I was recently in a conversation with my mom where she mentioned how a lot of her friends and relatives in the USA have been sharing on Facebook just absolute nonsense about Norway: videos and posts with exaggerated if not flat-out incorrect facts about the country, and more notably, "AI-generated" pictures of fairy tale-esque natural scenes. Mom said how she pointed out to one of her relatives who shared such a "photo", how it was made up, and that relative got a bit irate about my mom's comment and said, "Who cares if it's AI?! It's a nice picture!" — even though that relative seemed to fully believe it was a real photo right until mom pointed out it wasn't, and left no indication that it was not a real photo.
...So that's a bit concerning, "post-truth" as they say.
Relaying this anecdote to me, mom remarked, "I mean, seriously, what if someone came to Norway hoping to see these crazy flowers and natural phenomena and stuff? The locals would be like, 'What the heck are you talking about? That doesn't exist.' — So how can someone share misinformation like that, and just not care simply because it's a 'nice picture'? It's bizarre." — And I said that someone coming to Norway because of "AI-generated" pictures would be like the modern-day version of Gregor MacGregor's Poyais scheme.
Anyways, after relaying this anecdote to me, mom then remarked something to the effect of that it's as if her friends and relatives in the USA think of Norway as this magical mystical fairy tale country, and will cling to anything that lets them keep that conception, no matter how ridiculous it is, and will get upset if you try to poke holes in their "mythologizing". And I said, "That's called borealism, isn't it?" — and she hadn't heard that term, so I read the Wikipedia article to give her a basic idea of it.
Borealism is a form of exoticism in which stereotypes are imposed on the Earth's northern regions and cultures (particularly the Nordic and Arctic regions).
The term was inspired by the similar concept of Orientalism, first coined by Edward Said. An early form of Borealism can be identified in antiquity, especially Roman writings; but, like Orientalism, Borealism came to flourish in eighteenth-century European Romanticism and Romantics' fantasies about distant regions. Borealism can include the paradoxical ideas that the North is uniquely savage, inhospitable, or barbaric, and that it is uniquely sublime, pure, or enlightened.
A further form of borealism is the explicit invocation of the boreal by white-supremacist far-right politicians.
The Wikipedia article neglects to mention that the concept of borealism was first coined by Kristinn Schram of the University of Iceland in 2011, in articles like "Banking on Borealism: Eating, Smelling, and Performing the North" and "Borealism: folkloristic perspectives on transnational performances and the exoticism of the North"
In any case, not long after I told my mom about borealism, we noticed that NRK was airing Der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu, meaning something like "Where Nobody Would Think Somebody Could Live" — this is a TV show about people who live in inhospitable places around Norway, close to nature and all that. And mom remarked, "Is that a form of self-borealism?", and I said, "Maybe."
But ultimately, just because someone wrote a couple articles about it, and it got a Wikipedia page, doesn't necessarily mean that it is an accurate or useful concept. The term "borealism" is not in any major dictionaries — not even Wiktionary — and the concept of borealism has seen very little discussion or usage in academia compared to orientalism since it was first introduced. This can probably be partially chalked up to orientalism being a much older term that covers the exoticization of a much larger share of Earth's land and population, where the power dynamics, harm, and extremity of such exoticization tend to be much more readily apparent.
From my own perspective I can certainly say that I've seen people exoticize the Nordic and Arctic regions in weird ways, and locals do by all means play into these same exoticizations — and I can further say that I absolutely believe that the presentation of Norway as exotic in this manner is tied to the power dynamics between Norway and other regions.
However it also kinda feels like... can't you say that about every region? Like are we also gonna have an "occidentalism" and an "australism" just to get the "full set", or is there really something special about the concept of the "exotic north" that makes it uniquely deserving of its own term? I suppose I should read Kristinn's articles first to get a better idea of what he meant by the term and why he thinks it's useful.
Very good point, hadn't considered this because i've also just heard the term for the first time and was just typing out what spontaneously came to mind. Definitely my inner krakkker at work when i left out the Saami or the Inuit and First Nations in Greenland and Kanada (which, at least from a European perspective, i would probably include in borealism).
And also the Alaska Natives and for that matter the Natives of the Russian Far North.
Edit: Apropos the Natives of the Russian Far North, in (at least some) South Slavic languages like Serbo-Croatian, Tunguzija is used as their equivalent to "Timbuktu" in the sense of "nonspecific distant, remote, exotic place" — "Tungus" being a dated term for Evenks, who are native to a large area in the east of Krasnoyarsk Krai, very close to the geographical midpoint of Siberia. I learned this little fact because there's a Svemirko album called "Tunguzija" and I got curious about what that meant.
Does the Russian Far North count unter borealism? Not debating the colonization under the czars there, ofc, what i'm wondering is if Siberia falls under the same exoticizing lense as the northern parts of the political west or if it's genuinely distinct from the mythologization of the Nordics. It could be argued that when westerners think of that part of the world, they think of gulags, more gulags, and maybe mammoths in permafrost. It's the harsh and alien parts of the imagined North, mixed with a severe dose of anticommunism, not the socdem fairytale land under the polar lights we imagine Norway or Iceland as, and on the mental map of westerners, it is filled in with the same color as the post Soviet block, not the Nordic one. But like i said, i'm not familiar with the concept of borealism so far, so this is more my guesswork what the term entails.
I did specifically say the Natives of the Russian Far North as opposed to the Russian Far North in general — and I would in that case say that insofar as Westerners think about Nenetsians or Evenks etc, like, at all, that this is done with the same brush as the Sámi and Inuit. Relatedly, in Russia, I know an album called MIG-25 by Krasnoyarsk-based Dom Modeley, which has lyrics about shamans' strange herbs, about the cold hand of "Miss Lapland" slowly killing stranded travelers, about a man stuck alone at some sort of research or weather station, among other things, which really strikes me as not much different from how places like Alaska or Greenland or Sápmi are popularly imagined in the West.
This being said, if DPRK, China, Laos and Vietnam are in the West seen through the lens of orientalism plus anticommunism, wouldn't it also be possible to say that the Russian Far North is on the other hand borealism plus anticommunism? There's a YouTube channel called Life in Yakutia currently with 240,000 subscribers, whose most popular videos have millions of views and all put the temperature in the thumbnail. So I'd say that although the Russian Far North isn't necessarily a socdem fairy tale land, that people's imaginations are still by all means stirred by the sparse population amidst vast swathes of wilderness and extreme cold, and the grit and wisdom they imagine it takes to live in such an environment.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I learned about the Tunguska event, about the Daldykan turning red, about the Obskaya-Bovanenkovo Line et cetera as a preteen or teenager — so either I was just particularly clever and curious for my age, or it's a bit presumptive to say that Westerners' awareness of the Russian Far North begins and ends at gulags.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Remember Sami people, too. Indigenous Europeans who have long been subjected to anti-indigenous violence by northern Euros.
AcidSmiley already mentioned the Sami