Heritage that Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11 JoySather-Wagstaff. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011.

Abstract

Heritage that Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11 Joy Sather-Wagstaff. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011.At first glance, the subject of Heritage that Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11 might seem premature and even tasteless. But Sather-Wagstaff's book is framed by the argument that the almost universal caricature of a tourist to the site of the World Trade Center (WTC) as a voyeuristic gawker is both simplistic and in most cases false. Rather, she argues, it is the tourist who performs the act of memorial on a daily and individual basis, who transacts with and contributes to the ever-changing makeshift memorials at the site, and who enlarges the narrative and meaning of the site by taking home memories, photographic documents, and physical evidence (souvenirs) of those memorial acts. Sather-Wagstaff's book is one of very few volumes on the WTC site that does not address its permanent memorial structures; her focus is on the more performative and contingent acts of bringing and leaving photographs, flowers, written messages, flags and other ephemera to the site and with tourist engagement with these objects to create constantly changing memoryscapes. Such memoryscapes, Sather-Wagstaff argues, are by their very nature contingent, unstable, and in flux; their multiple meanings are molded, formed, and reformed over time and in large by tourists. Thus, the WTC site functions as a site of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Sather-Wagstaff has written a remarkably sensitive and sometimes profound book that is both theoretically complex and intellectually sophisticated. She posits that, while many believe it too soon to examine the social, cultural, political, and personal implications of the WTC site, this is, as Geoffrey White claims, just such a fluid moment of contested meaning that anthropology would be expected to embrace (11).Sather-Wagstaff's book is divided into eight chapters: the first four set her theoretical stage, and the next four address specific case studies. The first chapter describes the various ways in which a heritage that hurts (11) has been created at the WTC site, narrates the events of 9/11, and describes the physical history of the site since 9/11. Chapter two explores the intersections between theory and methods in the production of both memory and tourism. Chapter three extends this framework to explore the problematics of socalled dark or disaster tourism. …