Description
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.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review
Philip Stone
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Philip Stone, (2013),"Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review", International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7
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Rachael Raine, (2013),"A dark tourist spectrum", International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7 Iss 3 pp. 242-256http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJ CTHR-05-2012-0037
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Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review
Philip Stone
Abstract
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 signi?cant 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 tourismas a ?eld of study is still very much in
its infancy. Moreover, questions remain of the academic origins of the dark tourismconcept, as well as its
contribution to the broader social scienti?c 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 ?eld of study is where death
education and tourism studies collide and, as such, can offer potentially fruitful research avenues within
the broad realms of thanatology. Secondly, the author outlines how dark tourism as a conceptual
typology has been subject to a sustained marketization process within academia over the past decade
or so. Consequently, dark tourism is now a research brand in which scholars can locate a diverse range
of death-related and tourist experience studies. Finally, the author argues that the study of dark tourism
is not simply a fascination with death or the macabre, but a multi-disciplinary academic lens through
which to scrutinise fundamental interrelationships of the contemporary commodi?cation of death with
the cultural condition of society.
Originality/value – This review paper scrutinises dark tourism scholarship and, subsequently, offers
original insights into the potential role dark tourismmay play in the public representation of death, as well
as highlighting broader interrelationships dark tourism has with research into the social reality of death
and the signi?cant Other dead.
Keywords Tourism, Death, Research work, Education, Dark tourism, Scholarship, Thanatology,
Visitor economy
Paper type General review
Introduction
The act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre – or what has
commonly been referred to as dark tourism – is an increasingly pervasive feature within the
contemporary visitor economy. Indeed, the commodi?cation of death for popular touristic
consumption, whether in the guise of memorials and museums, visitor attractions, special
events and exhibitions, or speci?c tours, has become a focus for mainstream tourism
providers. Dark tourism is concerned with tourist encounters with spaces of death or
calamity that have perturbed the public consciousness, whereby actual and recreated
places of the deceased, horror, atrocity, or depravity, are consumed through visitor
experiences. Yet, the production of these ‘‘deathscapes’’ within the visitor economy and,
consequently, the consumption of recent or distant trauma within a safe and socially
sanctioned tourism environment, raises fundamental questions of the interrelationships
between morality, mortality and contemporary approaches to death, dying, and
DOI 10.1108/IJCTHR-06-2013-0039 VOL. 7 NO. 3 2013, pp. 307-318, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
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PAGE 307
Philip Stone is Executive
Director: Institute for Dark
Tourism Research (iDTR),
School of Sport, Tourism
and The Outdoors,
University of Central
Lancashire (UCLan),
Preston, UK.
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(re)presentation of the dead. Over the past decade or so, an increasing media scrutiny of
dark tourism and activities of so-called ‘‘dark tourists’’ has brought the interest of visiting
deathscapes into the contemporary imagination. Moreover, academic probes into the
principles and practices of dark tourism have ensured a growing area of scholarly
endeavour which, in turn, has witnessed a burgeoning of resources for social science
teaching and learning into the present-day commodi?cation of death. Subsequently, dark
tourism as a distinct focus of social scienti?c pedagogy is increasingly being delivered on a
range of undergraduate and further education courses in colleges and universities across
the world, as well as being a popular choice for postgraduate study (Stone, 2011a).
Even though an increasing number of scholastic spotlights are now being shone on dark
tourism as a contemporary visitor experience, the concept remains contested. Certainly,
problematic issues with the typological and theoretical foundations of dark tourism raise
complex issues regarding ‘‘dark heritage’’ and its representation and consumption.
Furthermore, dark tourism provokes challenging debate over the relationships between
‘‘heritage that hurts’’ and how contemporary society deals with its signi?cant Other dead.
While dark tourism, in its broadest sense, can be considered dialogic and mediatory, the
implications of dark tourism mediating death and the dead in modern society are fraught
with complexities. Even so, dark tourism exposes particularities of people, place and
culture, where visiting sites of mortality can reveal ontological anxieties about the past as
well as the future. Dark tourism also symbolises sites of dissonant heritage, sites of selective
silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined with
interpretation and meaning, and sites of the imaginary and the imagined. Therefore,
analysing distinctions of dark tourism as a concept and researching its mediating
interrelationships with the cultural condition of society is important in contributing to our
understanding of the complex associations between (dark) heritages and the tourist
experience.
However, despite the growing body of dark tourism related literature, questions remain of
dark tourism as an area of scholarly activity. Particularly, what are the academic and
conceptual origins of dark tourism? Is dark tourism simply the result of a creative research
branding exercise by academics in an ever-challenging global higher education market?
And, what are the consequences and contributions of studying dark tourism to broader
society? The purpose of my commentary, therefore, in this Special Issue is to critically
evaluate dark tourism scholarship by three central facets. Firstly, I brie?y explore the
evolution of death commodi?cation as a distinct research topic and, subsequently, suggest
conceptual origins of dark tourism can be located within multidisciplinary areas of
thanatology – that is, the social scienti?c study of death and dying. Second, I examine the
marketisation and branding of dark tourism as an academic construct, as well as a
provocative media label and contested industry term. Finally, through a succinct
examination of the key literature, I outline current parameters of dark tourism scholarship
and, in particular, I argue dark tourism research is a worthy academic lens through which to
critically peer at a variety of socio-cultural, political, historical and moral quandaries.
Ultimately, while dark tourism has, to some extent, domesticated death and exposes a
cultural institution that mediates between the ordinary Self and the signi?cant Other dead,
dark tourismscholarship is still very much in its infancy. Therefore in order to understand fully
dark tourism and its interrelationships with contemporary culture and society, a great deal
needs to be done to drive the interdisciplinarity of dark tourism research, as well as
engaging constructively with both industry and the media. Firstly, however, I suggest dark
tourism as an academic ?eld of study has emerged through the collision of death education
and tourism scholarship, and it is to this point that I now turn.
Dark tourism as a ?eld of study
To understand how dark tourism scholarship emerged, we must acknowledge not only the
maturing if contested area of tourism studies (Sharpley, 2011), but also how dark tourism
may be located within broader death studies and thanatology. Of course, I am not
suggesting that dark tourism should be placed exclusively within a thanatological
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framework – it should not. As evidenced later, dark tourism offers a multi-disciplinary
academic lens through which to scrutinise a broad range of social, cultural, geographical,
anthropological, political, managerial, and historical concerns. However, the central
component of dark tourism is the (re)presentation and touristic experience of death and
dying, and for that reason dark tourism has essentially emerged from a thanatopic tradition
or ‘‘thanatopsis’’ (the private contemplation of death in public spaces) (Seaton, 1996). A full
critique of dark tourism and thanatopsis is beyond the scope of my commentary, so I offer
here a brief critical insight into the nature of death studies, its central theses, and the
potential role dark tourism may play within the public representation of death.
While death is universal, dying is not. In other words, relationships between the living and the
dead, and where the dead are placed and remembered in society, depends on particular
cultural representations of mortality (Howarth, 2007). Despite in recent years an upsurge of
interest in death and dying, including a fascination with death re?ected in popular media
such as newspapers, television documentaries, soap operas, and ?lms, much of the
academic death literature has focussed on debates of denying death within contemporary
societies. Indeed, many scholarly approaches to death and dying, certainly from the 1960 s
onwards, have concentrated on loss of tradition and death denial within society. Particularly,
the notion that societies may be death-denying was developed by cultural anthropologist
Ernest Becker (1973) in his Pulitzer Prize award-winning book, The Denial of Death. The
basic premise of Becker’s popular thesis is that human civilisation and the socio-cultural
frameworks in which we reside are ultimately an elaborate and symbolic defence against the
knowledge of our mortality. Becker goes on to assert that whole societies may adopt a
maladaptive psychological response to mortality awareness.
