Dark Tourism: Exploring the Demand Side

Dark Tourism: Examining Current Theories of Demand and Exploring New Ones

Although it is becoming more and more studied, the concept of dark tourism is not yet well understood. It has been around for centuries in various forms. The roman gladiatorial games were viewed by many in ancient times, Waterloo was witnessed by many tourists who came to view the battle while it was in progress (Seaton, 1999) and it has even been alleged that England's first guided tour was a trip to watch the hanging of a pair of murderers (Stone and Sharpley, 2008). Despite all of this, only recently has it been recognized as it's own subset of the tourism industry and begun to be academically studied (Stone, 2006). Due to this youthfulness many processes surrounding it require further research in order to be fully explained as there are several gaps in the literature and information currently available. There has been research done into what dark tourism is; within a broader tourism context it has been defined and seperated. The available supply; where it occurs and what various causes of it's creation are have been explored in numerous case studies of sites all over the globe. However, one of the largest areas yet to be explored within the context of dark tourism is the why factor. What causes the demand for it? Why would so many people visit so many sites associated with such unpleasant occurances year after year? There have been some attempts to explain this, however they do not entirely answer the question. What this paper is going to do is to utilize pre-existing theories and create a new one based upon how important/significant a dark event or site is viewed as in order to explain the demand for dark tourism . Up until now it has been often assumed that "generally, visitors are seen to be driven by different intensities of interest or fascination in death..." (Stone and Sharpley, 2008) but as we will see, current explanations may not give us the whole picture.

As was stated earlier, dark tourism has only recently begun to be researched in an academic fashion, despite having existed for a long time. First it would be helpful to define what dark tourism is. Dark tourism, also called thanatourism and a myriad of other names, is the term used to describe tourist interest in death, disaster and atrocity (Lennon and Foley, 2000). It has also been defined as travel whole or in part to visit areas associated symbolically or actually with death (Seaton, 1999) or as "the phenomenon by which people visit, purposefully or part of a broader recreational itinerary, the diverse range of sites, attractions and exhibitions which offer a (re)presentation of death and suffering" (Stone, 2006, p. 146). Often it is also associated with the commodification of death, suffering and human misery and the packaging of these into products by the tourism industry. Sites such as old battlefieds, battlefield re-enactments, cemetaries, memorial sites, old prisons and dungeons and sites of murders can all be considered examples of dark tourism sites. This process has been criticized as it can lead to a loss of the authenticity of a site or experience and call into question the ethics of operating such a service to create personal gain out of the death and misery of others (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Miles, 2002; Muzaini, Teo and Yeoh, 2007). Commonly the historical accuracy of what is portrayed to have happened which is given to tourists has been changed in order to increase the popularity of a site or by making it less dark (Muzaini et al, 2007) or for other reasons such as politics or image (Strange and Kempa, 2003). This often leads to a loss of authenticity of a site, especially to those who where there when whatever made that site important happened, and to historians and researchers looking for a valuable first hand experience (Muzaini et al, 2007). The intent is often to produce a watered down version of the real events that while still having dark and disturbing parts, leaves out most of the extremes and often most of the moral lessons that could be taken away as well. The supply of such sites is widely documented relative to other areas of dark tourism, with numerous case studies having been done on such sites as Auschwitz and other concentration camps (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Miles, 2002), Alcatraz (Strange and Kempa, 2003), war sites of World War 1 and World War 2 (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Muzaini et al, 2007), the Texas school book depository where JFK was allegedly assassinated from (Lennon and Foley, 2000) and many others and as such is understood much better than the demand side.

