Battlefield Tourism

Chris Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780080453620
• eBook ISBN: 9781136427053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Through a series of case studies that involve past conflict in China, the United States, The South Pacific and Europe, the nature of battlefield sites as tourist locations are explored. As places of past conflict and individual acts of heroism, these sites are places of story telling. How are these stories told? And for what purposes are the stories told? The acts and modes of interpretation are many, ranging from a discourse conducted through silences to the more complex nuanced story telling told through re-enactments of past battles. The book also asks where is the battle-field? - as case studies relate to conflicts that ranged over several hundreds of miles, to, on the other hand, acts of local civil disturbance that subsequently achieved mythic values in a history of national identity. The book is divided into 'acts', these being 'Acts of Resource Management', 'Acts of Silence', 'Acts of Discovery and Rediscovery', 'Acts of Imagination' and 'Acts of Remembrance' and embrace examples as diverse as an re-enactment of past battles on a New Zealand rural town cricket pitch to the towering strength of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and from the Straits of Taiwan to the centre of Canada.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chris Ryan

As is noted in the preface, the antecedents of this book and its actual gestation are long. I noted that as a child enjoying long summers in the Mumbles on the Gower Peninsular, I did so under the shadow of the Norman Castle of Oystermouth. Indeed, in those days it was not open to the public, but what boy could resist slipping through inefficient fences to play at laying ambush upon a misplaced Sheriff of Nottingham, or aiding Walter Scott’s hero, Ivanhoe, to lay siege to the castle. And scattered around the peninsular lie other remnants of Norman castles and keeps, while on forays then and later into the heartlands of Wales one could not but be aware of the presence of military fortifications. Later, I became interested in history more formally, and indeed my original intention was to read history at university but, through what proved to be a lucky chance (although that was not my feeling at the time), I ended taking an economics degree. Nonetheless, I have long retained a personal interest in history, and have taken many opportunities to visit different places of historical interest across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australasia. Increasingly, over the past two to three decades those visits have become aligned with other interests related to tourism. I have become interested in how places are presented and managed, what is said and what is not said; how views are directed and gazes structured through the placement of notices, the spiel of guides, the writing of brochures and the very goods sold in souvenir shops. Such things are themselves acts of interpretation, acts that are not neutral, but constructed with an alignment to (a) what is perceived as professional good practice, and (b) the reinforcement, modification or rebellion against cultural mores and values — which acts are political and in recognition of nodes of differing structures of power. In some instances, the power and the interpretation is open and quite naked, as is evidenced to some degree by the concept of Red Tourism that is explored in this book by Gu, Ryan and Zhang. In other instances, it is complex hearkening back to important events based upon and still shaping a sense of difference, as is evident in the chapters in this book relating to the American Civil War sites in the state of South Carolina. Thus, for example, references to the Northern War of Aggression are readily evident in histories that inform the continuing debate in the United States of the relationship between Federal and State government. At other times, as in the chapter on the Eureka Stockade authored by Warwick Frost, places are not only sites of disputed facts but also of the making of myths that become important in shaping how societies (or the governments of those societies) like to see themselves — which myth making is turned to economic advantage.

The economics of battlefields is also a continuing theme that runs within many of the chapters. There is the obvious commercial gain that can result from visitation, and thus Mark Piekarz in his chapter on the identification of English Battlefields notes not only how a battlefield can create employment, but also their importance in contributing to a portfolio of tourist attractions to support a tourism industry in places devoid of iconic attractions. Yet the issues of economics possess their own inconsistencies. It is perhaps an irony that one of the strongest motives for the development of Red Tourism is not simply a confirmation of the heroic status of the founders of modern China, but a wish to develop the economies of rural areas. In an intriguing interweaving of tourism and the construction of major transport networks, Red Tourism sites are being developed to give reason for the usage of new transport systems that also bring regions and peoples into the mainstream of Chinese economic development. However, in the most capitalist of all countries, the United States, the development of the significant re-enactment movement is almost wholly motivated by a wish to better understand the conflicts of a past that shaped America, to use the re-enactments of engagements to inform a current generation of a history that some argue is in danger of being forgotten in an emergent popular culture of sound bites, of transitory moments of attention and the dominance of perception rather than reality. In the Bush years, after 11 September 2001, one can argue that public reaction to perceived threat has become a significant influence in American decision taking, and perhaps this was best exemplified in the debate of potential Dubai management of US ports in the first part of 2006 when the view was expressed on more than one talk back radio show that the facts did not matter, it was sufficient that the potential management company was Arab. It is perhaps an irony that it is a Bush presidency that exemplifies the post-modern importance of signage over reality.

