ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses and deconstructs, especially in the context of the North, the unilinear understanding of progress in which dissimilarity leads to disqualification, differences are seen as strangeness, and lack of unitemporality is seen as backwardness. It begins by looking at different notions of time in various periods of European history and by questioning progress as a trans-historical concept. In the northern context, from a synchronous point of view, definitions related to the concept of progress have traditionally been made by the political and intellectual elite of the South. In Finland, the concepts of 'development region' and 'development region policy' in everyday political discourse associated with the northern and eastern provinces of the country imply a centralised power of definition. Northern humanistic and social scientific research can be seen to have become, in a way, a part of the mental reconstruction of Lapland that still seems necessary.
