Dark Tourism and Place Identity

Managing and interpreting dark places

Leanne White, Elspeth Frew, Leanne White, Elspeth Frew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415809658
• eBook ISBN: 9781136483127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Dark Tourism, including visitation to places such as murder sites, battlefields and cemeteries is a growing phenomenon, as well as an emergent area of scholarly interest. Despite this interest, the intersecting domains of dark tourism and place identity have been largely overlooked in the academic literature and this book aims to fill this void.

The three main themes of Visitor Motivation, Destination Management and Place Interpretation are addressed in this book from both a demand and supply perspective by examining a variety of case studies from around the world. This edited volume takes the dark tourism discussion to another level by reinforcing the critical intersecting domains of dark tourism and place identity and, in particular, highlighting the importance of understanding this connection for visitors and destination managers.

Written by leading academics in the area, this stimulating volume of 19 chapters will be valuable reading for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in a range of discipline areas; researchers and academics interested in dark tourism; and, other interested stakeholders including those in the tourism industry, government bodies and community groups.

Part I
Visitor motivation

DOI: 10.4324/9780203134900-I

2 The Père-Lachaise Cemetery

DOI: 10.4324/9780203134900-3

Between dark tourism and heterotopic consumption

Stéphanie Toussaint and Alain Decrop

Introduction

Each year on November 1st (All Saints Day), candles light up the Père-Lachaise Cemetery and flowers bloom everywhere. Surprisingly, few people still have family members buried in this green and peaceful place. Today, the Père-Lachaise Cemetery is recognized as a major tourist destination in Paris. The spot is especially visited for its famous ‘residents’ such as La Fontaine (fabulist), Moliére (playwright and actor), Delacroix (artist), Chopin (composer and pianist), Edith Piaf (singer), Jim Morrison (singer), Oscar Wilde (writer and poet) and Allan Kardec (founder of the spiritualism movement). But the location is also valued as a place for relaxation, as a hill on which to go for walks, or as an art museum in the open air. Many people visit the Père-Lachaise to learn about memorials and particular tombs, to enjoy transcending experiences, and to have the opportunity to meditate or to mourn.

Since it opened its gates in the early 1800s, the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris has always been a very special location. Designed with a garden-like appearance by the famous French architect Alexandre Theodore Brongniart, the cemetery launched what might be described as its first marketing campaign in 1817. At that time, the cemetery was not attractive and was considered by most of Paris' citizens as too far from the city centre (as it was built on a hill outside the city for public health reasons). Its attractiveness really became established when the authorities decided to move in Moliére's and La Fontaine's remains. In the same year, the cemetery received the relics of Heloise and Abelard, two famous medieval lovers, whose arrival was widely covered by the media. This gave rise to a keen interest in luxury gravestones and people competing with each other in order to be buried next to the most famous figures (de Valverde and Hughes 2007).

Travelling to memorials or graveyards, and pilgrimages to the resting place of celebrities (Seaton 1996; Sharpley 2009) represents a category of dark tourism activities. Generally speaking, dark tourism may be considered as a behavioural phenomenon, defined by the traveller's motives rather than the features of the attraction itself (Seaton 1996; Sharpley 2009). In this chapter, we refer to dark tourism as “the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre” (Stone 2006: 146). As the ultimate destination of any human being, a cemetery is usually assumed to be a dark place. Therefore, the Père-Lachaise Cemetery may be considered as a black spot (Rojek 1993; 1997). A black spot generally refers to the marker of a death site or to disaster or memorable death sites.

As a cemetery, the Père-Lachaise possesses the usual properties of the sacred and may be considered as a heterotopias (Foucault 1967), that is ‘a place out of space and time’, defined by its own principles and a transitional (liminal) zone within its surrounding walls. Place identity is thus key to the interpretation of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery as it “offers a sense of mental proximity and feeling of belonging” (Blom 2000: 30).

This chapter raises three questions surrounding dark tourism and place identity regarding the famous cemetery of Père-Lachaise: Why do people visit ‘dark’ sacred places, such as famous graveyards? What are the perceptions, meanings and processes associated with the visit? How does the dialectic between the profane and sacred in postmodern consumption find its expression in the case of the Père-Lachaise? Three theoretical frameworks are useful to address these research questions: place identity and attachment, heterotopia, and the sacred in postmodern consumption. The following sections present such frameworks.

Place identity, heterotopia and the sacred in dark tourism

Place identity and attachment

According to Relph (1976: 46), “our experiences of places are direct, complete and often unconscious”. Referencing Albert Camus's writings (1965), the author presents three major components of the identity of places: the static physical settings, the activities and the meanings or symbols. The meanings of a place may stem from the physical setting and the activities, but still belong to the realm of experiences. Meanings can change from one object to the other and, for any given object, they may vary from one individual to the other. Moreover, the feelings and identity associated with a specific place will be determined by the context (social, economic and cultural) in which people live. Thus, identity is based both on the object and the individual, and on the global culture to which they belong (Blom 2000).

