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.
This is weird to me because Norway does have a lot of really gorgeous fjords and whatnot.
The far north really is witchy and strange though. Like legitimately. The sun goes sideways around the world at summer soletice and doesn't really rise at all for winter solstice, and above the Arctic circle it stay in the sky or hides for months at a time. There are giant invisible bears that hunt you. There are two different kinds of unicorn fish. The salmon runs are the heartbeat of the world. Some of the only non-tropical rainforests are in the Pacific Northwest. Depending on how you reckon it Denali is the tallest mountain in the world. The auroras are a regular sight in the sky. The magnetic pole wanders around like a drunkard. Orcas are almost certainly watching us and thinking strange dolphin thoughts. The ravens are smart enough to know what days of the week the trash is taken out and will be waiting for it with eager anticipation. More than most places half ton mega fauna is a routine problem that people have grown used to dealing with.
This is all based on my experiences with Alaska, but having more or less grown up in the remote, isolated north (in the "big city" of Anchorage) when I'm in the lower 48 most of it, especially between the Appalachians and the Rockies, looks like a post apocalyptic wasteland. Farmland is dead land, flattened and stripped of all life to be paved over with monocrops, cattle land is dead land, huge chunks of the South East are overrun with invasives, the whole world is a network of flat, endless highways and soulless cloned strip malls and chain stores.
Alaska is a completely different world in ways i cannot adequately describe to someone who hasn't spent extensive time there. It's not magical, it just hasn't been paved flat by industrial capitalism. It still has wild animals in dense populations. Theres still an integration of the "natural" and human worlds where it's just one world that we all live in - the people, the bears, the eagles, the squirrels, the salmon, the halibut, the orcas, the moose, the whales, the ptarmigans. There's no distinctive line between the human and natural world, there's just the world. There's still active geological formation happening with the glaciers and a few volcanos, and there was much more of that i. The 20th century as the slow death of the glaciers really changed parts of the landscape. There's mosquitoes in a way that people down south have never really experienced no matter how bad they think their bugs are. Even before deet the mosquitoes in the lower 48 never dimmed the sun.
Again, it's not magic, it's just very, very different from life in most of the lower forty eight. There really isn't anywhere on the continent as shockingly lush, dense, and green as the Pacific Northwest in the summer. You have to go all the way down to the jungles in the lower Yucatan to find forests like that again. You mostly just don't see bears regularly in the lower forty eight and mostly don't have to teach kids near safety or how to deal with moose.
Compared to Ohio it might as well be Narnia. So, it seems pretty natural to me to exoticize the far north. It really is extremely exotic to most euros, to the point of being pretty alien when you consider the extremes of dark and light or some of the very weird landscapes like the tundra, proper mountains, rainforests, fjords.
I'm from southeast Michigan right near Ohio, and "up north" is something mythologized/special to us here also, with many people having cottages up north, or traveling there for rest and recreation. I have made a tradition of going to the top of the upper peninsula for the last week of the year.
Southeast Michigan was also once beautiful pre-colonization—though it's been flat since the glaciers retreated—dense, lush forests with rivers and lakes, but now it's suburban sprawl. Up north is an escape from the apocalyptic wasteland we created and maintain as a consequence of our industrial capitalism.
We do the same thing with quaint small towns or people friendly cities – we'll travel to them as relief from the shitty sprawl we live in, but then
refusechoose to only live in sprawl, or refuse to support policies that make anything but sprawl possible.It seems we assume an inevitability of the industrial wasteland we live in, and mythologize anywhere that we haven't yet ruined, instead of realizing we're choosing to form our built environment this way, and choosing to built a different world.
A Hexbear recently showed me a Tlingit-language rap song called "Spirit" by Juneau-based youth music group IAK, and the scenery of the Alaska panhandle certainly was stunning — and that would certainly be the least exotic part of Alaska by my own standards. So Alaska certainly is a part of the world that captures my own imagination.