy at

large and for the consumers, whose imaginations the economy is independent upon.

For Sven, the main objective of his expedition was to see and photograph polar bears and

arctic foxes. Through his excursions, he reached this goal, and he returned home with several

pictures of both animals. Still, he said he was somewhat disappointed. In Longyearbyen,

everything seemed to pump up the expectations of the tourists in regards to finding polar

bears, with the buildings standing on stilts as protection for any eventual polar bear attack and

the souvenir shops selling polar bear trap for the tourists to take home and put on display.

There is of course also the famous unique polar bear warning sign on the outskirts of the

village (Hurtigruten 2019). Sven was disappointed because when he and his 42 travel

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companions had returned home, he found that another group had gotten a lot closer to the

polar bears than he and his companions had. He also said that the terrain was muddy and

unpleasant. For Sven, this did not mean that he was disappointed in the trip overall, he still

believed it to be a grand adventure, and he expressed a will to come back in the summer and

do it all over again, hopefully getting closer to the bears than previously.

Another thing that both Sven and Tova mentioned during our talks was the seemingly endless

darkness, the eternal sunlight of summer, and most of all, the northern lights. Visit Svalbard's

homepage online even markets the fact that the northern lights, or aurora borealis as they

have chosen to call it, appear even at day time during the polar night. Because Svalbard is

situated above the arctic circle, one can experience the midnight sun during the summer

months and a complete lack of sun during the winter. This makes the area perfect for those

looking for the northern lights, which is a phenomenon which makes tourists flock to arctic

regions by the thousands every year (Huggan & Jensen 2016:45). Fridtjof Nansen wrote

about the Aurora Borealis extensively in Farthest North:

Sometimes the spectacle reached such a climax that one’s breath was taken away; one felt

that now something extraordinary must happen—at the very least the sky must fall. But as

one stands in breathless expectation, down the whole thing trips, as if in a few quick, light

scale-runs, into bare nothingness. (Nansen 2010: 316)

The grandeur of the northern lights is surely something which has been spoken about for

centuries, so it would not be difficult to draw the conclusion that the idea of the northern

lights is much stronger etched into the minds of the everyday prospective tourist than the

reality is. For most, accounts like this one by Nansen, pictures like those all over Instagram,

taken by hundreds of photographers, films on YouTube, all of it has contributed to the

making the mythologised concept of northern lights. While my neither Tova, Sven or Olof

really mentioned the northern lights, throughout my experience talking to people who live

further south has led me to believe that the northern lights are a well-known phenomenon, the

pictures of which seems to have made many people fall in love with the idea with them.

People, when talking about the north in general, have usually mentioned the northern lights

pretty much as soon as the conversation started. Again, this can be so clearly alluded to in the

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marketing of arctic tourism because you simply have to go to the arctic areas to find the

northern lights at all, and furthermore, you have to leave metropolitan areas because of light

pollution, which makes the remoteness of Svalbard and its relatively small settlements ideal

for the hunt for northern lights.

Another thing that all of my informants mentioned without fail, was climate change and

global warming. One of them, Olof, works as a scientist recording the changes in Svalbard

and their correlation to climate change. Sven mentioned the duplicity of marketing Svalbard

as the last great wilderness and the need to preserve it, as a part of the tourism industry which

so obviously impacts the climate and environment greatly while also putting a lot of stress on

the archipelago itself when thousands of tourists come there every year. Sven meant that if

one is to go there, one should make the most out of the experience. One should learn about

the land, the nature, the life in the arctic, and explore as much of it as possible to, in some

way, make up a little bit for the impact your travels had. If one decides to travel to Svalbard,

he said, do everything. Tova also said that she would like to go there while it is still possible,

as climate change will surely change the place drastically, which Olof means it already has.

Olof also mentioned the duplicity of going to Svalbard to experience the Arctic High North in

it’s “untouched” form while putting so much stress on the area, and also the fact that climate

change is the reason people could even get to Svalbard in as high numbers as they can today.

Olof said that during the first few times he visited, the ice made it impossible to travel to

certain areas where today cruise ships can carry hundreds of passengers at a time. So, climate

change is a reason people want to visit Svalbard, while also being the reason Svalbard is

going through a drastic change away from the aspects which tourists value, such as the

wildlife.

