Dark Tourism Studies

Rami K. Isaac

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000563764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book provides original, innovative, and international tourism research that is embedded in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological thought in the study of dark tourism.

It is almost 25 years since the idea of dark tourism was introduced and presented into the field of tourism studies. The impact of this idea was greater, which attracted a great deal of attention from different researchers and practitioners with a good range of disciplines and farther tourism studies. This edited volume aims to capture a glimpse of the types of cutting-edge thinking and academic research in the domain of dark tourism studies as well as encourage and advance theoretical, conceptual, and empirical research on dark tourism. The book also addresses several future research directions focusing on the experience and emotions of visitors at 'dark tourism' sites.

This book will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics interested in dark tourism. Other interested stakeholders including those in the tourism industry, government bodies and community groups will also find this volume relevant.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Heritage Tourism.

Dark tourism and World Heritage Sites: a Delphi study of stakeholder perceptions of the development of dark tourism products

James Kennell

and Raymond Powell

ABSTRACTDark tourism has attracted increasing academic attention, but the extent to which it exists as a separate form of tourism from heritage tourism is not yet clear. Despite the growth of UNESCO World Heritage Site designations, little research has considered the relationship between dark tourism and World Heritage Sites. Because the development of dark tourism is beset with ethical concerns, heritage professionals can have negative perceptions about the acceptability or attractiveness of it for the sites that they are involved in managing. This research used a qualitative Delphi Panel method to evaluate stakeholder perceptions of the potential development of dark tourism to the Greenwich Maritime World Heritage Site in London, United Kingdom. The findings show that stakeholders are broadly supportive of tourism to the site and positive about future tourism growth. Despite this, they did not support the development of dark tourism to the site because it was perceived as inauthentic, tacky and sensationalist. In order to address this issue, recommendations are made that future attempts to develop dark tourism at WHS should involve enhancing the knowledge of stakeholders about dark tourism, and of the resources within their sites that could be included in a dark tourism offer to tourists.

Introduction

Despite twenty years of academic research into the nature and practices of dark tourism (Ashworth & Isaac, 2015), and its emergence in popular culture (e.g. Fryer, 2018), the extent to which it exists as a separate form of tourism is still contested (Light, 2017). It is not clear whether visitation to sites and attractions associated with death, disaster and suffering is something new, or simply a reframing of well-established heritage offerings by a ghoulish and attention-hungry media (Roberts, 2018). Because of this, dark tourism can suffer from negative perceptions from heritage tourism professionals, who worry about the dangers of promoting their products in a way that attracts sensationalist attention from tourists. The aim of this research was to assess stakeholder perceptions of dark tourism at a World Heritage Site (WHS), with a view to assessing its acceptability and viability in an established heritage setting.

To this end, this study critically examined these tensions through a case study of the Maritime Greenwich UNESCO World Heritage site in London, United Kingdom: a tourist destination that receives in excess of nineteen million visitors every year, including over one million overnight stays (Visit Greenwich, 2018). The site is diverse, containing military, religious, scientific, natural and architectural heritage, as well as being home to two universities and a national museum (Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, 2019). This research applies the Delphi study technique (Lin & Song, 2015) to survey the views of these stakeholders on the acceptability of dark tourism, and ways in which this could develop in the future. Over three rounds of questions, a panel of stakeholders were asked to define, explore and forecast the role of dark tourism on the site.

Literature review

Dark tourism in context

Despite the years of research into dark tourism (Dale & Robinson, 2011; Lennon & Foley, 2000; Stone, 2013; Tarlow, 2005) and the growth of the dark tourism market (Biran & Hyde, 2013; Biran et al., 2011; Stone & Sharpley, 2008), and the academic interest in this field (Ashworth & Isaac, 2015) there has been little interest shown in understanding the relationship between dark tourism and other forms of tourism. As Light (2017, p. 275) notes: ‘ … two decades of research have not convincingly demonstrated that dark tourism and thanatourism are distinct forms of tourism, and in many ways they appear to be little different from heritage tourism.’

Dark tourism is frequently described as having a spectrum of darkness (Miles, 2002; Stone, 2006). At the darkest end of the spectrum, sites are categorised largely on the basis of recent and actual suffering and death. There is usually an educational and commemorative rationale which underpins these sites, which very often is the authentic place of suffering. At the lighter end of this spectrum, tourism products are associated with ‘fright tourism’ (Bristow, 2020). This includes haunted houses, ghost tours, and scary stories, for example, with an entertainment, rather than educational or commemorative rationale. As Bucior (2020) has shown in a study of the interpretation of the Gettysburg battlesite in the USA, however, these two poles are not mutually exclusive. Interpretive tools such as ghost tours can provide alternatives to the ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ of dark sites, especially where these involve contested narratives. The notion that the diversity of sites in dark tourism can be categorised using a straightforward scale has been substantially critiqued (Ashworth & Isaac, 2015; Dale & Robinson, 2011; Ivanova & Light, 2018); most frequently this has been due to subjective classifications of sites and histories as ‘dark,’ but the persistence of the spectrum in the literature indicates its enduring utility as a descriptive tool.

