Britta Timm Knudsen

Thanatourism: Witnessing Difficult Pasts

This study looks at difficult heritage tourism as a form of visiting that to a great extent happens through the tourist’s body as locus. Actual tourists are craving for real experiences in order to feel alive and difficult heritage sites offer this experience of presence to excess. In addition tourists are also interested in witnessing the past and its victims, and the establishment of the witnessing relationship depends on the interactive design present at the site. The difficult pasts in question are situated on site-specific locations in Northern America and Europe and represent classic thanatourist sites bearing on Holocaust, totalitarian communism and terrorism. Through an analysis of the multimodal and interactive design at each site, the article outlines various ways that place designs relate actual tourists and victims of the past.This study looks at difficult heritage tourism as a form of visiting that to a great extent happens through the tourists body as locus. Actual tourists are craving for real experiences in order to feel alive and difficult heritage sites offer this experience of presence to excess. In addition tourists are also interested in witnessing the past and its victims, and the establishment of the witnessing relationship depends on the interactive design present at the site. The difficult pasts in question are situated on site-specific locations in Northern America and Europe and represent classic thanatourist sites bearing on Holocaust, totalitarian communism and terrorism. Through an analysis of the multimodal and interactive design at each site, the article outlines various ways that place designs relate actual tourists and victims of the past.

Online war memorials: YouTube as a democratic space of commemoration exemplified through video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers

In this article, we analyze 28 YouTube video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq with two analytical goals. The goals are to first understand how the soldier as an object of communal grief is affectively and discursively established, discussed, and challenged in the videos and comments, and second to investigate what type of commemorative practices the specific media space of YouTube enables. Our first observation is that the videos’ attempts to construct the soldiers as national heroes and common objects of grief are repeatedly disputed and opposed by the people commenting on them. Our second point is that YouTube allows for a new type of commemorative practice, which, unlike the traditional war monuments of the nation-state, is marked by explicit differences of opinion concerning the status and legitimacy of the war. The analysis draws on theoretical insights from the fields of affect theory, participatory culture, DIY media, and memory studies.

The past as staged-real environment: communism revisited in The Crazy Guides Communism Tours, Krakow, Poland

Through an analysis of a tourism design in Krakow Poland, The Crazy Guides Communism Tours, I wish to present one possible way of promoting a district through dealing with an unwanted past, an undesirable heritage. In this instance, it is Nowa Huta, a part of city from the unwanted past, that is revalorized partly through the construction of staged environments in real places. Such designs realize the communication potential of the situation and can change socially constructed knowledge into social (inter-) action. The Crazy Guides Communism Tours require a high level of bodily and emotional investment both from the tourists and from the guides themselves. The paper investigates the designs on a representational and an experiential level and uses field analysis to try and answer the questions if, for whom and why these tourism designs change anything.

Introduction: Affective Methodologies

The motivation for this anthology is a challenge raised in the growing volume of academic work on affective processes — or what is often termed ‘the affective turn’ in contemporary cultural analysis (Clough, 2007; Thrift, 2008; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Blackman, 2012; Wethereil, 2012; Leys, 2011; Ahmed, 2004). The challenge under discussion is how to develop and account for methodologies that enable cultural researchers to investigate affective processes in relation to a certain empirical study. The collection’s main methodological focus is thus how to perform empirically grounded affect research. We define an affective method as an innovative strategy for (1) asking research questions and formulating research agendas relating to affective processes, for (2) collecting or producing embodied data and for (3) making sense of this data in order to produce academic knowledge. The aim of this edited collection is therefore not to challenge or deconstruct established methodological categories (e.g., research questions, data production and data analysis), but rather to begin experimenting with how these categories can be used and reinterpreted in inventive ways in order to engage with the immaterial and affective processes of social life. The chapters in the collection deal with the various elements of this definition in different ways: some focus more on starting points and asking questions, others more on the production or sense-making of data through the use of new analytical and conceptual approaches.

