Philip Stone

Dark tourism: towards a new post-disciplinary research agenda

Over the past decade or so, dark tourism research – that is, the social scientific study of tourism and tourists associated with sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre – has witnessed a burgeoning of the literature base. Much of this research has a profundity that can and, undoubtedly, will contribute to broader social theories and to our understanding of cultural dynamics. Arguably, however, some dark tourism research has been characterised by a banality that either illustrates deficient conceptual underpinning or provides for limited disciplinary synthesis. Thus, in order to assuage any structural deficiencies in dark tourism as a coherent body of knowledge, I suggest scholars need to transgress traditional disciplinary borders and interests, and to adopt post-disciplinary research approaches that are characterised by increased reasonableness, flexibility and inclusivity. Consequently, I propose important, though not necessarily exclusive, components of a potential dark tourism research agenda that are critical to building a post-disciplinary approach. Ultimately, however, I offer this essay as a preliminary conversation and invitation to (dark) scholars to take up future dark tourism research without the restrictive dogma and parochialism of disciplinarity.

Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review

Purpose – Commonly referred to as dark tourism or thanatourism, the act of touristic travel to sites of or sites associated with death and disaster has gained significant attention with media imaginations and academic scholarship. However, despite a growing body of literature on the representation and tourist experience of deathscapes within the visitor economy, dark tourism as a field of study is still very much in its infancy. Moreover, questions remain of the academic origins of the dark tourism concept, as well as its contribution to the broader social scientific study of tourism and death education. Thus, the purpose of this invited review for this Special Issue on dark tourism, is to offer some critical insights into thanatourism scholarship.Design/methodology/approach – This review paper critiques the emergence and current direction of dark tourism scholarship.Findings – The author suggests that dark tourism as an academic field of study is where death education and tourism studies collide and, as ...

Dark tourism and the cadaveric carnival: mediating life and death narratives at Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds

Death is universal, yet dying is not. Consequently, within contemporary secularised society, the process of dying has largely been relocated from the familiar environs of the family and community to a back region of medical and death industry professionals. It is argued that this institutional sequestration of death has made modern dying ‘bad’ against a romantic portrayal of a death with dignity, or a ‘good’ death. Moreover, the structural analysis of death reveals issues of ontological security and mortality meaning for the Self. This paper, therefore, adds to that analysis, and specifically examines the construction of mortality meaning within the context of dark tourism – that is, the act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre. Particularly, the research interrogates the Body Worlds exhibition – a touring attraction of real human corpses – as a reflective space to mediate mortality. In doing so, this paper concludes that dark tourism is a new mediating institution that allows the Self to construct contemporary ontological meanings of mortality and to contemplate both life and death through consumption of the Significant Other Dead.

Dark Tourism as Psychogeography: An Initial Exploration

The study of ‘dark tourism’ may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but the practice itself—including commemorative, educational or even leisure visits to places associated with death and/or suffering—is by no means a new social behaviour (Stone 2007). Scholarly examination of dark tourism has raised fundamental lines of multidisciplinary interrogation, not least issues that focus on notions of deviance and moral concerns of consuming or producing ‘death sites’ within the global visitor economy (Stone and Sharpley 2013). Discourse often revolves around visitor motives and tourist engagement (Yuill 2003), as well as issues of how ‘dark heritage’ should be managed (Hartmann 2014). While motivation is of a personal and subjective nature, managing or producing dark tourism sites is fraught with political difficulties and moral quandaries. Importantly however, the (dark) tourist experience at sites of difficult heritage is a process of ‘co-creation’ between visitor site interpretation and individual meaning-making.

Dark Tourism in an Age of ‘Spectacular Death’

We live in a dominion of the dead. We have always done so. Throughout history the pact between the living and the dead has been one of mutual obligation. We ritualise the dead with a memorialised afterlife, where the deceased depend on the living to maintain their memory. In return, the dead counsel us to know ourselves, provide procedure to our lives, systematise our social relations, and help restrain our ravaging impetuous exploits. In essence, the dead maintain our social and cultural order and, consequently, act as our immortal custodians. We offer the dead a commemorative future so that they may bequeath us an honoured past: we help them live on in memory so that they may help us go forward (Harrison, 2003). Yet, while death is universal across time and cultures, dying is not. In other words, death is a finite ending to a biological life while dying embraces varying socio-cultural processes that are inherently influenced by life-worlds.

Dark Tourism, Difficult Heritage, and Memorialisation: A Case of the Rwandan Genocide

The International Handbook on Tourism and Peace offers an optimistic foreword in which the global tourism industry is described as: [a] worldwide social and cultural phenomenon that engages people of all nations as both hosts and guests, [generating] … connections, [which] spur dialogue and exchange, break down cultural barriers and promote values of tolerance, mutual understanding and respect. In a world constantly struggling for harmonious coexistence, these values espoused by tourism could be integral to building a more peaceful future. (Rifai, 2014)