Sensing Lightscapes: Playing with Light and Darkness in the Arctic

Darkness has been underestimated as a quality feature in tourism. Landscape is normally presented in daylight, which emphasizes the visual qualities of sensation, whilst darkness covers up and is sometimes depicted as void of meaning. In order to by-pass a common binary between light and darkness we apply the concept of lightscapes to describe the sensual meanings enacted on northern light tours. The chapter is based on ethnographic research on northern light tourism in Iceland and Norway through which we demonstrate the importance of darkness as an embodied experience, through the concept of lightscapes. We start the chapter with a conceptual discussion on the varied cultural meanings of darkness and its more ocular qualities. We will then provide examples from two different northern light tours that were unsuccessful in terms of seeing the aurora borealis. What the tours had in common, however, was that the aim of generating lightscapes was fulfilled, up to a point, in a variety of ways by connecting to qualities of darkness.