However, a number of sociological critiques of Becker’s essentially psychological theory of
the place of death in modern society have re-evaluated the issue of death denial. In
particular, Allan Kellehear (1984, 2001) argues that arbitrary evidence of the denial of death
was sought and attributed to social institutions such as curative education, funerary
customs, and the nature of modern work, traditional religion and medical research efforts.
Consequently, Kellehear’s (1984) sociological criticism argued against the seemingly
catholic manner in which the death-denial thesis is applied. He contends that in
contemporary Western societies the death-denial thesis ‘‘is used indiscriminately to refer to
any avoidance of reality – particularly the reality of the labelling observer’’ (p. 713). Put
another way, individual behaviour can be easily identi?ed as death-denying without the
identi?er being required to provide an explanation. Of course, while the concept of ‘‘denial’’
is primarily psychiatric, wholesale adoption by sociologists of the death-denial thesis to
describe the place of death within modern societies raises obvious confusion between
personal and social systems. This confusion is explored by Walter (1991) who examines
death-denial with notions of the taboo. In particular, Walter challenges the death-denial
proposition by contending the increasing public presence of death, in popular culture and
elsewhere, raises ambiguities for those who argue death in modern societies has been
sequestered or removed from the public realm (Giddens, 1991; Mellor, 1993). Whilst
sequestration is claimed to occur because death poses problems of meaning for individuals
in complex postmodern societies, death is argued to be publicly absent but privately
present (Mellor and Shilling, 1993). Though there is little doubting the privatisation of many
aspects of death, or the social and cultural diversity of dying and grief, ‘‘it may be that in their
quest to uncover hidden death, social theorists have neglected to acknowledge the more
public face of death’’ (Howarth, 2007, p. 35).
It is this acknowledgment of the ‘‘more public face of death’’ that dark tourism research has
taken as its thanatological cue. Elsewhere, I have examined the role of dark tourism as a
potential mediating mechanism to challenge the death-denial thesis, whereby certain kinds
of death are de-sequestered back into the public domain for contemporary consumption
(Stone, 2012a; Stone and Sharpley, 2008). Even so, dark tourism cannot be placed into
simplistic denial/acceptance or supply/demand dichotomies. Nor can dark tourism expose
diverse cultural experiences of death and dying in a single simple discourse. Death is
complex and multifaceted; it appears in unexpected forms, in unnatural circumstances, and
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to the reluctant. Certainly, dark tourismcan portray these elements of death and dying for the
contemporary visitor, yet dark tourism scholarship has hitherto to expose fully the social and
cultural reality and consequences of presenting the dead for the modern-day visitor
economy. Nevertheless, I suggest dark tourism scholarship is where death studies and
tourism studies collide, and where fruitful research avenues of mortality saliency may be
illuminated. With death education grounded in thanatology and tourism scholarship,
occupying a delicate disciplinary place between business management and the broader
social sciences, dark tourism can offer an empirical bridge to scrutinise modern
socio-cultural complexities of mortality, as well as examining the contemporary
commodi?cation of death and the dead. Yet, while dark tourism as an act of travel has
historical pedigree and may be an old concept in a new world, dark tourism as a scholarly
?eld has undoubtedly become axiomatic since the mid-1990’s, particularly from a research
branding perspective, and it is this that I now turn.
The branding of dark tourism (research)
The visitor economy is one of the world’s biggest employers, generating millions of jobs
across a range of sectors and contributing billions of revenue to government treasuries
across the globe. Therefore, with a growing international visitor economy, and to meet the
demand for well-quali?ed service sector professionals, the design and delivery of tourism
undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes has become one the
fastest-expanding areas of study in higher education (Jamal and Robinson, 2009).
Consequently, since the early 1990 s, tourism as a serious ?eld of academic endeavour
within both management studies and the social sciences has become ?rmly established
(Sharpley, 2011). However, despite of or even because of debate over disciplinary
foundations for the study of tourism, including dichotomised contestations over tourism as a
social science or tourism as vocational management, tourism education has opened up a
plethora of academic enterprises. Indeed, the maturing of tourism education, certainly in
terms of re?ectivity and criticality, has meant tourism research can cast crucial re?ections on
our contemporary world which are unhindered by disciplinary boundaries (Stone, 2011b).
Importantly, therefore, a key academic enterprise originating in tourism discourse has been
the study of the commodi?cation of death within the contemporary visitor economy.
Introduced in 1996 by Malcolm Foley and John Lennon in a special edition of the
International Journal of Heritage Studies (Foley and Lennon, 1996), the term ‘‘dark tourism’’
has entered a contemporary academic and media lexicon to denote the touristi?cation of
death and disaster. The concept was later brought to mainstream attention in 2000 by the
same authors in their intriguing yet theoretically fragile book Dark Tourism: The Attraction of
Death and Disaster (Lennon and Foley, 2000). During the same period, Tony Seaton
introduced the awkward if not more conceptually robust idiom ‘‘thanatourism’’ to de?ne the
act of contemporary travel to sites of death which, as an act of tourism, was historically
grounded within the ‘‘memento mori’’ of Romanticism (Seaton, 1996). Thus, since the
introduction into discourse of the popular term dark tourism and its scholarly sister term
thanatourism, there has been a steady but growing base of erudite inquiries into dark
tourism practices, processes, and principles. However, as Lennon and Foley (2000, p. 169)
prophetically pointed out with regard to offering dark tourism as a new tourism typology,
‘‘issues which some would rather not have been raised will lead to further development and
academic ‘exploitation’ of this ?eld’’. Arguably, therefore, any exploitation of dark tourism as
an academic ?eld is due not only to the maturing of tourismscholarship as mentioned earlier,
but also the fact that dark tourism is simply a fascinating and controversial area and, as
revealed shortly, an area that can shine critical academic light on complex social, cultural,
political, and moral issues.
Even so, despite obvious claims about the speci?c fascination of dark tourism, both as an
activity and concept, or the development of dark tourism academic discourse in general, I
suggest dark tourism scholarship has been popularised through a purposeful blend of
traditional academic output and contemporary research branding. In other words, the very
idea of dark tourism as a multidisciplinary ?eld of study has resolutely been subject to
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creative branding techniques not uncommon to the marketisation of a private sector
product. Indeed, in an era where tourism education is being scrutinised as either a
discipline, a ?eld of study, or as sectoral study, scholars attempting to carve out credible
research agendas and scholarly identity in a crowded academic marketplace have,
perhaps, viewed dark tourism as enticing to create a persuasive research appellation. This
is no more so than in my own personal research arena, where internal policies and politics at
my own institution has ensured a research-informed teaching agenda and a criteria for
academic success based (almost solely) on the premise of ‘‘publish or perish’’. Therefore,
with my inherent research interest in the broad realms of dark tourism, and with a
professional background in management consultancy and marketing within the private
sector, it is probably fair to suggest that I have been in the vanguard of creating a global dark
tourism subject ‘‘brand’’. Speci?cally, in 2005, I launched The Dark Tourism Forum at www.
dark-tourism.org.uk as an online resource repository dedicated to the study of dark tourism.
Consequently, the virtual Forum acted as a world-wide marketing device to expose the
emerging yet intriguing ?eld of dark tourism which, in turn, created appeal and signi?cant
(brand) awareness of the subject. The web site has nowevolved to become the of?cial site of
the recently launched Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) at the University of Central
Lancashire in England, and continues to trademark dark tourism scholarship. Indeed, with
over two million unique web hits since its 2005 launch from individuals based in over 100
countries, in addition to creating dedicated social media presence, including on Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr, dark tourism as an academic research activity has ‘‘been
taken to market’’. Augmenting this marketisation process, there has been signi?cant media
interest over the past eight years or so in the idea of dark tourism, with the iDTR and others
conducting a substantial number of newspaper, magazine, radio and television interviews
with media organisations from across the world (iDTR, 2013).
