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.”

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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.