2.3 Looking for charming rust

When my informant Olof went to Barentsburg for the first time in the early 1970s, he

experienced it as “living hell”. The picture he painted of the place was bleak, to say the least

meaning that people really did seem to suffer and starve against the stark backdrop of Soviet

concrete buildings and communist art. After the 1920 Svalbard treaty was created, which

granted Norway sovereignty, Russia became a signatory on said treaty. This meant that

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Russia was allowed access the natural resources to create enterprises in the archipelago.

When the Soviet Union was created, they used this opportunity to develop their commercial

pursuits there in the form of coal mines, and as a result, the settlements created for the

workers of the Soviet mines are like their own wholly Soviet villages. There the people spoke

Russian and used a different currency than in the Norweigan settlements, both practices

which have survived in the population today which is mostly made up of former Soviet

citizens. When the Soviet union dispersed, the soviet settlements stayed mostly unchanged

for a long time (Nuwer, 2014). Today, there are companies dedicated to giving tours to the

so-called “Soviet Svalbard” by their website, saying that by going to these settlements “you’ll

feel more like you are back in the USSR rather than in a Scandinavian country” (Soviet

Tours, 2020). In Pyramiden, which is another Soviet settlement which has been abandoned

since 1998 and since then preserved, there are several murals and slogans throughout the

area, including a bust of Lenin and a several meter long slogan translating to “Our goal is

communism!” built back in 1974 (Nilsen 2019). Not much has changed since then when it

comes to the buildings. In fact, Visit Svalbard advertises Barentsburg as “Wonderfully

Rustic”, and other tourist-oriented websites and media seem to market that same quality. Just

like with Pyramiden Barentsburg’s ability to work as a Soviet time-capsule seems to attract a

lot of tourists. Tova, who has never been to Svalbard, said that Barentsburg and Pyramiden

seemed to be incredibly interesting because of the historical significance carried by the

preservation of the Soviet buildings and art. Yet, according to Olof, Barentsburg has changed

drastically throughout the years. Since his visit in the 70s, he has returned several times for

work, and his latest visit to Svalbard was in the summer of 2019. The bleakness and suffering

which he witnessed in Barentsburg in the 70s seem to have been almost completely

eradicated. While he was well aware of the change Longyearbyen had gone through during

the years of the normalization process, and why that change was undergone, he said he was

absolutely sure that the transformation in Barentsburg was done only for the outside world’s

eyes. Tourism has become a much more important industry in Svalbard since the coal mines

are closer and closer to becoming depleted, which is estimated to happen by 2030

(VisitSvalbard.com) but Russia is not ready to let go of its operations in Svalbard. Olof said

that this is all about claims to the archipelago, and yet again for geopolitical interests, as more

clearly discussed in Juggan and Hansen’s book (2016:30ff). Barentsburg-based GoArctica

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has expressed a desire to completely recreate the town to become the centre for Russian

operations in the arctic, while containing the “Soviet Nostalgia” in Pyramiden, to where the

company offers tourists organised tours. This Soviet nostalgia is although a very important

aspect for tourism in Basentsburg to thrive. Huggan and Jensen write that Barentsburg is

indeed losing its charm because of these changes, which leaves tourists without the very

important feeling of authenticity when visiting, alluding to the often studied phenomenon that

objects lose their authenticity when recreated (Huggan & Jensen 2016:46). Yet, visit Svalbard

writes this about Barentsburg:

The first thing you see upon arrival is its power-station chimney, belching dark black smoke into

the blue sky. This isolated village continues to mine coal against all odds and still produces up to

350,000 tonnes per year – the seam is predicted to last until around 2030. With its signing in

Cyrillic script, still-standing bust of Lenin, murals of muscled workers in heroic

pose and a rundown and dishevelled air, Barentsburg is a wonderfully retro Soviet time warp.

(Visit Svalbard 2019)

Both Olof and Tova said that the Soviet feel of the place, the architecture, the art, the Cyrillic

script, made the place “charming”. Olof also mentioned that through the years and all the

efforts from the tourist industry to clean the place up and make it more attractive to tourists,

he felt that the opposite has been achieved. He said that the charm had begun to disappear,

that everything was now only a facade to make it appear inviting. He also said that this facade

did not feel genuine, that it felt like it was only there to make tourists look at it like it was

something desirable, it did not feel authentic to him. It started to look just like everything

else, like the houses and places they are both used to and listening to both Olof and Tova’s

thoughts about the place’s transformation, there does not seem to be anything especially

fascinating about it when it looks just like “anything else”.