Re-enacting the past: vivifying heritage ‘again’

What do the Mexican tourism concept Caminata Nocturna (running since 2004), the British Battle of Orgreave event staged by Jeremy Deller in 2001, Joshua Oppenheimer’s prize-winning 2012 documentary The Act of Killing and the international grassroots Society for Creative Anachronism have in common? In all of them – although for different reasons – people engage in re-enactment: they utilise, dramatise and revitalise selected events, episodes or even atmospheres of the past, whether those pasts concern illegal crossings of the US–Mexican border, the violent clashes of the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, the massacres of supposed communists in Indonesia during the 1960s or the arts and skills of pre-seventeenth-century Europe. This special issue deals with processes of re-enacting as they relate to heritage. Re-enactment as activity and concept implies a number of challenges to conventional understandings of ‘heritage’ and many of the taken-for-granted qualities and assumptions usually associated with the term, such as fixity, conservation, ‘listing’, ownership or authenticity, to name but a few. The contributions in this volume work, we hope, to unsettle many such ‘givens’, forcing us to critically interrogate the scope of conventional heritage thinking; to ask whether heritage can be thought and analysed, instead, along lines of impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity – and if so, how such lines of scrutiny might afford new possibilities and potential identifications within heritage work, while at the same time acknowledging a set of new or recast problems and issues not easily dealt with when ‘heritage’ is approached through the lens of re-enactment. Re-enactment is hardly an understudied phenomenon these days, and the present volume must be seen as a contribution to a growing field of research that spans several disciplines, including history, anthropology, performance studies and film studies (for some important, recent contributions, see Agnew and Lamb 2009; McCalman and Pickering 2010; Jackson and Kidd 2011; Magelssen and JusticeMalloy 2011; Schneider 2011; Kalshoven 2012; ten Brink and Oppenheimer 2012). What we have sought to provide in the present context is an open, curious and, importantly, cross-disciplinary set of studies and explorations of re-enactment as practice, problem and/or potential, and relate these to the field and insights of heritage studies. Why and how, one may ask, should re-enacting and re-enactment be seen as a particularly pertinent field of study within heritage studies just now? Following from our identification of the ‘challenging’ nature of re-enactment, above, we would identify four clusters of reasons for this:

Acts that matter – an analysis of Kiva

Purpose – The goal of this paper is to provide insight into how global social responsibility is performed through economic, mental and even physical investment and engagement by consumers and organisations. Design/methodology/approach – An illustrative analysis from the corporate website and blogs of an ethical organisation is undertaken. The analytical approach is communicative and inspired by discourse and legitimation studies and more particularly based on the framework of legitimation in discourse and communication developed by Theo van Leeuwen. Findings – The paper claims that new forms of value creation and a new relational logic of ethics – a so-called “logic of matter” – are emerging. From the three types of relational logic of matter ethics – an ethics of care, an ethics of reversibility and an ethics of activism – the ethics of activism plays the most important role in our material. Research limitations/implications – The analytical examples presented in this paper demonstrate how the new relati...