There is some research that has been done into the demand for dark tourism, but most of it produces results that are vague, partial or inconclusive. Many researchers believe that it is "...society's fascination with death, real or fictional, media inspired or otherwise, that is seemingly driving the dark tourism phenomenon" (Stone, 2006, p. 147) without showing any evidence of their being a demand for dark tourism based on the deaths, although the issue of media inspiration will be touched upon later. What has been demonstrated is that the pilgrimage of veterans and the family members of veterans to cemetaries, memorials or war sites that they were involved with does represent some of the demand for dark tourism (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Muzaini, et al, 2007), though not a large portion. Lennon and Foley (2000) have argued that it shouldn't even be considered dark tourism, whereas others such as Stone (2006) has concluded that they are indeed dark tourism experiences based upon accepted definitions of the term. This is usually carried out to pay respect to the dead or to their experiences, to try and imagine what it would have been like for others to be there, or to pay homage to other individuals. Often it is done by traveling to visit grave sites or commemoritve sites in a respectful fashion. However, it does not explain why complete strangers, often from another culture will visit the same places out of interest. Another pre-existing explanation for dark tourism focuses on underlying sociological processes associated with death and with our need to confront our own mortality and deal with it. Death is something that everyone has to deal with, it is an essential part of our existence and we cannot escape it. Thus, we need to develop various mechanisms to help us accept it and carry on, secure in our normal lives and with a sense of continuity, yet comfortable with the fact that it will one day end. This is referred to as 'ontological security' and it is a very important aspect of life, for both an indiviual and a society (Stone and Sharpley, 2008). Throughout most of history the role of providing ontological security was provided by various institutional religions that contained mechanisms within them such as an afterlife that helped people grieve the loss of loved ones and eventually cope with the fact that one day they too would become deceased (Stone and Sharpley, 2008). With the decline of organized religion in the Western world, a new way of providing this security was needed. Often this was achieved by simply not thinking about death or having it become "... a major issue to bracket out of everyday consciousness" (Stone and Sharpley, 2008, p. 581) which "... may have resulted in the contemplation of death becoming taboo..." (Stone and Sharpley, 2008, p. 581) in society. Indeed, "throughout most of history, confronting death was commonplace... death was routine, it was also readily accepted"(Macionis and Gerber, 2005, p.376) and in contemporary society it is "removed from everyday experience, death appears as something unnatural"(Macionis and Gerber, 2005, p. 376). The problem seems to be that this does not always work as there are many threats to this security which simply cannot be ignored and bracketed out, mainly that of death itself being inevitable, which must be faced sooner or later by both individuals and society. Thus more and more people are requiring a new mechanism to confront death and bring it, comfortably, back into their scope of everyday contemplation. In contemporary society "...dark tourism may provide a means for confronting and inevitability of one's own death and that of others" (Stone and Sharpley, 2008, p. 585) allowing death and mortality to be viewed as something natural that can be thought about and contemplated without provoking outright "primordial terror and dread" (Stone and Sharpley, 2008, p. 585). This would not likely be a conscious motivation for a visitor to view a dark tourism site, but may contribute to some sort of subconscious draw or interest in areas where others have died and to learn about how and why they died. As we are so far removed from death in today's society, it could be considered as being a push factor within tourism motivation that would fulfill the definition of someone taking a holiday due to "desire for something different" (Shaw and Williams, 2002, p. 87). Any benefits to ontological security taken away from such experiences are probably more implicit than explicit, and will deviate from person to person. None-the-less, as Stone and Sharpley(2008) argue, dark tourism is helping to act as a meaning system that fills the void once inhabited by religious orders by replacing the sacred and institutional ontological security they once provided with a consumptive tourism experience. These are all proposed explanations for part of the demand side of dark tourism, but they do not offer the full explaination of why people desire to visit sites associated with death and suffering.