Conclusion

Svalbard is recreated as imaginative worlds within the tourism market by media through the

idea of “otherness”. From the individual experiences of my three informants, we can see that

their thoughts and expectations of Svalbard have been clearly linked with the type of ideas

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the tourist-oriented market is trying to sell. As Appadurai mentioned when speaking of

mediascapes, or the way that media is distributed throughout the world, they are the most

efficient in inducing imaginative worlds and communities when the media depicts something

which the main focus group lack in their environment or lifestyle. This would mean that, in

order to sell experiences in Svalbard, this tourism market is trying to advertise “otherness”

because otherness has shown itself to be attractive. This is also apparently true in the cases of

my three informants, who did not find it exciting to go to, or indeed spend money on going

to, a place which looked and felt like “anything else”. They very clearly wanted to experience

something more extraordinary, and to some extent, something more “true”, which was most

clearly visible and understood in the accounts of Sven and Olof. Sven wanted to experience

genuine expeditions and adventure and scoffed at the idea of there being a high-end hotel part

of a well-renowned hotel chain which you can find in any other country in Longyearbyen. He

and his colleagues spoke about that as if the fact that it was a famous hotel part of a franchise

made it less genuine. Olof, on the other hand, rather found the facade of Barentsburg to be

“fake”. Even when having seen it in the 70s, a time period in which he experienced

Barentsburg to be as a living hell, he meant that the modern-day facade of prosperity and well

being in the town stripped the charm from Barentsburg. To him, this facade was put up as a

way to allure to tourists, which made it less authentic. He did not feel that way about

Longyerbyen though, as he felt that the normalization process of the village meant that the

change was genuinely to improve the life for the inhabitants, not just to make it look pretty.

Tova felt the same way as Olof when it came to Barentsburg, even if she has never been to

Svalbard and did not actually know what it looked like outside of pictures. She thought that

the idea of changing such a historical place at all would be a form of destruction rather than

creation, which she felt was a shame. She felt that such things ought to be preserved. To

Sven, it still felt like Longyearbyen was glamorous just to make it more friendly to tourists,

not to the inhabitants themselves, because of the type of tourist-oriented shops and what was

sold in it, such as the polar-bear trap that one of the souvenir shops sold.

The materiality of both Longyearbyen and Barentsburg play crucial roles in the tourism

industry, and many who arrive in Svalbard seem to expect the pristine nature which was

promised to them, wanting untouched, again “authentic”, wilderness as though the

archipelago has not been actively used and lived on for over four centuries. According to

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Huggen and Jensen, those who were allured by the “authentic wilderness” side of the

marketing are often disappointed to find the material remnants of this activity, the proof of

capitalist ventures and society within the mountain ranges. On the other hand, those who

were promised that Soviet-dilapidated charm can no longer find it in Barentsburg (Huggan &

Jensen 2016: 46-48).

Because of the history concerning the area, which is relatively recent in form of written

records, the tourism-market oriented mainly towards the west has come to capitalise to a

great extent on this imagined grandeur of former expeditions, the pristine nature, and to a

smaller extent, the rustic charm of the settlements and former industry in the archipelago.

Because of this, the tourists have come to expect untouched nature, a sense of isolation, and a

sense of greatness following in the footsteps of the explorers before them. These imaginaries

which have already been created for them by different sorts of media, such as the movie

“Amundsen” from 2019 which depicts the explorers life and arctic expeditions, books like the

previously mentioned Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen himself, as well as constantly

updated Instagram pages and tourist websites, did not necessarily shatter when they were

contradicted but rather adapted into fitting the reality which they were presented with. The

believed experience and the felt experience fused together at the point of contact. In other

words, it could be said that their preemptive imaginaries were not separated from their

first-hand experiences. There is no clear cut line between the two, there’s a transition, a

change perhaps, but they cannot be separated. For example, there is no questioning that the

individual imaginaries of my informant Sven had been somewhat created by the inevitably

apparent legend of arctic exploration, even in spite of his attempts to come in clean. Even

when his expectations were opposed, he still clung to the idea of adventure and expedition,

even if it was not exactly the way in which he thought it would be, to begin with. The legends

are thus reproduced; the legend creates the imaginary, and the imaginary reproduces the

legend. The way in which these two are able to correlate in this case is through media, which

is the reason so many individuals can be privy to the same general shape of imaginaries,

which is obvious in my informants as well as me.