What has transpired is a research ?eld which has gained popular momentum, not only with
the media, but also with undergraduate and postgraduate students from a variety of
disciplines as well as with a growing number of international social science scholars. Of
course, the purposeful branding of dark tourism as a research ?eld, arguably driven by my
own enterprises, but also supplemented by academic colleagues from around the globe,
means that Lennon and Foley’s initial typological classi?cation of dark tourism has been
‘‘exploited’’ in terms of mass appeal. That said, however, in many ways dark tourism as a
typology and research brand that incorporates multiple case studies and theoretical
perspectives might be deemed by some as contrary and unhelpful. With the juxtaposition of
the words ‘‘dark’’ and ‘‘tourism’’, the branding of dark tourismis not without its critics and the
notion of dark tourismhas even been examined as a kind of ‘‘deviant leisure’’ (Stone, 2013a).
However, despite some obvious and legitimate criticisms, and despite the inherent issues of
branding a ‘‘new’’ ?eld of study, dark tourism as a scholarly activity exposes valuable and
relevant conceptions. Subsequently, I now turn to dark tourism as providing an
interdisciplinary academic lens through which to scrutinise important interrelationships
with the cultural condition of contemporary society.
Dark tourism as an academic lens
At the most rudimentary level, tourism is simply the ‘‘movement of people’’. While this
‘‘movement’’ requires managing from a commercial perspective, the touristic moving of
people also generates speci?c socio-cultural, economic, and political implications. In other
words, the mobility of tourism is integrated into our contemporary world and, as such, offers
us a research window in which to observe the structures, processes, institutions,
transformations and challenges of our world (Sharpley, 2011). When applied to the ?eld of
dark tourism, these ‘‘research windows’’ allow us to glimpse fundamental practices and
visitor experiences that mediate between the contemporary production and consumption of
signi?cant death, dying, and the dead. In short, dark tourism is not simply an elementary
‘‘fascination’’ with death, but a powerful lens through which contemporary life and death may
be witnessed and relationships with broader society and culture discerned. It is this,
perhaps, that research into dark tourism has contributed to the social scienti?c study of
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death and dying in general and, in particular, has enhanced the legitimacy of dark tourism
scholarship. As the remainder of my commentary now outlines, a range of social science
topics have been theoretically and empirically examined through a dark tourism lens.
Pilgrimages to places associated with death have occurred as long as people have been
able to travel. In other words, it has always been an identi?able form of tourism, though
socio-cultural contexts in which death-related travel transpired have obviously changed
throughout the ages. This latter point is beyond the scope of my review, though Seaton
(2010) argues dark tourism was traditional travel that evolved through profound shifts in the
history of European culture, in?uenced by Christianity, Antiquarianism, and Romanticism.
However, as general participation in tourism has grown, particularly since the mid-twentieth
century, so too has the demand for and supply of dark tourism. For example, visitor sites
associated with war probably constitute the largest single category of tourist attractions in
the world (Smith, 1998). However, as Butler and Suntikul (2013) argue, the blunt
categorisation of all war-related tourism as ‘‘dark tourism’’ is perhaps misguided. Even so,
Thompson (2004, p. xii) in his 25 Best World War Two Sites tourist guide states that ‘‘a
battle?eld where thousands died isn’t necessarily a good place, but it’s often an important
one’’ (original emphasis). Slade (2003, p. 782) recognises this importance and suggests
Gallipoli, the battle?eld where Australia and New Zealand suffered massive casualties
during World War One, was where both countries, respectively, have their ‘‘de facto
psychological and cultural origins’’ and where modern visitors now enact a kind of secular
pilgrimage to the site (Hyde and Harman, 2011). Chronis (2005) also recognises how war
landscapes, such as those at Gettysburg, the site of one of the bloodiest battles during the
American Civil War, can be symbolically transformed and used by service providers and
tourists alike to negotiate, de?ne, and strengthen social values of patriotism and national
unity through the death of others. Similarly, Carr (2010) notes how war-tourism sites can
control or censor accounts of the past. In particular, she examines touristi?cation tensions
within the Channel Islands’ war heritage and the Nazi occupation it serves to represent.
Ultimately, Carr suggests wartime narratives in the Channel Islands, which are delivered
through fragmented and contested memorialisation at various bunker sites, are directly
analogous to other formerly-occupied Western European countries, rather than being
identi?ed with a British Churchillian paradigm – namely, that the British were not a nation of
victims, but of victors.
Yet war-tourism attractions, though themselves diverse, are a subset of the totality of tourist
sites associated with death and suffering. While there is no universal typology of dark
tourism, or even a universally accepted de?nition, reference is frequently made, for instance,
to speci?c destinations, such as the Sixth Floor in Dallas, Texas, site of one of the most
infamous assassinations of the twentieth century (Foley and Lennon, 1996). Alternatively,
reference is also made to speci?c forms of tourism, such as visits to graveyards and
cemeteries (Seaton, 2002), Holocaust sites (Beech, 2009), places of atrocity (Ashworth and
Hartmann, 2005), prisons and crime sites (Wilson, 2008; Dalton, 2013), and slavery-heritage
attractions (Dann and Seaton, 2001; Rice, 2009). Augmenting various typologies of dark
tourism, alternative terminology has also been applied to the phenomenon. For example,
labels include morbid tourism (Blom, 2000), black spot tourism (Rojek, 1993), grief tourism
(West, 2004) or as Dann (1998) alliterates, ‘‘milking the macabre’’. More speci?cally, Bristow
and Newman (2004) introduce the term fright tourism, a variation of dark tourism whereby
individuals may seek a thrill or shock from the experience. Meanwhile, Dann (1998, p. 15)
suggests that ‘‘dicing with death’’ – that is, seeking experiences that heighten tourists’ own
sense of mortality – may be considered a particular consequence of dark tourism. Dunkley
et al. (2007) add to the de?nitional debate and offer various categories, including horror
tourism, hardship tourism, tragedy tourism, warfare tourism, genocide tourism and extreme
thanatourism. The latter category, according to these authors at least, involve a marketable
live-event aspect of death and dying, and they cite (Western) visits to private cremations in
India or to public executions in the Middle East as particular examples. Evidently, therefore,
a blurring of typological parameters has occurred with regard to dark tourism and, as such,
full categorisations are extremely complex (but, see Stone, 2006).
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Nonetheless, despite the diverse range of sites and tourist experiences, Tarlow (2005, p. 48)
identi?es dark tourism as ‘‘visitations to places where tragedies or historically noteworthy
death has occurred and that continue to impact our lives’’ – a characterisation that aligns
dark tourism somewhat narrowly to certain sites and that, perhaps, hints at particular
motives. However, it excludes many shades of dark sites and attractions related to, but not
necessarily the site of, death and disaster (Miles, 2002; Stone, 2006). Consequently, Cohen
(2011) addresses location aspects of dark tourism through a paradigm of geographical
authenticity and sense of victimhood. Meanwhile, Biran et al. (2011) examine sought bene?ts
of dark tourism within a framework of dialogic meaning making (also Kang et al., 2011).
