Background
In 2012, the Faroese Løgting decided on working towards making tourism a new basis industry in The Faroes. This was an attempt to stabilize and differentiate the Faroese economy that was extremely fragile because it had been heavily reliant on fishery since the latter half of the 19th century (Malthe-Thagaard 2018; Joensen 1985). Over the following years, the Faroese tourism sector grew steadily and by 20191 revenue from tourism had increased by 44% (VFI 2019a). Tourism has made a visible impact on society; new and more frequent flight routes have inaugurated, a large number of new hotels, private guesthouses, restaurants and cafés have opened, local tourist agencies and tourist offers have sprung up all over the islands and many Faroese have become employed in the sector. At the same time, tourism has become increasingly political in The Faroes which for example shows in it being one of the most debated topics during the last national election on August 31st 2019 (Joensen 2019).
As noted by anthropologist Christophe Pons (2011), the geographical remoteness of The Faroes has previously led to a feeling of being outside of world history (Pons 2011: 83). But with the new influx of international tourists visiting the archipelago, it has certainly – if not previously – been connected to the world. Therefore, the central contention of this thesis is that international tourism makes a suitable prism for exploring the negotiations of what The Faroes is today. My thesis is based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the Faroese tourism sector in the spring of 2019. Here, I have studied how the past and present of the postcolonial2 Faroe Islands are negotiated and narrated within the context of increased international tourism to the archipelago.
Over the following pages, I provide a resumé of the methods and key findings of my thesis which was supervised by professor Morten Axel Pedersen at The Department of Anthropology, The University of Copenhagen. The thesis was handed in on February 18th 2020, defended orally on March 12th 2020 and received the grade 12 (A).
Methods
During my fieldwork, I gathered and co-produced ethnographic material by using three methods: participant observation, interviews and document analysis. I shall present these in the following.
Participant observation
I conducted participant observation for a total of 50 days during my fieldwork where I ventured out to 10 of the 17 populated islands to participate in a broad variety of tourist events ranging from fishing trips, cave concerts and dinners in private homes, over meetings, conferences and excursions with foreign tour organizers, to citizen hearings, maintenance of hiking trails and following the daily life of so-called outer areas (útjarðar) that receive a lot of tourists. Participating in these events gave me a first-hand knowledge of the field and an in-depth understanding of the nuances of the daily practices of my interlocutors (DeWalt & DeWalt 2002: 66). Furthermore, it provided me with a setting for conducting informal interviews.
Interviews
Contrary to participant observation, conducting interviews brought forward how my interlocutors articulated their experiences (Brinkmann & Tanggaard 2015: 33). I carried out both informal and semi-structured interviews during my fieldwork. The informal interviews, which I carried out during participant observation, were akin to an exploratory interview since they were a way of gaining knowledge about what was important to my interlocutors and what was at stake in my field setting at large. The semi-structured interviews were characterized by being relatively free-flowing conversations that followed an interview manual consisting of open-ended questions that held the possibility of being adjusted on the spot when a new and unexpected connection or theme occurred during the interview (Mason 2002: 62). In total, I carried out 24 semi-structured interviews ranging from 30 minutes to 2,5 hours. The interviewees were selected with regards to their representativity; they differed in age, educational background, experience and position working with tourism.
Document analysis
Finally, I have conducted document analysis of a total body of approximately 450 pages and 15 short videos which comprises promotional material made by the nationally owned tourist agency P/F Visit Faroe Islands (henceforth: VFI) and various tourist agents, strategic papers by VFI, legislative papers, newspaper articles from the international, Danish and Faroese media, Faroese radio and television coverage and social media debates, all of which I had found online. I used this as a complementary point of access to the agents in tourism, as I looked for patterns and recurring rhetoric that gave me inspiration to identify suitable topics and familiarized me with the settings, events and debates that were part of my field (Thin 2014: 40, 53).
Treatment of material
After terminating my fieldwork, I held a large body of ethnographic material consisting of scratch notes, thorough field notes, sound files with interviews, pictures, promotional videos and documents consisting of strategy papers, policy papers, reports, website descriptions, newspaper articles and debates on social media. The analytical process of converting this material into an analysis went as follows: I first transcribed all recorded interviews. To gain an overview of my material, I then subjected it all - both transcriptions and field notes - to two codings in the qualitative data analysis program NVivo. I first used an open coding where all recurrent themes are mapped. This widened my gaze from what I anticipated to be present in my material. I then coded my material under nine themes which I selected because of their significance to my problem statement. Following this, I began writing my analysis. The writing process has been characterized by a continuous breaking down and building up of material in order to see new connections and themes (Brinkman & Tanggard 2015: 46), and I let my theoretical and empirical findings continue to inform each other throughout my writing.