Postmodern crowds: re-inventing crowd thinking

An old spectre once again seems to haunt political life, namely the crowd. The Arab Spring, los Indignados in Spain, and most recently the 2013 uprisings in Turkey, Brazil and even Sweden suggest that both democratic governments and more authoritarian regimes must again reckon with forms of popular protest that appear to mirror, wittingly or not, the kinds of crowd behaviour that attracted keen attention in early sociological thinking. Indeed, when sociology was born in the late nineteenth century, one of its preoccupations was to get to terms with the phenomenon of crowds. In France, conservative scholars were ridden by anxiety in light of the apparent rise of crowds to societal power as well as the alleged predisposition of masses to shake the foundations of the bourgeois society, as marked by the French Revolution and especially the 1871 Parisian Commune. This produced all sorts of frightened analyses of crowds, most pointedly summarized in Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 popularizing treatise The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. In this book, Le Bon prophesised a veritable ‘era of crowds’ (Le Bon 1960, 14), emblematic of barbarianism and hypnotizing–suggestible irrationality (as well as socialism, femininity, and other similar evils) – as opposed to the rational civilized social order that, for Le Bon, was characteristic to society before the advent of modern crowds. So what crowds did, according to Le Bon, was to fundamentally challenge the constitution of the living body of society. To be sure, not all subscribed to the frantic image painted by Le Bon, or for that matter to his (bio)political way of approaching the crowd ‘problem’. For example, while in the USA some observers shared Le Bon’s and other French conservative observers’ fears that crowds were synonymous with socialism, US American discussions of crowds were generally framed against the backdrop of rapid urbanization. Also, in the American context the conservative French concerns were often replaced by more liberal conceptions, according to which crowds did not necessarily signify societal breakdown, but might just as well pave the way for new social forms (for a discussion of French, American as well as German crowd thinking, see Borch 2012). In other words, from early on, sociological conceptions of crowds oscillated between depicting crowds in negative and positive terms: as formless, contagious entities awaiting (or resisting) to be civilized, disciplined, and formed by states and social structures; and as a force which might serve liberating functions. Admittedly, the latter more positive understanding of crowds has been less prominent than the negative one. From a contemporary theoretical perspective, some of the most significant features of early sociological crowd thinking is how centrally it placed the crowd in the understanding of modern society and how marginalized the discourse of crowds has become in much present-day sociological theorizing. Thus, ever since social movement studies gained prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the notion of crowds rapidly receded into the background of sociological attention (see again Borch 2012). As an effect, a preoccupation

The Eyewitness and the Affected Viewer

Everyone agrees that the terror attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) on 11 September 2001 was a media event. But what exactly does that mean? Unlike the Gulf War, which according to the sociologist Jean Baudrillard did not really happen because the media’s presentation of the war turned the action into something that was unreal, 9/11 took place right in front of the eyes of internet or television viewers. Some commentators felt that viewers were trapped between an aesthetic fascination for the pictures on their screens, and an ethical involvement in the events being presented to them in pictures. Within the field of media research it is widely accepted that the immediate diffusion of news pictures by the media involves the viewers immediately and globally in whatever is happening locally. It is also well known that the media create a discursive framework around the events being presented to us, rapidly providing us with a stabilising understanding of the events in question. In the case of “9/ 11”, we were presented with victims and heroes (the fire fighters) as well as the people who committed the crime (enemies, Osama bin Laden) and their assistants (Saddam Hussein, the Axis of Evil). This discursive framing is extremely important, because it led to the political decisions taken in reaction to the event in question. In this connection, the politologist James Der Derian has pointed out that the decision to go to war with Iraq was taken in the days immediately following the terrorist attack on the WTC. One slightly overlooked element in the 9/11 attack seems to be the aesthetic fascination that the pictures had for viewers. Instead of regarding these elements and the fascination they seem to exert on us as unsuitable in relation to the horrific event taking place in front of our eyes, this article will argue that the formal elements in the presentation and representation of the event by the media helped to move us as viewers1. This article will indicate the way in which ethical and aesthetic effects combine in the way the media presented the disaster; and will consider the news presented by Denmark’s two main television channels (DR1 and TV2) on the day itself, as well as two documentaries entitled “Øjenvidner fra Helvede” (Eyewitness in Hell) and “9/11” respectively as examples.

Deportation Day: Live History Lesson

Abstract The paper presents an analysis of a labour camp re‐enactment in Lithuania explicitly created in order to teach young European citizens a lesson of democracy by inviting them into a non‐democratic historical period momentarily re‐created by the help of actors, props, historical sites, a narrative, a scenario etc. The paper investigates the interactive elements, the hybrid staged‐real character and aesthetic experiences that the re‐enactment make us of and evoke. The paper presents a discussion of whether Deportation Day challenges dominant narratives in Europe today and what role memory plays here in order to seek out the possible future of the strategic use of the past.

Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford

ABSTRACT The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a heritage that encompasses statues, buildings, Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes Trust funds. We include a comparative study of the Facebook use of RMF as it demonstrates significant differences between the two places in the development of the student movements as political activism. Investigating in more detail the heritage politics of RMF at UCT we fledge out what we call an affective politics using non-representational bodily strategies. We argue that in order for actual social movements to mobilize in current political controversies, they need to put affective tactics to use.