To us, in some way, it had become an imaginary edgeland because it was the edgeland to

those who first created the image which we have been exposed to and because there have

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been economical reasons to keep it that way. As Appadurai said, the fantasies of tourists

cannot be allowed to rest for too long, lest they stop being economically viable. The

imaginaries in the case of Svalbard are dictated and created by a narrative which focuses its

marketing on the things we find lacking in our current environment, which is clear in Tova’s

account of finding the mountains to be one of the most interesting parts of Svalbard, as she

did not have any mountains close by at home. It feels obvious that the target group for the

tourism industry here are adventure tourists who want to find something different from what

they are used to, and so the media paint a picture directly relating to this wish. They simply

supply the demand which they have created themselves from the material they have found to

be present, which in this case is the stories of explorers past, the remote and therefore less

industrialised nature, as well as the heavily industrialized mining settlements and their

remnants. By reproducing the imaginaries which stem from these factors over and over again,

tourist agencies create a solid marketing strategy which alludes to the tourists wish to find the

“other”.

Literature:

Huggan, G. & Jensen, L. 2016, Postcolonial perspectives on the European high north:

unscrambling the Arctic, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Salazar, N.B., 2010, Envisioning Eden: mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond,

Berghahn Books, New York. E-book.

Nansen, F. Farthest North, Vol. II Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship

'Fram' 1893-1896, Project Gutenberg. E-book.

Sellheim, N. 2016, A History of The Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation. John

McCannon. 2012. London: Reaktion Books. Polar Record, vol. 52, no. 2.

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Articles

Alexander, Caroline 2011. “The Man Who Took the Prize” National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/09/amundsen/ (Retrieved 2019-23-12) Barcott, Bruce 2009. “Ice Paradise”. National Geographic.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2009/04/svalbard/ (Retrieved 2019-19-12)

Leadbeater, Chris 2011. “A winter's tale in Norway: Explore the wilds of Roald Amundsen's homeland” Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/a-winters-tale-in-norway-explore-the-wilds-of-roald-amundsens-homeland-6274666.html (Retrieved 2019-17-12) Morris, Hugh 2017. “A journey to the end of the earth: the Iceland where tourists are yet to go”. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/iceland/articles/north-iceland-akureyri-siglufjordur/ (Retrieved 2019-17-12)

Nilsen, Thomas 2018. “Barentsburg aims to move from dirty coal to become gateway for

Russia's Arctic tourism”. The Barents Observer. https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/node/4314

(Retrieved: 2019-05-12).

Nuwer, Rachel 2014. “A Soviet Ghost Town in the Arctic Circle, Pyramiden Stands Alone”

Smithsonian magazine.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/soviet-ghost-town-arctic-circle-pyramiden-stands-al

one-180951429/ (Retrieved: 2020 03-06)

Rostuhar, Davor 2019. “Let’s go to Thule - The end of the world” Visit Greenland. https://visitgreenland.com/articles/thule-end-of-the-world/ (Retrieved 2019-17-12)

Websites Discover Iceland. Iceland: A Journey to the End of the Earth. 2018

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https://www.discover.is/iceland-journey-end-earth/ (Retrieved 2019-17-12) Hurtigruten. 2019 https://www.hurtigruten.com/us/press-releases/2017-press-releases/hurtigruten-reveals-new-h

ybrid-ships-and-20192020-polar-adventures/ (Retrived 2019-19-12)

Hurtigruten. 2019

https://global.hurtigruten.com/destinations/svalbard/inspiration/wildlife/polar-bear/

(Retrieved 2019-20-12)

Lonely planet. 2019

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/norway/svalbard (Retrieved 2019-06-12)

Soviet Tours. 2020

https://www.soviettours.com/svalbard-tours (Retrieved 2020-03-06)

Tourism notes. Adventure Tourism. 2019 https://tourismnotes.com/adventure-tourism/ (Retrieved 2019-06-12)

Visit Svalbard. 2019

https://en.visitsvalbard.com/ (Retrieved 2019-06-12)

Instagram pages: GoArctica 2019 https://www.instagram.com/goarctica/?hl=en (Retrieved 2019-29-11) See&Explore 2019. https://www.instagram.com/seeandexplore_/?hl=en (Retrieved 2019-29-11)

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Unpublished sources

Interviews

1. Olof (Pseudonym)

Gender: male

Date of interview: 26-11-19

Interview length: 35 minutes

Interview conducted by the author.

Interview stored by the author.

2. Sven (Pseudonym)

Gender: male

Date of interview: 22-11-19

Interview length: 40 minutes

Interview conducted by the author.

Interview stored by the author.

1. Tova (Pseudonym)

Gender: Female

Date of interview: 9-12-19

Interview length: 35 minutes

Interview conducted by the author.

Interview stored by the author.

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