The safety, dignity and privacy of my interlocutors have been paramount at every stage of my project. I took informed consent to be processual, not a one-off event (AAA 2012). I offered all of my interlocutors anonymity3 - both during our first encounters and on later occasions. They unanimously refused this, and in this thesis everyone therefore appears under their own names with the exception of a passage in Chapter III that I considered to be potentially harmful to the speakers. I also left out other information that I considered to be potentially harmful to my interlocutors, and on certain occasions, my interlocutors explicitly asked me to keep specific information out of my thesis, which I of course respected.
Key findings
The following is a presentation of the three findings that are key to explaining how The Faroes are negotiated and narrated in light of international tourism. These findings do not make an exhaustive list of the findings and analyses in my thesis, but they make up my overall argument. This is: In light of increased tourism, a new national subject is created in which nationality is conflated with support of tourism whereby some Faroese are positioned more squarely than others in the Faroese society.
A colonially sounding promotion
In 2013, the nationally owned tourist agency P/F Visit Faroe Islands, which heads coordination, development and branding of The Faroes, turned the seeming obstacle of promoting a country which is relatively unknown to the rest of the world into a way of attracting future tourists. They launched The Faroes as an un-destination; a place which distinguishes itself from other tourist destinations not by the characteristics that apply to it, but by those that do not (VFI 2019a). They created a brand for the archipelago consisting of the three negations: Unspoiled, unexplored, unbelievable which they encouraged the rest of the Faroese tourism sector to also begin using (VFI 2019b). In the thesis, I analyze this rhetoric as colonially sounding and exotifying because it bears a resemblance to the way in which colonialist annexation of land that was already inhabited by native populations was talked about as a ‘discovery’ of new territory. Emphasizing the point of view of the tourist by using words such as ‘explore’ VFI implicitly undermines the point of view of the Faroese since the first settlers were in the archipelago already in the 3rd or the 4th century, and the archipelago is therefore far from unexplored by the Faroese.
An increased national pride
The cross-cultural meeting which international tourism entails has in the opinion of many Faroese – both within and outside the tourism sector – caused them to revalorize their social identity leading to a new national pride. This poses the question of what came prior to the Faroese feeling proud of The Faroes. I suggest the Faroese have not previously been (as) proud of the archipelago due to the postcolonial past hereof. Colonialism has entailed that the Faroese have been considered backwards in comparison to the advanced superior metropolitan Danes (Jensen 2018: 57), and the Faroese have endured a long struggle of having their language and cultural identity recognized and accepted (Mitchinson 2012: 77). Drawing on the work of a great number of postcolonial scholars and anthropologists, who have argued that colonialism works on and through the psyche of the colonized by infusing a colonial imagination into everyday relationships through a process of Othering (e.g. Fanon 1967 [1952]; Spivak 1988; McClintock 1992), I argue that the Faroese have taken over a devaluing view on The Faroes from the Danish imperial power, and that this is now changing (partly, at least) because international tourists have begun showing an interest in The Faroes which provides the Faroese with a new way of looking at their country. Given the colonial past of The Faroes, it is perhaps surprising that many Faroese voice an increased pride over being Faroese following from the influx of tourists if these are – at least partially – drawn to The Faroes because of VFI’s work. However, a reason may be found in the following.
A demand to support tourism
VFI tries to engage the Faroese population in their work on promoting tourism by encouraging all Faroese to consider themselves as ambassadors of their country who can help brand The Faroes “in their networks, no matter if they are at meetings, are exchange students, through their digital canals etc.” (VFI 2017a: 22, my translation). In VFI’s encouragement, the agency addresses the Faroese solely qua their nationality. It is not questioned whether the Faroese support tourism; it is taken for granted that they do. I claim that VFI thereby conflates nationality with a support of tourism. I analyze this with the concept of interpellation as this is coined by Louis Althusser (1972 [1970]), who illustrates the constitution of a subject with a policeman hailing an individual in the street by calling out to him: “Hey, you there!”. When the individual turns around to see who has hailed him, he recognizes that he is the body being hailed and he thereby gives his consent that he may be hailed this way. I argue that when VFI reach out to the Faroese to encourage them to participate in their work on branding The Faroes, this may be seen as them interpellating the Faroese as national subjects that support tourism.
VFI successfully engage the Faroese in their work on branding The Faroes. For example, VFI made a campaign called FaroeIslandsTranslate in 2017, where 41% of Faroese of all ages, genders and ethnicities participated (VFI 2017b). Following Althusser, this must be seen as a successful interpellation, and in Althusser’s vocabulary the Faroese participating in branding The Faroes can be classified as good subjects. However, there are also bad subjects in Althusser’s theory. These are ones that fail to be interpellated because they instead challenge status quo of society (Althusser 1972: 66), and in my thesis I present an example of what I argue to be such a subject. This is a farmer who is very critical of VFI’s conduction of tourism. By being critical, he becomes an example of one who is nationally Faroese and does not support tourism – i.e. he shows that nationality and support of tourism cannot be naturally conflated. Thereby, this farmer comes to pose a threat to the political economy of The Faroes because he indirectly challenges the Løgting’s ambition of making tourism a new basis industry in The Faroes.