For her part, Teresa Leopold in her chapter argues that one of the functions of battlefields is to serve as reminders of the past in order to create a better future. If only it could be so! My own belief is that these are complex phenomena located in the cultural politics of silence and absence as much as articulation and presence. References to silences, and to discourse, and the nature of that discourse, and the relationship between agreement, disagreement, presence and absence reflects an underlying philosophical paradigm that helped shape this book. It seems to me that much of the content concerns itself with four related things or processes. First, there is the question of how a culture is made, of how, in this instance, an interpretation of events is created so as to contribute to an understanding of the present. Second, there is a need to analyse the text of such interpretations. The researcher needs to question that which is taken for granted. There is a need to search for the silence and the alternatives that such silences may represent. There is in the academic debate about tourism, a longstanding concern and questioning about what is and what constitutes ‘the authentic’. I have long come to the conclusion that that is the wrong question. What we should be concerned about is the ‘authorisation’ of stories that are constructed about events, about interpretation and about culture. In a sense, who authorises the authentication? Who authorises the story telling, and for what purpose is the authorisation given? The issue possesses importance because the authorisation helps shape the experience of place. Therefore, third, it seems to me, especially given the nature of the tourism, we must look at the ‘lived in experience’ of the place. There is, of course, the experience of the tourist, who comes to the place with a set of mental constructions, born of their own past experience, and of expectations filtered through the presence or absence of significant other people. We know that an experience of any place is never the same, no matter how many times it is visited. As I said in Peking (Ryan, 2006), to visit a place alone, to visit with family, to visit with friends, to visit with lovers, to visit with students — all of these companions make differences even though the landscape and the physical constructions and professional interpretations and representations of any given place remain the same. Tourism is about relativities of lived in spaces — or perhaps that should be of visited places — and these relativities are never the same. But in addition to the visitor there is also the host. The visitor’s place of difference is the host’s place of everyday work. In the case of battlefield sites and other commemorations of war, they are also living reminders of a past, which form part of the host’s daily social ambience and to which, by their functions and perhaps personal interests, they contribute and possibly identify with. Fourth, there is the presence of another significant influence — the managers of the sites. Not only do the managers of sites impact upon interpretation of place by what they choose to say, and not to say, they also impact upon that experience of place by the construction and nonconstruction of paths, viewing sites and the other means of destination management. It is they who literally direct the tourist gaze, informing what there is to see, how to see and thereby framing sight — and it is for the visitor to question or not to question the framing. In this they react to and with the political hegemonies and sites of resistance that shape the culture of their society. Consequently much of this book might be said to be informed by a sense of symbolic interactionism (e.g. see Goffman, 1959; Clough, 1991), albeit with full recognition of post-modernistic interpretations of signage, and the consumption of signs as a means of self-definition. Indeed, given the importance of communication within symbolic interactionism, it seems to me totally in accordance with the pragmatism of the Chicago school that in the early part of the twenty-first century the role of media in both form and content in determining self-concept based on consumption of signs and not possible ‘reality’ must be recognised. In adopting this perspective the nature of messages and their omissions become important in understanding the construction of signage, which in turn impacts upon the ‘lived in experience’.

Symbolic interactionism has been defined as ‘a down-to-earth approach to the scientific study of human group life and human conduct’ (Blumer, 1969, p. 47). Denzin (1989, 1992) argues that its data are the voices, emotions and actions of those studied, of the life experiences to which people attribute importance and which shape their personal meanings and understandings of the world in which they live. It is therefore a means of looking at and examining battlefield sites that accepts definitions of heroism; that individuals can face dangers knowing that the days of their own mortality are indeed numbered, and that in turn, these stories can emotionally impact upon the visitor, as described in the chapter on the aircraft carrier Yorktown. In short, while histories and battles are the outcomes of significant social forces as, for example, described by Hugh Smith in his contribution on the Spanish Civil War and its comparative lack of interpretation at Belchite, these forces result in selections of actions and behaviours by individuals. Equally, while tourism is a social and economic force of significance, it is as individuals that we stand and stare at sites, listen to and read interpretations and incorporate them into our own neural networks of understanding — which understandings are affective as well as cognitive. Emotional responses to places of conflict, injury and death are thus to my mind an appropriate subject for description and analysis.

Thus, in the past as I have gazed upon battlefield sites, I have experienced a mixture of emotions, which the research for this book has intensified. People died at these sites, and these deaths become the subject of our gaze. Not all, indeed one suspects most, of the dead wanted to be at these sites. Some died as cowards, others as heroes. Some died with fear, others with hate, and others perhaps almost unaware, victims of an unseen bomb or a sniper’s bullet. Some will have believed in the cause in which they served, others were present through a sense of responsibility even while entertaining doubts, and others were present through conscription or ill-luck. Some hated their military service, while for others it provided companionship and sense of purpose. And what of the survivors of battle? Some survived the immediate aftermath of conflict as either being wounded or as a prisoner, only subsequently to die of poor or no care. Some survived periods of internment, while others survived as ‘victors’, to continue their lives as witnesses to horrors or, in more modern periods, encased in the isolation of a distant strike but perhaps victim to an imagination of what befell their victims. Given these multiplicities of experiences, it is no wonder that battlefield sites possess multiple ‘truths’. They are the constructions of reactions to individual stories, wider social constructs and ideologies that formed our past and inform our present and future.

Having stated my own perspectives, it should be noted that they are not necessarily the perspectives of other contributors to this book. As noted in the preface, as editor I have sought to create an ordered text. In doing so it is more than possible that I have imposed interpretations that are not perhaps wholly consistent with the intent of the original contributors, and as noted in the introduction to the ‘act of resource management’ it is recognised that a spirit of positivism does inform some of the contributions. However, it must also be recognised that regardless of any intent on the part of either author or editor, the final constructions will be those of the readers, who will bring to the subject their own perspectives. It is hoped however, that the following chapters will help inform those perspectives.