Jamal and Lelo (2011) also explore the conceptual and analytical framing of dark tourism,
and suggest notions of darkness in dark tourism are socially constructed, rather than
objective fact. Meanwhile, Bowman and Pezzullo (2009) interrogate the scholarly and
political attachments of the trope ‘‘dark’’ in relation to ‘‘tourism’’. Drawing on performance
theory, Bowman and Pezzullo suggest dark tourism scholarship can be a productive
approach to explore the intersections of death and tourism, including broader questions of
ritual, play, identity, everyday life, and embodiment. Likewise, Osbaldiston and Petray (2011)
suggest touristic engagement with ‘‘dark’’ sites is a source of ritual and, in particular, they
argue tourists’ cannot only be enlightened by their sacred experience, but also disturbed by
it. They go on to suggest that tourists’ negotiate ‘‘dark properties’’ of places, particular those
with national or international heritage value. Similarly, White and Frew (2013) offer an edited
collection of case studies that examine the intersection between dark tourism, place identity,
and imagined collective communities, whereby dark heritage sites and attractions can help
disseminate a discourse of national inclusion and a shared past.
However, notwithstanding diverse facets of both the conception and application of dark
tourism, Skinner (2012) edits an ethnographic volume dedicated to ‘‘writing the dark side of
travel’’. In particular, he and his co-contributors explore the writings and texts of so-called
dark journeys and the implications and consequences of travelling over the dead, among
the dead, and alongside the suffering. Consequently, Skinner suggests that from the tour of
humanity’s violence and misery, comes poignancy in the characterisation of plight and,
ultimately, dark tourism allows for a sense of the profound and for spiritual journeys to be
undertaken that record and memorialise tragedy. This aspect of recording tragedy,
particularly from a political ideological perspective is examined by Lee et al. (2011).
Speci?cally, they locate dark tourism within a peace paradigm between North and South
Korea and suggest Western hegemonic constructions of tourismgenerally and, dark tourism
in particular, means that Euro-centric perspectives of dark tourism are not applicable to
other indigenous (Oriental) perspectives. They go on to argue that the recent killing of a
South Korean tourist in the North Korean Mt Kumgang tourist resort – once seen as a peace
tourism site when policies of rapprochement guided inter-Korean strategy – is now a
Foucaultian heterotopian space, which combines dark tourism with idealised cultural
narratives within a contradictory geopolitical place. Similarly, I too examine dark tourism and
the conception of heterotopia but within the context of a post-apocalyptic Chernobyl – the
site of the world’s worst nuclear accident (Stone, 2013b). In locating dark tourism
experiences within a heterotopian framework, I argue that Chernobyl is a space of technical,
political and cultural importance which, through it touristic production and consumption,
allows for a valorisation of an alternate social ordering whereby the familiar and the uncanny
collide.
Meanwhile, Seaton (2009) addresses how dark tourism sites should be managed –
especially within the milieu of Other death. Seaton concludes that thanatourism sites are
unique auratic spaces whose evolutionary diversity and polysemic nature demand
managerial strategies that differ from other tourist sites. By the same token, Knudsen (2011)
examines this notion of ‘‘aura’’ from a tourist experience perspective, and suggests the
interactive design and representation of dif?cult heritage should allow tourists to feel alive in
their reconnection with the past and to feel empathy with victims. Indeed, within the context
of business practice and consumer research, Coats and Ferguson (2013) examine dark
tourism within a framework of post-earthquake perceptions in New Zealand. In particular,
they argue inherent emotional tensions between residents of a disaster zone and
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subsequent visitors should always be aligned with unbiased interpretation that offers an
opportunity for catharsis, acceptance, as well as grieving for a sense of loss of both people
and place.
In terms of the politicisation of dark tourism, Sharpley (2009) examines notions of dissonance
and the in?uence of political ideology conveyed in dark tourism interpretation, and goes on
to outline a stakeholder model of dark heritage governance. Speci?cally, Sharpley argues
such a model provides a basis for encouraging harmony and reconciliation, as well as
understanding or learning through a more inclusive memorialisation and interpretation of
challenging heritages. Sharpley and Stone (2009) also examine (re)presentations of tragedy
and, in particular, locate dark tourism interpretation within a paradigm of kitsch and the
commodi?cation of (tragic) memories. In so doing, we suggest that death is inevitably
vulnerable to kitschi?cation, as it ‘‘requires inoculation and thus rendering into something
else that is comfortable and safe to deal with and to contemplate’’ (original emphasis –
Sharpley and Stone, 2009, p. 127). We go on to conclude that concerns within dark tourism
interpretations remain and revolve around interrelationships between kitsch, nostalgia and
melancholy and the meanings that are consequentially projected and consumed.
Elsewhere, I also recognise these concerns and suggest ethical ambiguities inherent
within dark tourism are systematic of broader secular moral dilemmas in conveying
narratives of death (Stone, 2009a, 2013a). In particular, I propose dark tourism and the
tourist experience it entails – which some might consider ‘‘dark leisure’’ – signi?es a
contemporary communicative mechanism of morality in that ‘‘dark tourism may not only act
as a guardian of history in heritage terms, but also as moral guardian of a contemporary
society which appears to be in a midst of resurgent effervescent moral vitality’’ (Stone,
2009a, p. 72).
Though the morality of dark tourism is often the subject of academic discourse and media
commentary, so too is discussion on the mortality aspects of the touristi?cation of death. As
noted earlier, dark tourism and its relationship with the thanatological condition of
contemporary society has been scrutinised. Consequently, dark tourism has been
suggested to be a mediating institution of mortality and, in particular, I have argued that
in Western secular society where ordinary death is often sequestered behind medical and
professional fac¸ ades, yet extraordinary death is recreated for popular consumption, dark
tourism mediates a potential if not complex and relative social ?lter between life and death
(Stone and Sharpley, 2008; Stone, 2009b, 2011c, d; 2012b). In summary, therefore, while a
full critique of dark tourism in all its manifestations is beyond the scope of my review,
evidently there appears to be a myriad of fundamental interrelationships that exist between
dark tourismand the cultural condition of society. Moreover, despite the diversity of sites and
relative experiences, a common factor of dark tourism is the association, in one way or
another, between a tourist experience and the touristic representation of death and the
dead. It is these interrelationships and associations that provide the rationale to study death
and dying as a commodity within the visitor economy. In so doing, dark tourism scholarship
can provide an academic lens through which research windows are opened and,
consequently, critical approaches adopted to examine the contemporary social reality of
death.
Concluding thoughts
Despite dark tourismbeing a contested term, my commentary has aimed to provide a critical
insight into the emergence and current direction of dark tourism scholarship, in addition to
highlighting dark tourism as a branded ?eld of academic study. This is particularly relevant
considering the evident practice of travel to and experience of sites of death, disaster or the
seemingly macabre within the global visitor economy. Moreover, I have suggested dark
tourism as an academic construct and research area is now established which, in turn,
essentially emerged through a collision of death education and tourism studies.
Subsequently, dark tourism as a ?eld of study within higher education has been
marketized and branded for scholarship and academic inquiry. As a result, dark tourism is
identi?able as a broad area in which social scientists may peer at diverse socio-cultural
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quandaries that impact on death and the dead as contemporary commodities. Indeed, dark
tourism exposes a cultural institution and practice that blurs the line between
commemoration of the dead and commodi?cation of death. In so doing, those
professionals who work on the front line in what might be considered dark tourism sites,
attractions, and exhibitions are faced with unprecedented moral, managerial and political
challenges. The management of remembrance, the interpretation of tragedy and suffering,
distinctions between dif?cult heritage and tragic history, the effect of chronological distance
and the fading of the signi?cant Other dead into the past, are just some of the complex
issues tourism memory managers are encountering. Moreover, tourist encounters of places
of tragedy and death and, crucially, the consequences of those encounters for broader
society remain a crux of dark tourism research. Ironically, therefore, dark tourism is
concerned with death and dying, yet through its social scienti?c study, tells us more about
life and the living. For that reason, dark tourismscholarship should continue to shine a critical
light on how societies deal with and present their dead, and in doing so, offer
multidisciplinary discourse on the darker side of travel.
