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The article addresses the problems of defining an indigenous people by deconstructing the Sámi debate in Finland, which has escalated with the government's commitment to ratify ILO Convention No. 169. We argue that the ethnopolitical conflict engendered by this commitment is a consequence of groupism, by which, following Rogers Brubaker, we mean the tendency to take discrete groups as chief protagonists of social conflicts, the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities and the tendency to reify such groups as if they were unitary collective actors. The aim of the article is to deconstruct groupist thinking related to indigenous rights by analytically separating the concepts of group and category. This allows us to deconstruct the ethnicised conflict and analyse what kinds of political, social and cultural aspects are involved in it. We conclude that indigeneity is not an ethnocultural, objectively existing fact, but rather a frame of political requirements.

This article examines one of the key occupations in nature tourism: wilderness guiding. It investigates what it means for the work of guides when nature is simultaneously a product to be sold, an operational environment and a partaker in the tour. The concept of ‘collective’ by Bruno Latour is used as a methodological guideline in investigating guiding as work. By examining a guide’s work as a collective, we can see what kinds of demands this kind of ‘hybrid-work’ requires, how nature is intertwined with customer service practices, and how technology becomes a part of guiding. It is demonstrated that nature and technology play a greater role in shaping tourism practices and performances of employees than previously thought. Nature is an essential part of a guide’s performance; it is an ‘actor’ which participates in constructing the service event of nature tourism.

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