While battlefields possess multiple truths, Bruce Prideaux points out that they increasingly possess multiple categories of locations. In the Second World War, the battlefield could range several miles as demonstrated by Prideaux’s own analysis in this book, and the chapters on the Yorktown and Solomon Islands by Ryan and Panakera, respectively. Today, argues Prideaux, war could be in cyber space, or a viral warfare, while what is one to make of a ‘War on Terror’ which is waged by Bush not only in the lands of Afghanistan and Iraq, but through the monitoring of phone calls in the United States and prison camps and ‘holding areas’ in countries not otherwise involved in the ‘hot’ war zones. The implication is that the battlefield is not geographically bound to a specific place, but becomes free of geography; or rather it is bound by the geography of the location of the enemy who is outside of any given entity known as a state or country. In a world or society of ‘war against drugs’ or a ‘war against terror’ where the enemy is defined as a ‘drug baron’ or terrorist who is often embedded in more than one society, the definition of the battlefield as previously understood becomes either incomplete or is redefined in terms of a pre-modern or modern world only and hence, by definition, is incompatible with a post-modern world where war is constructed by engagements over media, hostage takings, non-declaration of hostilities, cyber space, eaves-dropping on one’s own citizens and the surrounding of houses in one’s own country. These new realities are recognised by Bruce Prideax in his chapter, and by Mark Piekarz in his chapter on ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ war but, for the most part, being concerned with tourism, the main part of the text concentrates upon specific destinations or artefacts of war that can be visited by the tourist.

One problem with the approach of adopting multiplicities of definitions, ‘truths’ and experiences of sites in tourism is that identified by positivists such as Huber (1974) and McPhail (1991) who argue that it is all very well creating contextualised stories of specific places at specific times for specific actors, but such an approach becomes atheoretical, does not permit generalisation and lacks the rigour of scientific enquiry. It also becomes a concentration upon reaction to events, writings and presentations rather than an enquiry into the ‘why’ of events, writings and presentations. From another perspective it begins to omit an analysis of power and politics. However, it can be objected that of necessity in order to communicate there must be shared understandings, and the specificities of given places and times are transferable to illuminate other places and times — and it is in the aggregation of constructed stories that themes emerge, which are testable in the ways required of post-postivisitic enquiry. Already in this chapter opposites have been posed that represent an initial framework of enquiry. These are shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Continuums of battlefield interpretation.

Therefore, the site might have varying degrees of being ‘hot’ or ‘cold’. Piekarz in his chapter on hot war tourists thus writes of tourists attracted to current rather than past conflict and includes in his analysis the peacekeepers and others who have differing degrees of interaction with combatants. However, such sites become less hot as hostilities cease, time passes, and eventually the direct combatants die and pass away. The events then pass into history and subsequent generations interpret them in terms of their own needs. Such interpretations can range between the poly-vocal and the uni-vocal as those subsequent generations seek to either confirm their own status and homogeneity by perceiving others through a gaze of ‘otherness’ or alternatively embrace more inclusive interpretations. The nature of this voice in terms of whether it embraces or is silent about others is not necessarily a precursor to the complexity of the interpretation. While there is a correlation between a poly-vocal voice and complexity, this need not necessarily be the case. The interpretations of ‘the other’ may be comparatively simple, and divisions within one’s own society may be glossed over. The interpretations that are on offer may be confined to a contextualisation confined within the chronology of a given battle without reference to wider social significance or, alternatively, they are generalised in terms of what lessons might be thought to exist for a contemporary society and its future. Both interpretative alternatives represent a judgement and thus imply the existence of an authorised perspective, which of course raises the interesting question of who authorises and for what purpose? However, in some circumstances, where commemoration has emerged from a bottom-up rather than a top-down drive for recognition, then the interpretations may well be sites of resistance to the dominant myths and structures of a society. This is perhaps particularly true of sites that relate to indigenous people, who had hitherto been marginalised and in part silenced by incomplete representations of their perspective. The chapter by Ryan that compares Rangiriri and Batoche touches upon such issues. These different perspectives of interpretation are possibly tied to two ways of viewing the battlefield, and these are suggested not as metanarratives but as constructs to help inform perceptions of battlefields and their functions as tourist sites. The first arises from the above continua and the second adopts Weaver’s (2000) own adoption of Butler’s (1980) life cycle to the site of war.

Figure 1.2 represents four possible patterns of interpretation and management of battlefield sites based upon two dimensions of the mythic vs. factual adherence in interpretation, and the concern to tell a story specific to the events of a site as against a concern to contextualise interpretation within a wider setting of social, economic and political forces. A subset of this second dimension is the issue of justification of events as against a vilification of parties ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• The Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Acts of Resource Management
• Acts of Silence
• Acts of Discovery and Rediscovery
• Acts of Imagination
• Acts of Remembrance
• References
• Further Reading
• Subject Index