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Corresponding author
Philip Stone can be contacted at: [email protected]
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doc_813300625.pdf
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.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review
Philip Stone
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Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review
Philip Stone
Abstract
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 signi?cant 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 tourismas a ?eld of study is still very much in
its infancy. Moreover, questions remain of the academic origins of the dark tourismconcept, as well as its
contribution to the broader social scienti?c 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 ?eld of study is where death
education and tourism studies collide and, as such, can offer potentially fruitful research avenues within
the broad realms of thanatology. Secondly, the author outlines how dark tourism as a conceptual
typology has been subject to a sustained marketization process within academia over the past decade
or so. Consequently, dark tourism is now a research brand in which scholars can locate a diverse range
of death-related and tourist experience studies. Finally, the author argues that the study of dark tourism
is not simply a fascination with death or the macabre, but a multi-disciplinary academic lens through
which to scrutinise fundamental interrelationships of the contemporary commodi?cation of death with
the cultural condition of society.
Originality/value – This review paper scrutinises dark tourism scholarship and, subsequently, offers
original insights into the potential role dark tourismmay play in the public representation of death, as well
as highlighting broader interrelationships dark tourism has with research into the social reality of death
and the signi?cant Other dead.
Keywords Tourism, Death, Research work, Education, Dark tourism, Scholarship, Thanatology,
Visitor economy
Paper type General review
Introduction
The act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre – or what has
commonly been referred to as dark tourism – is an increasingly pervasive feature within the
contemporary visitor economy. Indeed, the commodi?cation of death for popular touristic
consumption, whether in the guise of memorials and museums, visitor attractions, special
events and exhibitions, or speci?c tours, has become a focus for mainstream tourism
providers. Dark tourism is concerned with tourist encounters with spaces of death or
calamity that have perturbed the public consciousness, whereby actual and recreated
places of the deceased, horror, atrocity, or depravity, are consumed through visitor
experiences. Yet, the production of these ‘‘deathscapes’’ within the visitor economy and,
consequently, the consumption of recent or distant trauma within a safe and socially
sanctioned tourism environment, raises fundamental questions of the interrelationships
between morality, mortality and contemporary approaches to death, dying, and
DOI 10.1108/IJCTHR-06-2013-0039 VOL. 7 NO. 3 2013, pp. 307-318, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
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PAGE 307
Philip Stone is Executive
Director: Institute for Dark
Tourism Research (iDTR),
School of Sport, Tourism
and The Outdoors,
University of Central
Lancashire (UCLan),
Preston, UK.
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(re)presentation of the dead. Over the past decade or so, an increasing media scrutiny of
dark tourism and activities of so-called ‘‘dark tourists’’ has brought the interest of visiting
deathscapes into the contemporary imagination. Moreover, academic probes into the
principles and practices of dark tourism have ensured a growing area of scholarly
endeavour which, in turn, has witnessed a burgeoning of resources for social science
teaching and learning into the present-day commodi?cation of death. Subsequently, dark
tourism as a distinct focus of social scienti?c pedagogy is increasingly being delivered on a
range of undergraduate and further education courses in colleges and universities across
the world, as well as being a popular choice for postgraduate study (Stone, 2011a).
Even though an increasing number of scholastic spotlights are now being shone on dark
tourism as a contemporary visitor experience, the concept remains contested. Certainly,
problematic issues with the typological and theoretical foundations of dark tourism raise
complex issues regarding ‘‘dark heritage’’ and its representation and consumption.
Furthermore, dark tourism provokes challenging debate over the relationships between
‘‘heritage that hurts’’ and how contemporary society deals with its signi?cant Other dead.
While dark tourism, in its broadest sense, can be considered dialogic and mediatory, the
implications of dark tourism mediating death and the dead in modern society are fraught
with complexities. Even so, dark tourism exposes particularities of people, place and
culture, where visiting sites of mortality can reveal ontological anxieties about the past as
well as the future. Dark tourism also symbolises sites of dissonant heritage, sites of selective
silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined with
interpretation and meaning, and sites of the imaginary and the imagined. Therefore,
analysing distinctions of dark tourism as a concept and researching its mediating
interrelationships with the cultural condition of society is important in contributing to our
understanding of the complex associations between (dark) heritages and the tourist
experience.
However, despite the growing body of dark tourism related literature, questions remain of
dark tourism as an area of scholarly activity. Particularly, what are the academic and
conceptual origins of dark tourism? Is dark tourism simply the result of a creative research
branding exercise by academics in an ever-challenging global higher education market?
And, what are the consequences and contributions of studying dark tourism to broader
society? The purpose of my commentary, therefore, in this Special Issue is to critically
evaluate dark tourism scholarship by three central facets. Firstly, I brie?y explore the
evolution of death commodi?cation as a distinct research topic and, subsequently, suggest
conceptual origins of dark tourism can be located within multidisciplinary areas of
thanatology – that is, the social scienti?c study of death and dying. Second, I examine the
marketisation and branding of dark tourism as an academic construct, as well as a
provocative media label and contested industry term. Finally, through a succinct
examination of the key literature, I outline current parameters of dark tourism scholarship
and, in particular, I argue dark tourism research is a worthy academic lens through which to
critically peer at a variety of socio-cultural, political, historical and moral quandaries.
Ultimately, while dark tourism has, to some extent, domesticated death and exposes a
cultural institution that mediates between the ordinary Self and the signi?cant Other dead,
dark tourismscholarship is still very much in its infancy. Therefore in order to understand fully
dark tourism and its interrelationships with contemporary culture and society, a great deal
needs to be done to drive the interdisciplinarity of dark tourism research, as well as
engaging constructively with both industry and the media. Firstly, however, I suggest dark
tourism as an academic ?eld of study has emerged through the collision of death education
and tourism scholarship, and it is to this point that I now turn.
Dark tourism as a ?eld of study
To understand how dark tourism scholarship emerged, we must acknowledge not only the
maturing if contested area of tourism studies (Sharpley, 2011), but also how dark tourism
may be located within broader death studies and thanatology. Of course, I am not
suggesting that dark tourism should be placed exclusively within a thanatological
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framework – it should not. As evidenced later, dark tourism offers a multi-disciplinary
academic lens through which to scrutinise a broad range of social, cultural, geographical,
anthropological, political, managerial, and historical concerns. However, the central
component of dark tourism is the (re)presentation and touristic experience of death and
dying, and for that reason dark tourism has essentially emerged from a thanatopic tradition
or ‘‘thanatopsis’’ (the private contemplation of death in public spaces) (Seaton, 1996). A full
critique of dark tourism and thanatopsis is beyond the scope of my commentary, so I offer
here a brief critical insight into the nature of death studies, its central theses, and the
potential role dark tourism may play within the public representation of death.
While death is universal, dying is not. In other words, relationships between the living and the
dead, and where the dead are placed and remembered in society, depends on particular
cultural representations of mortality (Howarth, 2007). Despite in recent years an upsurge of
interest in death and dying, including a fascination with death re?ected in popular media
such as newspapers, television documentaries, soap operas, and ?lms, much of the
academic death literature has focussed on debates of denying death within contemporary
societies. Indeed, many scholarly approaches to death and dying, certainly from the 1960 s
onwards, have concentrated on loss of tradition and death denial within society. Particularly,
the notion that societies may be death-denying was developed by cultural anthropologist
Ernest Becker (1973) in his Pulitzer Prize award-winning book, The Denial of Death. The
basic premise of Becker’s popular thesis is that human civilisation and the socio-cultural
frameworks in which we reside are ultimately an elaborate and symbolic defence against the
knowledge of our mortality. Becker goes on to assert that whole societies may adopt a
maladaptive psychological response to mortality awareness.
