Dark tourism

Throughout the history of mankind, there have been various places and events linked together by tourism and death, such as the gladiators fighting in the Roman coliseum , places of public execution and catacombs . In addition, such places were Via Dolorosa , the tombs of the pharaohs and the Tower of London . ^[3]

In 1839, the first railroad trip to Cornwall was held in Great Britain to visit the site of the execution of two convicted murderers. And already in the middle of the XIX century, the British businessman Thomas Cook arranged and conducted the first trips of tourists to the battlefields of the Civil War in the United States . And a few years after the end of the Crimean War, under the supervision of the American writer Mark Twain, tourists visited Sevastopol . ^[3]

In 1937, after the tragic death of the Hindenburg airship to its crash site near the Lakehurst Naval Base in New Jersey, travel agencies began to arrange tourist trips. ^[3]

Despite the fact that even in antiquity there was a tradition of attending events in one way or another related to death, the scientific study of all this began relatively recently. Patrick O'Rourke called his trip to Warsaw, Managua and Belfast “a weekend in the underworld” ^[5] , Chris Rogerck wrote in 1993 about black-label tourism, and Graham M. S. Dunn wrote about “squeezing horror”. ^[6]

The concept of "dark tourism" was first introduced into scientific circulation in 1996 by the staff of the Department of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure Management of the University of Caledonian, John Lennon and Malcolm Foley ^[1] , and the concept of "thanatotourism" in the same year was first proposed by the professor of tourism marketing at Strathclyde University A V. Seaton. ^[7]

Hospitality and Tourism

In this interdisciplinary field, scientists have studied many things. Lennon and Foley expanded their initial idea, expressing regret that “ courtesy and taste do not prevail over economic considerations ” and that “guilt for crimes cannot lie solely on the shoulders of the owners, but also on tourists, since without their demand there was no suggestion. " ^[eight]

Economics

Employees of the Faculty of Tourism and Leisure Management of the Lancashire School of Business Central Lancashire University Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley viewed dark tourism through the prism of the market place that it occupies. They proposed a new concept of “dark tourism product”, and also examined its demand, supply and consumption. Sotun and Sharpley published a large number of theoretical works on the topic of dark tourism and founded the Institute of Dark Tourism. In 2005, Stone suggested that " in modern society, people constantly consume death and suffering in the tourist shell, apparently through education and / or entertainment, " and called for research into the " sphere of consumption of dark tourism " in order to " identify patterns of consumer behaviors that embrace contemporary socio-cultural manifestations of death and dying . ” ^[9] In 2006, Stone examined the “ range of dark tourism product”, arguing that “some suppliers of [dark tourism] may [...] redistribute some of the features, perceptions, characteristics of the product, which can then be freely translated into all kinds of shades of darkness " ". His typology of tourist sites associated with death consists of seven positions ordered from the lightest to the darkest: ^{[10] [11]}

1. dark entertainment industry
2. dark exhibitions
3. dungeons
4. dark places of the deceased (cemeteries and individual graves)
5. dark places of worship
6. dark places of armed clashes
7. dark places of genocide (tourism of genocide )

In 2008, Stone and Sharpley hypothesized that gathering dark tourists in places associated with grief and death indicates immorality, which makes us think about morality. ^[12]

Psychology, Philosophy, and Anthropology

Research in these areas is aimed at understanding the motivation and importance of dark tourism equally for tourists and route developers of the program of thematic tourist places and attractions, as taking into account the socio-cultural environment. ^[13] So Maximiliano Kostanier had a description of giving the status of a sacred place to the tragedy in the nightclub "Republic of Cro-Magnon" , which occurred on December 30, 2004 in Buenos Aires . He noted that the place of memory simply turned into “a sanctuary that not only resisted becoming a place of tourism, but also continues to inspire deep sorrow in public opinion, ” and that “a sense of community has closed the gap between society and officials. ” ^[14] Kostanier was also suggested that " dark tourism can act as a means of resilience, helping society recover from a natural disaster or disaster , a form of domestication of death in a secularized world ." ^[15]

Attractions for dark tourism are castles and battlefields, such as Calloden in Scotland , Bran and Poenari in Romania . Prison in the city of Bomaris on the island of Anglesey . Jack the Ripper exhibition at the Museum of Prison History “ London Donjon ” ". Places related to natural disasters and man-made disasters such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan , Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Ground Zero in New York in the USA . ^{[16] [17]} In addition, dark tourism covers places where genocide or other atrocities occurred: ^{[16] [18]} Holocaust Museum in the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland , Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall in China, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nanjing massacre , the Tuolsleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia , the site of the Jeju rebellion in the Republic of Korea . The Spirit Lake Internment Center near Le Fermi in the province of Quebec is related to the internment of Canadian Ukrainians in 1914-1920. Also, museums dedicated to a particular cultural phenomenon associated with death may be places for dark tourism. For example, the Museum of World Funeral Culture located in Novosibirsk . ^[nineteen]

The places to be visited by tourists are the following cemeteries: ^[20] Pere-Lachaise , Montparnasse , Novodevichy Cemetery , Vagankovsky Cemetery , Highgate Cemetery , Green Wood , Foreign Cemetery , Carrowmore .

In Bali, “the rituals associated with death and funerals were adapted to tourism [...], where savvy entrepreneurs begin to travel in wagons as soon as they find out that someone has died somewhere ." ^[21]

In the United States, tourists have the opportunity to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington by receiving an “ identity card that records their age and gender along with the name and photo of the real Holocaust victim. Against the background of the visual embodiment depicting death squads , the imaginary Holocaust victim introduces a personal identification number on the monitor, as if repeating the path that their real person is . ” ^[22]

Operation

Entrepreneurs can play on the feelings of visitors in order to increase profits. Whether a tourist attraction is informative or operational is established by both managers and visitors. Tour operators overwhelmed by greed can “squeeze the horror” ^[6] or constantly remind about the tragedy in order to better remember ^[23] . In this regard, Rodnti Zanelli notes that thanatotourism and slum tourism are in are inextricably linked, since both are making efforts to rethink the pastime for the financial elite, which is not responsible for colonial arbitrariness. The halo of special tourists, very important people, strengthens the attention to ensure that " others do not have the same opportunity ." Thus, it turns out that even in our days capitalism significantly reduces social mobility in an effort to make labor resources stationary. ^[24] In turn, Maximiliano Kostanye confirms that dark tourism serves as an ideological basis for giving visitors a halo of superiority over those who are on the edge of life. Its main message is the assertion that nationalism and tourism act as a discursive tool that does not allow shattering the nation. Under the cover of trauma and suffering, the survivor develops high self-esteem , which leads to ethnocentrism and chauvinism . In the end, the survivors confirmed the proof of death. Their invulnerability is often accompanied by stories related to power, fate, pride and courage. This sensation, in the short term, helps people to heal wounds after a natural disaster, and later becomes an “iron cage” that puts upside down the causes and consequences of what happened. As a result, those who are guilty of what happened have slipped away. ^[25]

Misinformation

Chris Hedges notes that “the story about Alcatraz was presented by the US National Park Service ” as “ bleach ” because it “ ignores the savagery and injustice of the American system of mass imprisonment .” Omitting complex details, Hedges indicated that the park service had decided to arrange “ disneyfication ” of the Russian language ". ^[26]

• Military tourism
• Catastrophe Tourism

in Russian

in other languages

• Wartourist.eu Places of interest along Hitlers Atlantic Wall in Denmark and Norway
• Institute for Dark Tourism Research (est. 2005) , University of Central Lancashire, free access to articles by Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley
• Institute for Dark Tourism Forum University of Central Lancashire