Dark tourism and heritage tourism

Whilst a subset of heritage tourism may be considered dark, there is no readily distinguishable divide between aspects of heritage tourism and aspects of dark tourism per se. Richards (2001) says it is necessary to broaden the categorisation of heritage attractions to include intangible ideas, including those that relate to the ideas such as statehood, history and struggle, often typical of dark sites (Murtagh et al., 2017). There is a clear link between heritage tourism and dark tourism, theoretically inextricable in the majority of cases (Hartmann, 2014), and the term ‘dark heritage’ (Kamber et al., 2016) is already in use to capture these associations.

Biran et al. (2011) identify that the experience of visitors is important to the conceptualisation of dark tourism, which is largely the product of on-site interpretation, and it is unlikely to be simply a fascination with death which encourages visitation to dark sites. It is not necessary to have a morbid interest in death to be fascinated by aspects of death, especially when such narratives have personal or national significance. For example, ‘ … Australians and New Zealanders visiting Gallipoli are enaged in a profound heritage experience and are not interested in death itself’ (p. 822). Other motivations for visiting dark sites, such as a desire for novelty, nostalgia, curiosity, entertainment and pilgrimage are the same as motivations for visiting heritage sites (Ashworth, 2004; Biran et al., 2011; Hyde & Harman, 2011; Stone & Sharpley, 2008; Tarlow, 2005). The motivation of pilgrimage is particularly relevant for many dark tourism sites, when expanded to include more secular definitions of the term, where religious motivations are less important than other commemorative aspects of visitation and the sense that these are sites which ‘add meaning to life’ (Collins-Kreiner, 2016, p. 1187).

Postmodern contexts for the growth of dark tourism (Powell & Kennell, 2016) offer competing conceptualisations of this, in the context of increasing interest in utopian and dystopian visions of the world (Farkic, 2020; Podoshen et al., 2015). There is no agreement in the literature about the categorisations of dark tourism motivations, and all that can be certain is that there are a wide variety of these (Isaac & Çakmak, 2014; Raine, 2013).

The dark tourism literature demonstrates the current inadequacies and impreciseness of definitions of dark tourism to date. Dark sites are perceived as being associated with death, disaster and frequently genocide, yet many dark sites are also dynamic and elevating, structured servicescapes (Magee, 2018). Thus it would be wrong to assume that dark tourism is only concerned with the macabre. Undoubtedly that remains a fascination, but as the development of dark attractions is a relatively new phenomenon (Sharpley, 2005), notwithstanding the long-established practice of travelling to sites of suffering since medieval times, sites at the darkest end of the spectrum are only a fraction of sites which record the history of humanity and as dark histories are intermingled inextricably with all aspects of human history, the significance of dark tourism motivations may be overestimated by researchers.

There can be squeemishness around the commercial exploitation of dark sites. Dann (1994) identifies that there is the potential to capitalise on the ‘product of dark tourism’ and ‘milk the macabre’ (p. 61). Ethical considerations abound when establishing attractions with dark themes (Stone & Sharpley, 2008). WHS need to consider the authenticity of new tourism offers, to avoid accusations of commercialisation and ‘cashing in,’ which may complicate any desire to increase revenue. Dark and heritage attractions cover a wide spectrum of authenticity, and the perceived authenticity of a site is important. Attractions at the lightest end of the darkness spectrum (Stone, 2006) do, however, attract visitation without being authentic.

Dark tourism sites and attractions are often significant in the forming of national stories and identity and an understanding of often contested history (de-Miguel-Molina & Barrera-Gabaldón, 2019; Kennell et al., 2018; Lemelin et al., 2013) and the ‘history wars’ that can take place over such sites (Boyle, 2019). For WHS, there is a tension between the notion of ‘universal’ value, which is a condition of WHS status, and such ‘contested’ heritage, which implies the absence of a settled interpretation of a site (Rakic & Chambers, 2008).

Tourism to world heritage sit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction to dark tourism
• 1 Dark tourism and World Heritage Sites: a Delphi study of stakeholder perceptions of the development of dark tourism products
• 2 Touring female crime: power and perceptions
• 3 Commemorative insights: the best of life, in death
• 4 Does emotional engagement matter in dark tourism? Implications drawn from a reflective approach
• 5 Designing dark tourism experiences: an exploration of edutainment interpretation at lighter dark visitor attractions
• 6 Uncomfortable and worthy: the role of students’ field trips to dark tourism sites in higher education
• 7 Dark tourism as educational tourism: the case of ‘hope tourism’ in Fukushima, Japan
• Conclusion: future research directions
• Index