However, a number of sociological critiques of Becker’s essentially psychological theory of
the place of death in modern society have re-evaluated the issue of death denial. In
particular, Allan Kellehear (1984, 2001) argues that arbitrary evidence of the denial of death
was sought and attributed to social institutions such as curative education, funerary
customs, and the nature of modern work, traditional religion and medical research efforts.
Consequently, Kellehear’s (1984) sociological criticism argued against the seemingly
catholic manner in which the death-denial thesis is applied. He contends that in
contemporary Western societies the death-denial thesis ‘‘is used indiscriminately to refer to
any avoidance of reality – particularly the reality of the labelling observer’’ (p. 713). Put
another way, individual behaviour can be easily identi?ed as death-denying without the
identi?er being required to provide an explanation. Of course, while the concept of ‘‘denial’’
is primarily psychiatric, wholesale adoption by sociologists of the death-denial thesis to
describe the place of death within modern societies raises obvious confusion between
personal and social systems. This confusion is explored by Walter (1991) who examines
death-denial with notions of the taboo. In particular, Walter challenges the death-denial
proposition by contending the increasing public presence of death, in popular culture and
elsewhere, raises ambiguities for those who argue death in modern societies has been
sequestered or removed from the public realm (Giddens, 1991; Mellor, 1993). Whilst
sequestration is claimed to occur because death poses problems of meaning for individuals
in complex postmodern societies, death is argued to be publicly absent but privately
present (Mellor and Shilling, 1993). Though there is little doubting the privatisation of many
aspects of death, or the social and cultural diversity of dying and grief, ‘‘it may be that in their
quest to uncover hidden death, social theorists have neglected to acknowledge the more
public face of death’’ (Howarth, 2007, p. 35).
It is this acknowledgment of the ‘‘more public face of death’’ that dark tourism research has
taken as its thanatological cue. Elsewhere, I have examined the role of dark tourism as a
potential mediating mechanism to challenge the death-denial thesis, whereby certain kinds
of death are de-sequestered back into the public domain for contemporary consumption
(Stone, 2012a; Stone and Sharpley, 2008). Even so, dark tourism cannot be placed into
simplistic denial/acceptance or supply/demand dichotomies. Nor can dark tourism expose
diverse cultural experiences of death and dying in a single simple discourse. Death is
complex and multifaceted; it appears in unexpected forms, in unnatural circumstances, and
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to the reluctant. Certainly, dark tourismcan portray these elements of death and dying for the
contemporary visitor, yet dark tourism scholarship has hitherto to expose fully the social and
cultural reality and consequences of presenting the dead for the modern-day visitor
economy. Nevertheless, I suggest dark tourism scholarship is where death studies and
tourism studies collide, and where fruitful research avenues of mortality saliency may be
illuminated. With death education grounded in thanatology and tourism scholarship,
occupying a delicate disciplinary place between business management and the broader
social sciences, dark tourism can offer an empirical bridge to scrutinise modern
socio-cultural complexities of mortality, as well as examining the contemporary
commodi?cation of death and the dead. Yet, while dark tourism as an act of travel has
historical pedigree and may be an old concept in a new world, dark tourism as a scholarly
?eld has undoubtedly become axiomatic since the mid-1990’s, particularly from a research
branding perspective, and it is this that I now turn.
The branding of dark tourism (research)
The visitor economy is one of the world’s biggest employers, generating millions of jobs
across a range of sectors and contributing billions of revenue to government treasuries
across the globe. Therefore, with a growing international visitor economy, and to meet the
demand for well-quali?ed service sector professionals, the design and delivery of tourism
undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes has become one the
fastest-expanding areas of study in higher education (Jamal and Robinson, 2009).
Consequently, since the early 1990 s, tourism as a serious ?eld of academic endeavour
within both management studies and the social sciences has become ?rmly established
(Sharpley, 2011). However, despite of or even because of debate over disciplinary
foundations for the study of tourism, including dichotomised contestations over tourism as a
social science or tourism as vocational management, tourism education has opened up a
plethora of academic enterprises. Indeed, the maturing of tourism education, certainly in
terms of re?ectivity and criticality, has meant tourism research can cast crucial re?ections on
our contemporary world which are unhindered by disciplinary boundaries (Stone, 2011b).
Importantly, therefore, a key academic enterprise originating in tourism discourse has been
the study of the commodi?cation of death within the contemporary visitor economy.
Introduced in 1996 by Malcolm Foley and John Lennon in a special edition of the
International Journal of Heritage Studies (Foley and Lennon, 1996), the term ‘‘dark tourism’’
has entered a contemporary academic and media lexicon to denote the touristi?cation of
death and disaster. The concept was later brought to mainstream attention in 2000 by the
same authors in their intriguing yet theoretically fragile book Dark Tourism: The Attraction of
Death and Disaster (Lennon and Foley, 2000). During the same period, Tony Seaton
introduced the awkward if not more conceptually robust idiom ‘‘thanatourism’’ to de?ne the
act of contemporary travel to sites of death which, as an act of tourism, was historically
grounded within the ‘‘memento mori’’ of Romanticism (Seaton, 1996). Thus, since the
introduction into discourse of the popular term dark tourism and its scholarly sister term
thanatourism, there has been a steady but growing base of erudite inquiries into dark
tourism practices, processes, and principles. However, as Lennon and Foley (2000, p. 169)
prophetically pointed out with regard to offering dark tourism as a new tourism typology,
‘‘issues which some would rather not have been raised will lead to further development and
academic ‘exploitation’ of this ?eld’’. Arguably, therefore, any exploitation of dark tourism as
an academic ?eld is due not only to the maturing of tourismscholarship as mentioned earlier,
but also the fact that dark tourism is simply a fascinating and controversial area and, as
revealed shortly, an area that can shine critical academic light on complex social, cultural,
political, and moral issues.
Even so, despite obvious claims about the speci?c fascination of dark tourism, both as an
activity and concept, or the development of dark tourism academic discourse in general, I
suggest dark tourism scholarship has been popularised through a purposeful blend of
traditional academic output and contemporary research branding. In other words, the very
idea of dark tourism as a multidisciplinary ?eld of study has resolutely been subject to
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creative branding techniques not uncommon to the marketisation of a private sector
product. Indeed, in an era where tourism education is being scrutinised as either a
discipline, a ?eld of study, or as sectoral study, scholars attempting to carve out credible
research agendas and scholarly identity in a crowded academic marketplace have,
perhaps, viewed dark tourism as enticing to create a persuasive research appellation. This
is no more so than in my own personal research arena, where internal policies and politics at
my own institution has ensured a research-informed teaching agenda and a criteria for
academic success based (almost solely) on the premise of ‘‘publish or perish’’. Therefore,
with my inherent research interest in the broad realms of dark tourism, and with a
professional background in management consultancy and marketing within the private
sector, it is probably fair to suggest that I have been in the vanguard of creating a global dark
tourism subject ‘‘brand’’. Speci?cally, in 2005, I launched The Dark Tourism Forum at www.
dark-tourism.org.uk as an online resource repository dedicated to the study of dark tourism.
Consequently, the virtual Forum acted as a world-wide marketing device to expose the
emerging yet intriguing ?eld of dark tourism which, in turn, created appeal and signi?cant
(brand) awareness of the subject. The web site has nowevolved to become the of?cial site of
the recently launched Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) at the University of Central
Lancashire in England, and continues to trademark dark tourism scholarship. Indeed, with
over two million unique web hits since its 2005 launch from individuals based in over 100
countries, in addition to creating dedicated social media presence, including on Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr, dark tourism as an academic research activity has ‘‘been
taken to market’’. Augmenting this marketisation process, there has been signi?cant media
interest over the past eight years or so in the idea of dark tourism, with the iDTR and others
conducting a substantial number of newspaper, magazine, radio and television interviews
with media organisations from across the world (iDTR, 2013).
