Dark tourism

Field of study

While there is a long tradition of people visiting recent and ancient settings of death, such as travel to gladiator games in the Roman colosseum, attending public executions by decapitation, and visiting the catacombs, this practice has been studied academically only relatively recently.

Travel writers were the first to describe their tourism to deadly places. P. J. O'Rourke called his travel to Warsaw, Managua, and Belfast in 1988 'holidays in hell', or Chris Rojek talking about 'black-spot' tourism in 1993 or the 'milking the macabre'. Academic attention to the subject originated in Glasgow, Scotland: The term 'dark tourism' was coined in 1996 by Lennon and Foley, two faculty members of the Department of Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure Management at Glasgow Caledonian University, and the term 'thanatourism' was first mentioned by A. V. Seaton in 1996, then Professor of Tourism Marketing at the University of Strathclyde.

As of 2014, there have been many studies on definitions, labels, and subcategorizations, such as Holocaust tourism and slavery-heritage tourism, and the term continues to be molded outside academia by authors of travel literature. There is very little empirical research on the perspective of the dark tourist. Dark tourism has been formally studied from three main perspectives by a variety of different disciplines:

Hospitality and tourism

Scholars in this interdisciplinary field have examined many different aspects. Lennon and Foley expanded their original idea in their first book, deploring that "tact and taste do not prevail over economic considerations" and that the "blame for transgressions cannot lie solely on the shoulders of the proprietors, but also upon those of the tourists, for without their demand there would be no need to supply."

Whether a tourist attraction is educational or exploitative is defined by both its operators and its visitors. Tourism operators motivated by greed can "milk the macabre" Chris Hedges criticized the "Alcatraz narrative as presented by the National Park Service" as "whitewashing", because it "ignores the savagery and injustice of America's system of mass incarceration". By omitting challenging details, the park service furthers a "Disneyfication", per Hedges.

Example destinations

Destinations of dark tourism include castles and battlefields such as Culloden in Scotland and Bran Castle and Poienari Castle in Romania; former prisons such as Beaumaris Prison in Anglesey, Wales and the Jack the Ripper exhibition in the London Dungeon; sites of natural disasters or man made disasters, such as Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine and the commercial activity at Ground Zero in New York one year after September 11, 2001. It also includes sites of human atrocities, murders, and genocide, such as the former German Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in China, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia; the sites of the Jeju uprising in South Korea and the Spirit Lake Internment Camp Centre near La Ferme, Quebec as an example of Canada's internment operations of 1914–1920. After the Broken Arrow murders, the home of the Bever family became a center for dark tourism by ghost hunters, urban legend seekers, teenagers, trespassers and vandals.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's former palaces have become a place of attraction for tourists. Saddam's spiderhole in which he hid, briefly became a tourist attraction prompting U.S. Marines to seal it with concrete.

In Bali, "death and funeral rites have become commodified for tourism... where enterprising businesses begin arranging tourist vans and sell tickets as soon as they hear someone is dying." In the U.S., visitors can tour the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., "with an identity card which matches their age and gender with that of a name and photo of a real holocaust victim. Against a backdrop of video interpretation portraying killing squads in action, the pseudo-Holocaust victim enters a personal ID into monitors as they wander around the attraction to discover how their real-life counterpart is faring." In Colombia, places associated with Pablo Escobar, the drug lord from the Medellín Cartel, became hotspots for dark tourism through Escobar-themed tours. In Medellín, visitors frequent Roberto Escobar's private museum of his infamous brother, the house where he was killed, and La Catedral, Escobar's prison. Another famous place is the Hacienda Nápoles estate located between Bogotá and Medellín, near Puerto Triunfo.

References

References

1. Courtney C. Reed. (April 2007). "Shedding Light on Dark Tourism". gonomad.com.
2. Handayani, B., & George, B. P. (2017). DARK TOURISM AS QUASI-SUICIDE: ACase STUDY OF THE SEA OF TREES. GAZING AT DEATH, 95.
3. O'Rourke, P. J.. (1989). "Holidays in Hell". Picador.
4. Rojek, Chris. (1993). "Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel". Palgrave Macmillan.
5. Dann, G. (1994). "Global Tourism: The Next Decade". Butterworth Heinemann.
6. Tzanelli, R. (2016). Thanatourism and cinematic representations of risk: Screening the end of tourism. Routledge.
7. Foley, Malcolm. (1996). "JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination". International Journal of Heritage Studies.
8. Seaton, AV. (1996). "Guided by the dark: from thanatopsis to thanatourism". International Journal of Heritage Studies.
9. (March 15, 2012). "Writings On The Dark Side Of Travel". Berghahn Books.
10. (2013). "Understanding visitor's motivation at sites of death and disaster: the case of former transit camp Westerbork, the Netherlands". Current Issues in Tourism.
11. Lennon, J.. (2000). "Dark tourism: The attraction of death and disasters". Thomson Learning.
12. Darryl Coote. (2010-06-12). "Exploitation or healthy interest? An analysis of dark tourism.". Jeju Weekly.
13. (1999). "Contemporary issues in tourist development". Routledge.
14. (30 November 2014). "Alcatraz: A Prison as Disneyland". Zuade Kaufman.
15. (2011). "Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum website". [[Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum]].
16. "Chernobylzone". chernobylpripyat.com.
17. "Chernobyl Tours". Ukrainianweb.com.
18. "Chernobyl tour, official provider of Chernobyl exclusion zone". Chernobyl-TOUR.
19. Jayson Blair. (June 29, 2002). "Tragedy turns to tourism at Ground Zero". 2002 The Age Company Ltd.
20. "Memorial Museum Auschwitz Birkenau". [[Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau]] w Oświęcimiu.
21. (July 2010). "Launch of Quebec Internment Spirit Lake Interpretive Centre". [[Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund]].
22. "Fundraising effort seeks to turn site of Bever murders into memorial park, garden". Tulsa World.
23. Yuan, Shawn. (23 March 2023). "After the Iraq War, Saddam’s legendary palaces are open to all". Al Jazeera.
24. (4 February 2004). "US to cover Saddam's 'spider hole'".
25. McLaren, Deborah. (June 2003). "Rethinking Tourism and Ecotravel". Kumarian Press.
26. Stone, P. (2005). "Dark Tourism Consumption – A call for research". E-Review of Tourism Research.
27. [https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pobutsky&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 ''Pablo Escobar and Colombian Narcoculture''], by Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky (UF Press 2020), p.40-45