An increased gap between capital and countryside
The outer areas are positioned centrally to VFI’s narrative of what The Faroes is. On numerous occasions, the CEO at VFI, Guðrið Højgaard, has publicly stated that she sees the outer areas as “diamonds of the tourism industry” (Biskopstø 2018: 12), and in VFI’s campaigns, most of the pictures derive from the outer areas. However, I show tourism particularly strain the outer areas in several ways. Three primary frustrations are shared by many if not most of those living in these areas:
a) While many outer areas have seen an increase in visiting tourists, the large majority of capital deriving from tourism ends up in Tórshavn, which holds by far the largest amount of tourist agencies, accommodation and dining possibilities in The Faroes.
b) The outer areas are typically connected to the rest of the country either by one-way-roads, oneway-tunnels or sea routes run by very small boats – all of which are intended for smaller groups of travelers than the current ones. This infrastructure makes it more time consuming to reach these areas, and many locals fear for the safety in the roads and boats because these are not made for large amounts of people that do not know how to navigate them.
c) Many people living in the outer areas have told me that living conditions have drastically changed to the worse because of the new influx of tourists. They experience tourists trespassing their private property, taking photos of them without asking etc., and this has made many wait for the boat to leave in late afternoon before hanging out outside of their houses.
The villagers in the outer areas do not hold the power to change the course of the tourists because that power lies in Tórshavn from where the branding of The Faroes is done. This illustrates a highly asymmetrical power division within the Faroese tourism industry. Tórshavn is also the center of power, administration and finance in The Faroes overall and in tourism in particular; it holds both the Løgting and VFI. I analyze this divide between the capital and countryside by drawing on the Marxist branch of center and periphery studies (e.g. Wolf 1964; Wallerstein 1974-9; Worsley 1984), where it is shown that center accumulates value through an exploitation of a periphery that produces goods out of raw materials. These goods are bought by the center that controls the periphery through a structural and discursive hegemony by imposing values on it without caring much about the locals. In my context, this may be seen as the center (Tórshavn) selling the landscape of the periphery (the outer areas) as a kind of raw material (made up of tourist experiences in the experience economy) to tourists without minding that this landscape belongs to private owners in the periphery.
Tourism underscores an ongoing negotiation over social justice that takes place between Tórshavn and the outer areas that have long experienced a gradual depopulation, increase in average age, a loss of jobs and a large part of the active working force being employed in fishery, meaning that many residents are away from the villages most of the year (Finnson & Kristiansen 2006: 21-3). The authorities in Tórshavn see tourism as a potential of creating positive change in the outer areas, but they fail to take the local realities as point of departure in their work on developing the outer areas. This results in a culture clash between the staff from Tórshavn and the locals in the outer areas, where the former see the latter as “fearing or opposing change simply because it entails change,” as one actor in a prominent position within the tourism industry in Tórshavn told me.
Final comments
The current scale of international tourists coming to The Faroes is hitherto unprecedented, and aspects of tourism have been shown to have many, different as well as intertwined, effects on the Faroese society. It makes a new income, creates jobs and a large amount of new possibilities (new flight routes, hotels, restaurants, cultural offers etc.) have been established, it has led to a new national pride of The Faroes, and in the outer areas it is experienced as challenging to the living conditions.
Fortunately, during my fieldwork I experienced a lot of interest from the authorities in regard to making tourism sustainable for all Faroese. For example, I was invited to give a talk to 200 people within the industry at the annual tourism trade’s fair, Vinnuforum, in March. There – as I will reiterate here – I argued for a more respectful dialogue with the outer areas, where the authorities take the local realities as point of departure when developing tourism. As I have shown in the above, this is a pressing issue. When I revisited several field sites in the outer areas this summer, most people told me that while they were worried about the spread of the covid-19 pandemic, they were also relieved that less people had visited them this year. Perhaps the current emergency situation caused by the pandemic can serve as a point of reconsidering the path of Faroese tourism.
Finally, my study builds up to a future exploration of possible political consequences of tourism - both in regard to The Faroes and to the relationship between The Faroes and Denmark that persists in The Unity of the Realm. I leave a number of questions unanswered: Will the financial boom that partly stems from tourism affect this? Will the increase of national self-confidence do so? Or will the new possibility of telling the Faroese story to an international audience?