What has transpired is a research ?eld which has gained popular momentum, not only with
the media, but also with undergraduate and postgraduate students from a variety of
disciplines as well as with a growing number of international social science scholars. Of
course, the purposeful branding of dark tourism as a research ?eld, arguably driven by my
own enterprises, but also supplemented by academic colleagues from around the globe,
means that Lennon and Foley’s initial typological classi?cation of dark tourism has been
‘‘exploited’’ in terms of mass appeal. That said, however, in many ways dark tourism as a
typology and research brand that incorporates multiple case studies and theoretical
perspectives might be deemed by some as contrary and unhelpful. With the juxtaposition of
the words ‘‘dark’’ and ‘‘tourism’’, the branding of dark tourismis not without its critics and the
notion of dark tourismhas even been examined as a kind of ‘‘deviant leisure’’ (Stone, 2013a).
However, despite some obvious and legitimate criticisms, and despite the inherent issues of
branding a ‘‘new’’ ?eld of study, dark tourism as a scholarly activity exposes valuable and
relevant conceptions. Subsequently, I now turn to dark tourism as providing an
interdisciplinary academic lens through which to scrutinise important interrelationships
with the cultural condition of contemporary society.
Dark tourism as an academic lens
At the most rudimentary level, tourism is simply the ‘‘movement of people’’. While this
‘‘movement’’ requires managing from a commercial perspective, the touristic moving of
people also generates speci?c socio-cultural, economic, and political implications. In other
words, the mobility of tourism is integrated into our contemporary world and, as such, offers
us a research window in which to observe the structures, processes, institutions,
transformations and challenges of our world (Sharpley, 2011). When applied to the ?eld of
dark tourism, these ‘‘research windows’’ allow us to glimpse fundamental practices and
visitor experiences that mediate between the contemporary production and consumption of
signi?cant death, dying, and the dead. In short, dark tourism is not simply an elementary
‘‘fascination’’ with death, but a powerful lens through which contemporary life and death may
be witnessed and relationships with broader society and culture discerned. It is this,
perhaps, that research into dark tourism has contributed to the social scienti?c study of
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death and dying in general and, in particular, has enhanced the legitimacy of dark tourism
scholarship. As the remainder of my commentary now outlines, a range of social science
topics have been theoretically and empirically examined through a dark tourism lens.
Pilgrimages to places associated with death have occurred as long as people have been
able to travel. In other words, it has always been an identi?able form of tourism, though
socio-cultural contexts in which death-related travel transpired have obviously changed
throughout the ages. This latter point is beyond the scope of my review, though Seaton
(2010) argues dark tourism was traditional travel that evolved through profound shifts in the
history of European culture, in?uenced by Christianity, Antiquarianism, and Romanticism.
However, as general participation in tourism has grown, particularly since the mid-twentieth
century, so too has the demand for and supply of dark tourism. For example, visitor sites
associated with war probably constitute the largest single category of tourist attractions in
the world (Smith, 1998). However, as Butler and Suntikul (2013) argue, the blunt
categorisation of all war-related tourism as ‘‘dark tourism’’ is perhaps misguided. Even so,
Thompson (2004, p. xii) in his 25 Best World War Two Sites tourist guide states that ‘‘a
battle?eld where thousands died isn’t necessarily a good place, but it’s often an important
one’’ (original emphasis). Slade (2003, p. 782) recognises this importance and suggests
Gallipoli, the battle?eld where Australia and New Zealand suffered massive casualties
during World War One, was where both countries, respectively, have their ‘‘de facto
psychological and cultural origins’’ and where modern visitors now enact a kind of secular
pilgrimage to the site (Hyde and Harman, 2011). Chronis (2005) also recognises how war
landscapes, such as those at Gettysburg, the site of one of the bloodiest battles during the
American Civil War, can be symbolically transformed and used by service providers and
tourists alike to negotiate, de?ne, and strengthen social values of patriotism and national
unity through the death of others. Similarly, Carr (2010) notes how war-tourism sites can
control or censor accounts of the past. In particular, she examines touristi?cation tensions
within the Channel Islands’ war heritage and the Nazi occupation it serves to represent.
Ultimately, Carr suggests wartime narratives in the Channel Islands, which are delivered
through fragmented and contested memorialisation at various bunker sites, are directly
analogous to other formerly-occupied Western European countries, rather than being
identi?ed with a British Churchillian paradigm – namely, that the British were not a nation of
victims, but of victors.
Yet war-tourism attractions, though themselves diverse, are a subset of the totality of tourist
sites associated with death and suffering. While there is no universal typology of dark
tourism, or even a universally accepted de?nition, reference is frequently made, for instance,
to speci?c destinations, such as the Sixth Floor in Dallas, Texas, site of one of the most
infamous assassinations of the twentieth century (Foley and Lennon, 1996). Alternatively,
reference is also made to speci?c forms of tourism, such as visits to graveyards and
cemeteries (Seaton, 2002), Holocaust sites (Beech, 2009), places of atrocity (Ashworth and
Hartmann, 2005), prisons and crime sites (Wilson, 2008; Dalton, 2013), and slavery-heritage
attractions (Dann and Seaton, 2001; Rice, 2009). Augmenting various typologies of dark
tourism, alternative terminology has also been applied to the phenomenon. For example,
labels include morbid tourism (Blom, 2000), black spot tourism (Rojek, 1993), grief tourism
(West, 2004) or as Dann (1998) alliterates, ‘‘milking the macabre’’. More speci?cally, Bristow
and Newman (2004) introduce the term fright tourism, a variation of dark tourism whereby
individuals may seek a thrill or shock from the experience. Meanwhile, Dann (1998, p. 15)
suggests that ‘‘dicing with death’’ – that is, seeking experiences that heighten tourists’ own
sense of mortality – may be considered a particular consequence of dark tourism. Dunkley
et al. (2007) add to the de?nitional debate and offer various categories, including horror
tourism, hardship tourism, tragedy tourism, warfare tourism, genocide tourism and extreme
thanatourism. The latter category, according to these authors at least, involve a marketable
live-event aspect of death and dying, and they cite (Western) visits to private cremations in
India or to public executions in the Middle East as particular examples. Evidently, therefore,
a blurring of typological parameters has occurred with regard to dark tourism and, as such,
full categorisations are extremely complex (but, see Stone, 2006).
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Nonetheless, despite the diverse range of sites and tourist experiences, Tarlow (2005, p. 48)
identi?es dark tourism as ‘‘visitations to places where tragedies or historically noteworthy
death has occurred and that continue to impact our lives’’ – a characterisation that aligns
dark tourism somewhat narrowly to certain sites and that, perhaps, hints at particular
motives. However, it excludes many shades of dark sites and attractions related to, but not
necessarily the site of, death and disaster (Miles, 2002; Stone, 2006). Consequently, Cohen
(2011) addresses location aspects of dark tourism through a paradigm of geographical
authenticity and sense of victimhood. Meanwhile, Biran et al. (2011) examine sought bene?ts
of dark tourism within a framework of dialogic meaning making (also Kang et al., 2011).
