Dark tourism and moral disengagement in liminal spaces

Abstract

Dark tourism, which deploys taboo subjects and commercially exploits the macabre, has always raised moral conflicts at a collective and individual level while providing new spaces in which morality is communicated, reconfigured and revitalized. Although earlier studies in dark tourism have focused upon the collective notions of morality with a considerable amount of discussion on the comprehension and the manner in which the history and information of dark tourist attractions are presented for tourist consumption, the individual differences of tourist morality and how tourists morally engage with death and its various forms of representation, has been neglected. In order to understand morally transgressive behavior displayed by tourists at emotionally sensitive or controversial sites and the various ways they justify their actions, the narratives of international tourists who are interested in death-related rituals at a cremation ground in India were collected and analyzed. Drawing upon a socio-cognitive theory, the moral mechanisms involved in tourist judgment towards photography of death-related rituals are discussed. It was observed that the cremation ground offers a liminal space for tourists to exercise their moral agency in an inhibitive form, as well as proactive form and that transgressive behavior among tourists is likely if they disengage from processes related to moral conduct using various moral disengagement mechanisms. This behavior arises due to an obscuring and fragmentation of human agency during moral disengagement thereby making it possible for tourists to not take ownership of the consequences of their actions.