‘Space’ and ‘place’ are not synonyms but belong to different perceptual categories (Borghini and Zaghi 2006). ‘Space’ is changing, moving and is no one's property. In contrast, ‘place’ is more or less stable, absolute, occupied and provides the possibility to experience sensations related to the area. A place is thus a tried and consumed space. Debenedetti (2004: 7) defines place attachment as “an affective and positive bound between an individual (or a group) and its physical environment”. Low and Altman (1992: 5–6) maintain that “place refers to space that has been given meaning through personal, group or cultural processes”, and that place attachment “implies that the primary target of affective bonding of people is to environmental settings themselves”. The analysis of “dark resting places” (Stone 2006) focuses on cemeteries as potential objects of dark tourism.

In this contemporary perspective, the cemetery is more like a romanticized “urban regeneration tool” (Stone 2006: 154), which poetically confronts dark and possibly mysterious corners of the city with supposedly real authentic life experiences (Crawshaw and Urry 1997: 179). This last dimension refers to the place's ability to provide a positive, entertaining experience to the individual (Pearce 2005), induced by the esthetical dimension of the environment (Filser 2002). It is not surprising then that the Père-Lachaise “attracts over two millions visitors a year, and beyond its primary function of internment, [remains] the largest park in Paris and [continues to evolve] into an open air museum and pantheon garden” (Stone 2006: 155). Tours of the cemetery take place at special dates related to its residents, such as birth- or death-day, or at any other occasion during the year.

Heterotopia

Literally meaning ‘other places’, the concept of heterotopia (Foucault 1967) is “a rich concept that describes a world off-center with respect to normal or everyday spaces, one that possesses multiple, fragmented or even incompatible meanings” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008). Heterotopian spaces turn out to be collective or shared spaces allowing overlaps within surrounding borders. They are “simultaneously mythic and real contestations of the space in which we live” (Foucault translated by Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 17). Heterotopias rely on six principles. First, there is not a single culture without heterotopias:

in all civilization, [those] real and effective places are a sort of counter-emplacement, a sort of realized utopias in which the real emplacements… are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted; a kind of places that are outside all places, even though they are actually localizable.

(Foucault translated by Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 17)

Second, each heterotopia may appear, evolve and disappear in the course of time. Across centuries, the cemetery has become “the ‘other city’ where each family possesses its dark dwelling” (Foucault translated by Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 19). Third, the heterotopia has “the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are themselves incompatible” (Foucault translated by Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 19). As a consequence, different meanings may stem from the experiences lived in such a place.

The fourth principle relies on the space-time continuum. Indeed, the heterotopia makes sense when individuals completely disconnect with their daily life. The cemetery is once again a remarkable heterotopia by definition, since it historically blends several eras. Moreover, the graveyard reveals itself as a strong heterotopian place since it begins with death and defines a new time: the time of perpetuity and eternity. The fifth principle assumes “a system of opening and closing that both isolate [heterotopias] and make them penetrable” (Foucault translated by Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 21). The interior space of the heterotopia may not be specifically public or private, sacred or profane, but rather “heterotopian” (Foucault translated by Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 16). One cannot enter the heterotopia as if it was a mundane place, and visitors are often expected to follow rituals while being there. Such rituals help to maintain the distinction between inside and outside the heterotopia. The sixth principle highlights the function that heterotopias have in relation to the surrounding space. Their role is to create a space of illusion or a place of compensation: as perfect and bright as our world is harsh and superficial.

The sacred and the profane in postmodern consumption

In their Consumer Behavior Odyssey, Russell Belk, Melanie Wallendorf and John Sherry Jr. (1989) carried out a wide and detailed analysis of contemporary consumption phenomena in various settings. Parts of their findings involve symbolic and sacred consumption. The authors argue that the consumption of products and activities with symbolic and/or sacred value can be approached from places prone to the dialectic between the sacred and the profane. Indeed, “consumption implies more than the means by which people meet their everyday needs. Consumption can become a vehicle of transcendent experience; that is, consumer behavior exhibits certain aspects of the sacred” (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989: 2).

Generally speaking, the sacred refers to religions and to entities that inspire an absolute respect. In contrast, the profane characterizes ‘what is not sacred’. Etymologically, both dimensions are in opposition: ‘sacred’ stands for what is separated and confined (in Latin, sancire means to bound, to surround and to sanctify), whereas ‘profane’ implies what is outside the preserved surrounding wall (pro-fanum) (Dumas 2005). Profane is also used to describe the uninitiated individual who is novice to a ritual or to its practice. Belonging to the sacred sphere implies that one must be used to a religion, to follow its rites and to worship the sacred with the highest respect. According to Dumas (2005), the sacred does not belong by itself to the substance of objects or places but it exists with reference to some faith, even un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Biography
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Visitormotivation
• Part II Destination management
• Part III Place interpretation
• Index