The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies

Philip R. Stone, Rudi Hartmann, Tony Seaton, Richard Sharpley, Leanne White, Philip R. Stone, Rudi Hartmann, Tony Seaton, Richard Sharpley, Leanne White

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137475664
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry

This handbook is the definitive reference text for the study of 'dark tourism', the contemporary commodification of death within international visitor economies. Shining a light on dark tourism and visitor sites of death or disaster allows us to better understand issues of global tourism mobilities, tourist experiences, the co-creation of touristic meaning, and 'difficult heritage' processes and practices.

Adopting multidisciplinary perspectives from authors representing every continent, the book combines 'real-world' viewpoints from both industry and the media with conceptual underpinning, and offers comprehensive and grounded perspectives of 'heritage that hurts'. The handbook adopts a progressive and thematic approach, including critical accounts of dark tourism history, dark tourism philosophy and theory, dark tourism in society and culture, dark tourism and heritage landscapes, the 'dark tourist' experience, and the business of dark tourism.

The PalgraveHandbook of Dark Tourism Studies will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in aspects of memorialisation and morality in sociology, death studies, history, geography, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, business management, museology and heritage tourism studies, politics, religious studies, and anthropology.

Section 1

Dark Tourism History

Introduction

Until the late 1990s, tourism history was a Cinderella subject in tourism discourse. Though there had been intermittent works on the Grand Tour (Lambert, 1937; Trease 1967; Hibbert 1987), that institutional holiday for the sons of aristocrats and gentlefolk which was a precursor of modern tourism, there were few attempts to provide more systematic accounts of tourism development, nationally or internationally. A few illustrated texts designed for a general audience appeared at irregular intervals (Sigaux 1966; Loschburg 1979; Feifer 1985), and there were two pioneering accounts of British seaside holidays that still have authority (Pimlott 1947; Walton 1983). More sustained interest in tourism history only began to develop as tourism became a recognised subject in academic programmes during the 1990s, and as scholars in traditional curriculum subjects—particularly history, sociology, and literary studies—came to recognise that it offered a wide and socially important field of behaviour for applying their disciplinary skills. The result was a minor renaissance in tourism history that included scholarly studies of tourism development over specified time periods that began with Towner’s (1996) history of European tourism, followed by other general histories (Withey 1997; Lofgren 1999). There were also more specialist histories, including studies of human involvement with the sea (Corbin 1994), the beach (Lencek and Bosker 1998), Mediterranean (Mullen and Munson 2009) mountains (Macfarlane 2003), and, following Marples (1959) early study, the history and philosophy of walking (Jebb 1987; Solnit 2001). There were also new scholarly studies of the Grand Tour in which text dominated illustration (Black 1992, 2003; Sweet 2015).

But none of these initiatives extended to the history of thanatourism/dark tourism, which still lacks a book length history 20 years after it emerged, though there are articles that include historical content, scattered among tourism and non-tourism journals. Nor are there academics working exclusively in dark tourism history that come close to John Walton’s commitment over more than 30 years to British tourism history, which eventually led to the formation of the Journal of Tourism History in 2009. The dearth of dark tourism scholars with a track record of historical research in the subjects included in this collection made it necessary to look outside tourism to writers from other subject areas to meet the brief. The intention was to commission writers who could provide an interesting and diverse range of historical, dark tourism cases on subjects which had not previously featured strongly in the literature. The subjects chosen were: the touristic history of public executions; ‘dark’ walking tourism in nineteenth century London and Paris; dark tourism history in Scandinavia; and the touristic history of natural disasters. The writers assembled include those with backgrounds in anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and languages as well as tourism studies.

About This Section

Chapter 1 by Tony Seaton offers a broad orientation to dark tourism history which begins with a critical overview of dark tourism as practice and discourse. This highlights some of the problematics surrounding its meaning and effects, and the way they act as a barrier to constructing a coherent history. The chapter proposes a revised model of dark tourism—entitled the EOR model—that aims to avoid the difficulties within current definitions, by shifting the focus of thanatourism/dark tourism from that of tourism contact with death, to tourism encounters with remembrance of fatality and mortality. The implications of this category change are then specified in terms of the way they affect historical perspectives. The chapter concludes with a three-point, methodological approach to historical inquiry into the history of encounters with engineered remembrance that comprise attention to their: political origins and beginnings; aetiology; and phenomenological antecedents and effects. Tony Seaton has, with John Lennon, been involved with dark tourism—or ‘thanatourism’ as he prefers to call it—since its inception (Foley and Lennon 1996; Seaton 1996), and more recently with the historical representation of tourism in literature (Seaton 2015, 2016, 2017), and visual iconography in art and photography (Seaton 2013a, b, 2014, 2016).