What has yet to be touched upon by many dark tourism researchers is that the demand for dark tourism might not have anything directly to do with the site being associated with death and suffering. The demand for dark tourism and the darkness of the site may be caused by the same factor in some cases, but do not contribute to each other. If a battle site is of significant importance to the entities participating, more resources will be devoted towards it in terms of both lives and destructive power, as well as media coverage. This not only causes massive amounts of death and destruction, in turn making it a dark site, but due to how significant the battle is and the massive amount of exposure it gets to the general public through word of mouth and media, it makes people interested in witnessing it, learning about it and experiencing important events that they have heard about, in some cases even as they are still occuring or before they have even started to happen and no deaths have yet occured (Seaton, 1999). Thus demand is created. Seaton (1999) also points out that some sites might become sacralized, taking on meanings that become quasi-holy to certain groups of individuals who they effect and ingraining in them certain morals or feelings of glory. Important battle sites perfectly exemplify this, such as how "...Canada came of age at Vimy Ridge" (Berton, 1986, p. 294), how Waterloo "...resulted in the overthrow of Napoleon and secured the freedom of Europe from a French domination..." (Seaton, 1999, p. 139) or how Churchill said at the start of the Battle of Britain that "If the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."" (Churchill, 1940). Sites such as these are not visited due to how many people died at them or how much they suffered, but because of their historical significance, percieved or real, to various groups of people. Many battle sites such as Vimy Ridge, the skies of Britain or Waterloo did have vast quantities of death and suffering occur at them, but this does not seem to have any direct effect on them having become tourist destinations, rather it is caused by the same thing that made them tourist destinations; the importance of the events that occured there at a certain time, real or percieved. The same can be said of non-battle related sites of dark tourism as well. Comparisons can be made from site such as the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository, which recieves nearly 500,000 visitors a year (Lennon and Foley, 2000, p. 91) from around the world and the Auschwitz concentration camp, which recieves around 750,000 visitors a year (Lennon and Foley, 2000, p. 28) from all over the world. Both are sites of events so significant that they changed the course of 20th century history (the assassination of a President and the Holocaust of European Jews, respectively) and both recieve massive numbers of visits, yet the amount of death and suffering occuring at each was on a vastly different scale that would suggest one would be visited hundreds of thousands of times more than the other if the amount of death and suffering were all that mattered. The significance of the events to certain groups is what they have in common, which is what contributes (among other things such as location) to their similar visitation numbers. As has been mentioned, the significance or importance of an event or site may be real or percieved. This alludes to how media attention paid to it would heighten the perception of its' significance to the public. The term percieved is used because often times sites of dark tourism "reflect the role of... media in their individual significance" (Lennon and Foley, 2000). This has increased over time as the power of media has increased, so much so that "global communication technologies have shaped the perceptions of what are the significant sites in the political history or the twentieth century" (Lennon and Foley, 2000, p. 20) and that sites that may be important do not recieve visitors because they have not been portrayed as so in the various types of media throughout the ages (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Seaton, 1999). A comparison can be drawn from our previous example of the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Dachau concentration camp which evidences this. According to Lennon and Foley (2008), Dachau was not a major concentration camp but is the most visited, even more that Auschwitz, which "..stems largely from the influence of the media..." (Lennon and Foley, 2000, p. 40) among other things. The noteriety or popularity of the individuals linked to a certain site or event can also create demand for a dark tourism product. There are plenty of maximum security prisons in the United States that could be considered sites for dark tourism, but "a handful of famous gangsters boosted Alcatraz's notoriety..." (Strange and Kempa, 2003, p. 390) along with Hollywood films and press attention, giving it an almost mythic status among prisons. Therefore it is quite likely that the demand for a particular dark tourism experience is driven to the importance or significance of what created the dark tourism site in the first place rather than the amount of death, pain or suffering that occured there. Whether it is a real significance to world events though or a perception derived from various types of media is inconsequential, people will still come to visit the site in order to learn, comemorate, or just to say that they had been there.

The relatively short amount of time in which the dark tourism phenomena has been studied by academic society means that there are still plenty of gaps in our information about it and these blank spots raise more and more questions. They also pose difficulties in obtaining an accurate understanding of how the entire process of dark tourism functions within the prespective of a tourism industry. The supply side of the dark tourism industry has seen a fair amount of literature produced on it for such a new idea and there seems to be a good grasp on what drives it. Although young frameworks exist as to define what consists of dark tourism and what doesn't, there are still some areas of debate. The ethical issues surrounding the exploitation of the dead and the past suffering of real everyday people for material profit are also yet to be settled. It is interesting that the evidence points to this use of the deaths of past individuals being beneficial to the ontological security of today's living and the ability of dark tourism to fill a much needed role in society, but ultimately this would not seem to fully explain the demand for dark tourism product on the scale it is consumed. More work needs to be done to discover the main factors that drive the demand side of dark tourism. What it does not seem to directly relate to is the amount of death and suffering that occured at a particular site. What does seem to offer a potential explaination for the demand is a desire of tourists to visit sites that they view as important to themselves and their world. This importance may be partially or entirely magnified or created by media attention and how it is portrayed, but it seems to be a motivating factor behind the demand for dark tourism.

Bibliography

Academic Sources

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Churchill, W. (June 18, 1940) The Churchill Centre, "Their Finest Hour" Speech available online at:
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=418 Accessed on November 3rd, 2008