Dorina Buda

Desiring the dark: 'a taste for the unusual' in North Korean tourism?

Desire is a continuous force, fundamentally eccentric and insatiable, yet insufficiently explored in tourism studies. To examine desire in tourism to ‘unusual’ places of darkness and danger we propose four interpretations of this psychoanalytic concept: desire as recognition, ‘object’ cause of desire, desire for novelty, and desire for fantasy. Initial empirical evidence drawn from analysing online mass-media accounts of tourists in North Korea suggests that tourists access desire when travelling to such a country portrayed as one of the most reclusive, dangerous and feared in the world.

Tourism in Conflict Areas Complex Entanglements in Jordan

In this article, the workings of tourism in areas of sociopolitical turmoil are critically examined. In so doing the aim is to scrutinize interconnections between tourism, safety, and conflict as I contend that tourism, tourists and the danger generated by ongoing sociopolitical conflicts are intimately connected. The empirical focus is on tourism in Jordan, a country in a region troubled by ongoing conflicts. Fieldwork for this project was carried out in 2009 and 2010. Data were collected from local tourism industry representatives and international tourists in Jordan. Findings indicate that a safety/danger binary is destabilized by industry representatives who operate a “sanitization” process in Jordan meant to erase danger and conflicts from tourism spaces. Tourists in the region also disrupt this binary as they travel to the region in spite of the conflict and downplay violent incidents.

‘Real’ and ‘Normal’ North Korea: On the Politics of Shining Light on the Darkness. Reply to: ‘Shining Light on the Darkness. Placing Tourists within North Korean Tourism’

In our letter to the editor, we posed the question whether international tourism to North Korea can be interpreted as a form of dark tourism (desiring the dark) with ‘a taste for the unusual’, paraphrasing recent mass-media accounts (Buda & Shim, 2015). John Connell, in his response to our letter, offers welcome engagement with our question, and, by extension, with debate over tourism to/in North Korea. Connell claims that tourists from ‘western’ countries, or at least the ‘small tour group of eight’ male university graduates he interviewed (2015, p. 3), travel to North Korea because they seek to discover a ‘normal’ or a ‘real’ North Korea. Connell’s assertion seems, indeed, to be at variance with the one possible answer we proposed for our question. Based on our analysis of 20 articles from 12 magazines and newspapers, we proposed that tourism to North Korea was driven by an imaginative geography, both on the side of the tourists and of tourism industry representatives organizing these tours. Tourism companies rarely seek to offer a ‘real’ North Korea. Tourists seem to often want to discover their communist North Korea. For travel and tourism often involve tourists’ imaginations and projections of their own values, feelings and attitudes onto (unknown) places. In this vein, tourism cannot be separated from the tourists’ and tour guides’ construal of reality. This becomes more poignant in a communist country whereby such regimes are portrayed as secretive, dangerous and unique. We indeed operate from ‘privileged’ academic positions at a university in a country considered economically developed and belonging to what is called the ‘western’ world, but ours can hardly be ‘a distant and detached perspective’ (Connell, 2015, p. 3). Dorina Buda is born and grew up in communist Romania of the 1980s and experienced firsthand ‘Westerners’ fascination for such regimes. David Shim’s parents were born in South Korea and he gained first-hand experience in the North while working in autumn 2008 as a food aid monitor for the UN World Food Programme. In this capacity, David, like other international staff members who were accompanied by a domestic counterpart, had special access to sites of the country that other foreign visitors including diplomats, business travellers and ‘ordinary’ tourists did not. During his assignments, David was similarly confronted with questions over discerning the ‘real’ from the ‘fake’, for

Adaptation, interaction and urgency: a complex evolutionary economic geography approach to leisure

ABSTRACT Local and regional governments in western European peripheral areas aim to spur leisure-led regional development. We explore planning for leisure by applying an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) approach from a complexity perspective. We identify conditions which enable and constrain leisure development and its effects on the region as a whole. This means combining the local level of individual adaptations with the institutional setting and with the regional scale. We examine the Dutch province of Fryslân and explore by means of case study analysis how current leisure development processes can be explained in a complex evolutionary manner. We explore economic novelty as a result of individual adaptations; how such adaptations through interactions create emerging spatial patterns; how these spatial patterns form self-organizing new types of order; and the way this process is dependent on previous paths whilst also creating new pathways. Our findings show that although development is dependent on individual adaptations often stemming from a few actors, for such adaptations to have an effect on the region requires a connectivity between actors and a sense of urgency amongst those actors. Using a complex EEG approach allows us to explain leisure-led regional development as the product of these conditions. This can help planners deal with the complexity and unpredictability of this process, focusing not on a desired end goal as such, but on creating the conditions in which a more autonomous development can take place.

Unravelling Fear of Death Motives in Dark Tourism

The relative simplicity of the term ‘dark tourism’, which has achieved a broad if not contested acceptance within academia and industry alike, is in contrast to the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon. Embedded in this complexity is the association dark tourism makes between the presentation and consumption of death in the context of tourism, as well as the complex relationships humans have with death and mortality—as individuals as well as societies. Tourism has been traditionally explored from a hedonistic perspective and, subsequently, has assumed that consumption of tourism products and destinations predominately serve the purpose of experiencing fun and pleasure (Gnoth, 1997; Malone et al., 2014). Death, conflict, and atrocity sites which elicit sadness, distress, and an inherent sense of danger have been predominately considered deterring factors for tourists (Biran et al., 2014; Buda, 2015a). An important aspect of dark tourism—that of human suffering—has made it difficult to apply traditional tourism motivational theories to its study (Dunkley et al., 2011). Moreover, with the seemingly pleasure-oriented consumption of tourism in places connected to death and tragedy, visits to such sites have been often portrayed as immoral, deviant, or a social pathology (Biran and Poria, 2012; Stone and Sharpley, 2013; also see Chap. 7).

Souvenirs in Dark Tourism: Emotions and Symbols

This chapter explores the proposition that the act of ‘souveniring’ recent and/or ancient places of death, disaster, or atrocities is a more emotionally immersive experience—and thus less cognitively controlled—than in other tourism contexts. We introduce and explore the notion of ‘dark souvenirs’ which encompass unlikely forms, redolent of darkness, emotions, and affective experiences in the dark tourism context of places connected to death, disaster, or atrocities.

Qualitative Tourism Research

Conducting qualitative research in tourism studies entails engaging with an entire approach, a set of methods that shape project design, conceptual frameworks, data analysis, and anticipated outcomes. Standard qualitative methods are individual interviews, focus groups and ethnography. Solicited written diaries, photograph and video documentation, as well as online methods represent more innovative qualitative tools. The aim with qualitative research is not to be representative on a large scale, as is the case with quantitative approaches meant to replicate results, but rather to explore individual experiences in rich detail, situated in their tourism contexts.