Jamal and Lelo (2011) also explore the conceptual and analytical framing of dark tourism,
and suggest notions of darkness in dark tourism are socially constructed, rather than
objective fact. Meanwhile, Bowman and Pezzullo (2009) interrogate the scholarly and
political attachments of the trope ‘‘dark’’ in relation to ‘‘tourism’’. Drawing on performance
theory, Bowman and Pezzullo suggest dark tourism scholarship can be a productive
approach to explore the intersections of death and tourism, including broader questions of
ritual, play, identity, everyday life, and embodiment. Likewise, Osbaldiston and Petray (2011)
suggest touristic engagement with ‘‘dark’’ sites is a source of ritual and, in particular, they
argue tourists’ cannot only be enlightened by their sacred experience, but also disturbed by
it. They go on to suggest that tourists’ negotiate ‘‘dark properties’’ of places, particular those
with national or international heritage value. Similarly, White and Frew (2013) offer an edited
collection of case studies that examine the intersection between dark tourism, place identity,
and imagined collective communities, whereby dark heritage sites and attractions can help
disseminate a discourse of national inclusion and a shared past.
However, notwithstanding diverse facets of both the conception and application of dark
tourism, Skinner (2012) edits an ethnographic volume dedicated to ‘‘writing the dark side of
travel’’. In particular, he and his co-contributors explore the writings and texts of so-called
dark journeys and the implications and consequences of travelling over the dead, among
the dead, and alongside the suffering. Consequently, Skinner suggests that from the tour of
humanity’s violence and misery, comes poignancy in the characterisation of plight and,
ultimately, dark tourism allows for a sense of the profound and for spiritual journeys to be
undertaken that record and memorialise tragedy. This aspect of recording tragedy,
particularly from a political ideological perspective is examined by Lee et al. (2011).
Speci?cally, they locate dark tourism within a peace paradigm between North and South
Korea and suggest Western hegemonic constructions of tourismgenerally and, dark tourism
in particular, means that Euro-centric perspectives of dark tourism are not applicable to
other indigenous (Oriental) perspectives. They go on to argue that the recent killing of a
South Korean tourist in the North Korean Mt Kumgang tourist resort – once seen as a peace
tourism site when policies of rapprochement guided inter-Korean strategy – is now a
Foucaultian heterotopian space, which combines dark tourism with idealised cultural
narratives within a contradictory geopolitical place. Similarly, I too examine dark tourism and
the conception of heterotopia but within the context of a post-apocalyptic Chernobyl – the
site of the world’s worst nuclear accident (Stone, 2013b). In locating dark tourism
experiences within a heterotopian framework, I argue that Chernobyl is a space of technical,
political and cultural importance which, through it touristic production and consumption,
allows for a valorisation of an alternate social ordering whereby the familiar and the uncanny
collide.
Meanwhile, Seaton (2009) addresses how dark tourism sites should be managed –
especially within the milieu of Other death. Seaton concludes that thanatourism sites are
unique auratic spaces whose evolutionary diversity and polysemic nature demand
managerial strategies that differ from other tourist sites. By the same token, Knudsen (2011)
examines this notion of ‘‘aura’’ from a tourist experience perspective, and suggests the
interactive design and representation of dif?cult heritage should allow tourists to feel alive in
their reconnection with the past and to feel empathy with victims. Indeed, within the context
of business practice and consumer research, Coats and Ferguson (2013) examine dark
tourism within a framework of post-earthquake perceptions in New Zealand. In particular,
they argue inherent emotional tensions between residents of a disaster zone and
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subsequent visitors should always be aligned with unbiased interpretation that offers an
opportunity for catharsis, acceptance, as well as grieving for a sense of loss of both people
and place.
In terms of the politicisation of dark tourism, Sharpley (2009) examines notions of dissonance
and the in?uence of political ideology conveyed in dark tourism interpretation, and goes on
to outline a stakeholder model of dark heritage governance. Speci?cally, Sharpley argues
such a model provides a basis for encouraging harmony and reconciliation, as well as
understanding or learning through a more inclusive memorialisation and interpretation of
challenging heritages. Sharpley and Stone (2009) also examine (re)presentations of tragedy
and, in particular, locate dark tourism interpretation within a paradigm of kitsch and the
commodi?cation of (tragic) memories. In so doing, we suggest that death is inevitably
vulnerable to kitschi?cation, as it ‘‘requires inoculation and thus rendering into something
else that is comfortable and safe to deal with and to contemplate’’ (original emphasis –
Sharpley and Stone, 2009, p. 127). We go on to conclude that concerns within dark tourism
interpretations remain and revolve around interrelationships between kitsch, nostalgia and
melancholy and the meanings that are consequentially projected and consumed.
Elsewhere, I also recognise these concerns and suggest ethical ambiguities inherent
within dark tourism are systematic of broader secular moral dilemmas in conveying
narratives of death (Stone, 2009a, 2013a). In particular, I propose dark tourism and the
tourist experience it entails – which some might consider ‘‘dark leisure’’ – signi?es a
contemporary communicative mechanism of morality in that ‘‘dark tourism may not only act
as a guardian of history in heritage terms, but also as moral guardian of a contemporary
society which appears to be in a midst of resurgent effervescent moral vitality’’ (Stone,
2009a, p. 72).
Though the morality of dark tourism is often the subject of academic discourse and media
commentary, so too is discussion on the mortality aspects of the touristi?cation of death. As
noted earlier, dark tourism and its relationship with the thanatological condition of
contemporary society has been scrutinised. Consequently, dark tourism has been
suggested to be a mediating institution of mortality and, in particular, I have argued that
in Western secular society where ordinary death is often sequestered behind medical and
professional fac¸ ades, yet extraordinary death is recreated for popular consumption, dark
tourism mediates a potential if not complex and relative social ?lter between life and death
(Stone and Sharpley, 2008; Stone, 2009b, 2011c, d; 2012b). In summary, therefore, while a
full critique of dark tourism in all its manifestations is beyond the scope of my review,
evidently there appears to be a myriad of fundamental interrelationships that exist between
dark tourismand the cultural condition of society. Moreover, despite the diversity of sites and
relative experiences, a common factor of dark tourism is the association, in one way or
another, between a tourist experience and the touristic representation of death and the
dead. It is these interrelationships and associations that provide the rationale to study death
and dying as a commodity within the visitor economy. In so doing, dark tourism scholarship
can provide an academic lens through which research windows are opened and,
consequently, critical approaches adopted to examine the contemporary social reality of
death.
Concluding thoughts
Despite dark tourismbeing a contested term, my commentary has aimed to provide a critical
insight into the emergence and current direction of dark tourism scholarship, in addition to
highlighting dark tourism as a branded ?eld of academic study. This is particularly relevant
considering the evident practice of travel to and experience of sites of death, disaster or the
seemingly macabre within the global visitor economy. Moreover, I have suggested dark
tourism as an academic construct and research area is now established which, in turn,
essentially emerged through a collision of death education and tourism studies.
Subsequently, dark tourism as a ?eld of study within higher education has been
marketized and branded for scholarship and academic inquiry. As a result, dark tourism is
identi?able as a broad area in which social scientists may peer at diverse socio-cultural
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quandaries that impact on death and the dead as contemporary commodities. Indeed, dark
tourism exposes a cultural institution and practice that blurs the line between
commemoration of the dead and commodi?cation of death. In so doing, those
professionals who work on the front line in what might be considered dark tourism sites,
attractions, and exhibitions are faced with unprecedented moral, managerial and political
challenges. The management of remembrance, the interpretation of tragedy and suffering,
distinctions between dif?cult heritage and tragic history, the effect of chronological distance
and the fading of the signi?cant Other dead into the past, are just some of the complex
issues tourism memory managers are encountering. Moreover, tourist encounters of places
of tragedy and death and, crucially, the consequences of those encounters for broader
society remain a crux of dark tourism research. Ironically, therefore, dark tourism is
concerned with death and dying, yet through its social scienti?c study, tells us more about
life and the living. For that reason, dark tourismscholarship should continue to shine a critical
light on how societies deal with and present their dead, and in doing so, offer
multidisciplinary discourse on the darker side of travel.
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Corresponding author
Philip Stone can be contacted at: [email protected]
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