What is truly Scandinavian?
Hi all,
Following our discussions about Doreen Massey’s (1991) ‘A Global Sense of Place’ yesterday, I saw on Twitter this morning that SAS, the Scandinavian Airlines, has attracted a lot of criticism since yesterday over a new video ad that they just launched – so much in fact that they’ve decided to remove it from social media only after a day.
The ad starts with the narrator saying:
“What is truly Scandinavian?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Everything is copied.”
The gist of the video is that ‘nothing is truly Scandinavian’, but that a lot of products which are often associated with Scandinavia, for example Danish pastry, bicycles, democracy, windmills, rye bread, etc. actually ‘originated’ elsewhere.
The airline’s pitch for thinking about Scandinavia – not as a simple enclosure with a singular form of identity and a long, internalised history, but instead as extroverted and inclusive – echoes Massey’s understanding of place as open and hybrid and a product of interconnecting flows, ’layer upon layer of different sets of linkages’ rather than ‘roots’. The point of the video appears to be that Scandinavia is unique exactly because of these linkages with the ‘outside’ world. As Massey (1991) notes, the uniqueness and specificity of a place ‘derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations’.
Apparently, social media has been boiling since yesterday, both within Scandinavia and internationally, and in both Sweden and Denmark right-wing MPs have called for their respective Ministers for Transport to reprimande the partially state-owned airline. I feel like this example – of a company trying to disrupt certain ideas about origins, authenticity and place and subsequently experiencing a public backlash – really illustrates how powerful these ideas are.
You can view the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShfsBPrNcTI
References:
Massey, D. (1991). ‘A Global Sense of Place’ Maxism Today June 1991
Contributed by CharlottePetersen on 12/02/2020