Chapter 2 by Tony Seaton and Graham Dann examines the touristic history of public executions and corporal punishments, judicial practices that attracted large audiences in Britain for several centuries, before being outlawed in the mid-nineteenth century. Though covering a longer period, and differing in thematic emphases, it follows earlier work by Gattrel (1994) and Wilson (2008) on dark tourism and crime history. Graham Dann has been one of the best-known and prolific tourism academics for some 40 years who has written widely on tourism motivation, the sociology of tourism, and, since the mid-1990s, on dark tourism history and the semiotics of tourism representation (Dann 1996, 1998, 2005). These later works also included a co-edited volume with his colleague Tony Seaton (Dann and Seaton 2001). As a further collaboration, the present account describes how judicial punishments in public, particularly executions, were first engineered and orchestrated by royalty in the twelfth century, flourished under the Tudors, declined under the Stuarts, and were reconfigured in the eighteenth century when more than 200 crimes were punishable by death. Executions were constructed with considerable attention to semiotic effects, which were first designed to attract large audiences and deter would-be transgressors, but later became as much carnivalesque entertainment as cautionary warning. After the abolition of capital punishment in 1868 the relationship between criminal justice and public hedonism continued as the mass media profitably exploited the popular appeal of crime and punishment in news coverage and fictional presentations. The result was a hegemonic alliance between the state and the entertainment industry which continues to the present. Its effects were to create a market for the growth of crime-based museums, exhibitions, and displays, as well to mark out geographies of crime, some of which were packaged as itineraries for commercial crime tours.

Chapter 3 comprises John Edmondson’s account of the dark attractions of death in popular culture in mid-nineteenth century Paris and London and complements the first and fifth chapters in exploring the variety of exhibitions, shows and sites that put mortality and fatality on display, including violent crime. Edmondson is an independent scholar who has specialised in the mid-nineteenth century history and literature of France and Britain and especially in the work of Charles Dickens (see for example Edmondson 2006, 2014). His chapter falls into two sections. The first focuses on contemporary accounts of English visitors to the morgue in Paris, which was opened in 1804 with the purpose of displaying unidentified corpses for the pragmatic purpose of getting them identified. However, the displays attracted large audiences, including substantial numbers of English tourists, and the morgue was gradually appropriated as a tourist attraction. It was described in popular tourist guide books, one of which featured a full-page, coloured illustration of corpses. Dickens, who visited it several times, was a fascinated but shocked observer and Edmondson (2006) summarises his speculations on what drew the crowds to the corpses:

In Dickens’s view, these onlookers are not contemplating their own inevitable future state; the corpse is no memento mori for them, but rather an object of curiosity with which they make no personal connection…

This view contrasts with recent studies that exposure to exhibitions of bodies induces in their audiences’ reflections on their own death (Stone 2011). For Dickens the spectators were voyeurs indulging a sublime curiosity in staring at the dead, in the safety of knowing that the dead could not stare back. From Paris Edmondson moves his account to London and surveys the great diversity of transgressive attractions featuring criminality, deviance, and violence there, including: the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s; prison visits and murder sites; the portrayals of violent fatality in peep shows and panoramas featuring battles and the Lisbon Earthquake; and the popularity of anatomical museums and mummy unrolling. The chapter affirms the critical role of the press, theatre and ‘penny dreadful’ pulp fictions in stimulating and supplying tastes in popular culture that widened dark tourism practices.

Chapter 4, by Kathryn Walchester, comprises an appraisal of dark tourism encounters by British travellers in Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is the first specialist essay on the subject. She teaches in the Department of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, where she leads a course on the history of travel and travel writing. She has published on women travellers in Italy (Walchester 2007) and travel to the North (Walchester 2014). Her account straddles three main categories: visits to the death sites, tombs, and memorials associated with Scandinavian monarchs; general accounts of cemeteries and funereal practice; and accounts of ancient burial sites and places associated with the dark aspects of Viking sagas. She locates travel to Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland as part of the general ‘discovery’ of northern Europe by British travellers in the Romantic period, partly due to a belief that Nordic culture was part of Britain’s literary and linguistic heritage, and also to the gothic connotations of their history, and the perceived Otherness of their physical features, particularly Iceland’s, which became coded as ‘sublime’ sights. Among the most popular tourist destinations in Sweden were places associated with Charles XII of Sweden, who died in battle in 1718 in mysterious circumstances which centred around whether or not he was killed by enemies or his own men. It was not just his death that was the main fascination, but the competing versions of engineered remembrance attached to it. Walchester provides a suggestive survey of Iceland, ‘land of ice and fire’, which was virtually unknown to English travellers until the late eighteenth century, but thereafter flourished as a literary destination among a coterie of elite travellers who included: Lord Dufferin, Sabine Baring-Gould, Anthony Trollope, Richard Burton, William Morris, and W.H. Auden, as well as many lesser-known writers ...