Dark tourism is not new, as my readers (whose insightful comments always inspire further reflection) point out: Travel Muse recalls touring German war sites as a teenager, while Sandy suggests that The Crusades, which revolved around a fascination with the macabre, might also have been an early version of dark tourism. Indeed, the thesis of 'Guided by the dark: from thanatopsis to thanatourism', published in 1996 by A V Seaton, is that death is the one heritage that everyone shares and therefore has been an element of tourism longer than any other form of heritage. (Thanatourism is generally described as the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death.) The nobility watched the 1815 Battle of Waterloo from a safe distance, while one of the American Civil War sites (Manassas) was immediately marketed as a tourist attraction after the war ended, according to UK scholar John Lennon in Journeys into Understanding in The Observer (2005). Indeed, the Auschwitz-Birkenaz concentration camp museum and memorial (pictured) was established in 1947, less than two years after the Red Army troops arrived in 1945 and found 7,000 emaciated prisoners there; it now receives nearly a million visitors a year. Debbie Lisle in 'Defending Voyeurism: Dark Tourism and the Problem of Global Security' (in Peter M Burns and Marina Novelli's Tourism and politics: global frameworks and local realities, 2007) argues that historical spectacles such as Roman gladiator matches and public hangings were also forms of dark tourism, and that the phenomenon also takes in sites of celebrity deaths, such as the site of JFK's assassination in Dallas and the site of Diana's death in Paris, as well as tours to modern conflict zones, from Bosnia to Mogadishu. It was just recently that tourists visited Iraq for the first time since 2003, starting with an independent traveller (see Fallujah's Strange Visitor: a Western Tourist in the New York Times) in February 2009, followed by a group of package tourists (see I took a picture to show my dentist in The Guardian, 21 March 2009). It's interesting to note that the group didn't consider themselves to be 'war tourists', claiming they were there for the history and culture, despite visiting places that are still very dangerous, such as Mosul, while the Italian independent traveller simply seemed naive. Neither the Iraqis nor Italian officials nor American marines interviewed for the story thought Iraq was ready for tourists yet.
Is it real, imagined or constructed? Recent years have seen a rise in grief tourism, dark tourism and disaster tourism, according to media reports. But I wonder if this has any actual foundation, whether the increase is real or whether it's a case of more media reporting, arising from more academic analysis on the phenomena? It would be interesting to see a comparative study on how tourist numbers at specific sites have changed in recent years. The media, as much as the travel industry, values novelty - indeed, the industry is in the business of manufacturing and commodifying novelty, of creating new tourist products that inspire people to travel to their destination - so is it simply a case of old practices being renamed so that they appear new?
Regardless of whether there has been an actual increase in these touristic practices, or simply an increase in coverage of them, I find the phenomena intriguing. Essentially, grief tourism is travel to a place to remember, commemorate and mourn a significant loss of life, such as visits to cemeteries, war memorials and sites of murders. It's a sub-category of dark tourism, which involves travel to places associated with death, tragedy and atrocities, such as battlefields like Gallipoli (which I've been posting about recently), mass graves such as the Killing Fields, and concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. But that visit doesn't necessarily involve mourning or grief, but may be more about education - developing an awareness and understanding of the tragedy, and attempting to better empathize with the suffering - and also entertainment. And then there's disaster tourism, which involves visits to sites of mass destruction such as New York's 'Ground Zero', Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and places where natural catastrophes occurred, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the 2004 tsunami in South-East Asia, and Cyclone Tracey in Darwin. The terms have long been in use - the Germans' use 'Gruseltourismus' or shudder tourism, which I like. So while the discussion of these phenomena might have travelled from academia to the media and to the blogosophere (see the Dark Tourism series on Vagabondish for instance), has there actually been a rise in the practices themselves in recent years? What do you think? And if so, what does this say about tourism and about ourselves as travellers?
