Shapeshifting Nature : Ambivalent Ways of Seeing the Non-Human World within Swedish National Park Tourism and its Visual Culture

Sammanfattning: National parks are often assigned a self-identical role as protectors of valuable pieces of the non-human world, generally depicted as nature. Besides, many parks are also popular tourism destinations that attract millions of tourists each year. National park tourism and its visual culture impact how people relate to and see the non-human world. Up until now, research paying interest in such ways of seeing has mainly focused on national parks in North America, implying that their empirical scope is geographically narrow and needs to be broadened. In this dissertation, I contribute to such broadening by focusing on the Swedish national park tourism, which is facing intensifying times transforming it from a shadow interest into the center of attention. By unraveling, making visible, and problematizing ways of seeing the non-human world enabled by the Swedish national park tourism and its visual culture, I extend the insights in human ways of seeing the world we call nature. I direct the focus to how the non-human world has been represented, what characteristics it has been assigned, and what ontological and epistemological stances that can be identified therein. I also reflect upon what productive effects and implications all of this can have for how humans see and relate to the non-human world. Through a discourse analysis, I have identified four ways of seeing that together construct the non-human world as a sublime wilderness of nationalistic character that functions as an edutainment arena for environmentally conscious tourists. Within and among those ways of seeing, there exist not only coherences but also contradictions. Those are grounded in a tension between the two opposing interests of saving and using nature, which is said to be united by the third interest of knowing it. Through this, the ways of seeing become ambivalent, as they frame the non-human world as a shapeshifting nature that assumes different and even contradictory forms.