Madness and Mayhem

Abstract

Although tourism studies is a relatively new academic discipline, practice of dark sites dates back to ancient times. British tourism scholar Philip Stone defines full spectrum of tourism as the act of to sites associated with death, suffering, and seemingly macabre. (1) The field includes everything from haunted houses and museum exhibitions to battlefields and even genocide sites. A.V. Seaton describes this phenomenon as Thanatourism, or travel to a location wholly or partially motivated by desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death. (2) Laurie Beth Clark further narrows field by focusing on trauma tourism, visiting sites where death actually occurred. (3) Maria Tumarkin has coined term traumascapes to describe places scarred by a legacy of traumatic violence. (4) The theoretical issues surrounding tourism intersect with fields of museum studies, sociology, consumer psychology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and visual culture. It is important to examine tourism phenomenon within larger social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. (5) Given vastness of field, this essay will focus primarily on two traumascapes: genocide sites in Cambodia and Rwanda, and will explore intersection of consumer desire with paradoxical roles of education and economics. I will also address role of media in aestheticizing death as well as how kitsch and ethical controversies affect interpretation/consumption of these genocide tourism sites. Patrick West suggests ours is an age of mourning, and our desire to grieve death a postmodern phenomenon. (6) Malcolm Foley and John Lennon concur, arguing that rise of technology in our postmodern world accounts for increase in consumer desire and demand. (7) Yet this view does not take into account historical precedent of pilgrimages and nineteenth-century passion for commemoration. While scholars disagree about reasons for rise in tourism, it is evident that number of sites and visitors has increased dramatically in recent years. In his book Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (2007), Paul Williams posits a few reasons to account for current need for public commemoration. He suggests that end of Cold War brought a decline in nationalist historic rituals, leading to society's interest in commemorations that create an environment for catharsis, reflection, and redemption. (8) In addition, media increased awareness about global atrocities and subsequent memorial initiatives. Clark aligns visitor motivation with Freudian discourse--the act of repetition compulsion. She does not agree with viewpoint that visitors consume death for salacious pleasure, but rather believes they have an innate compulsion to visit sites of trauma. Clark attributes this compulsion to a philosophical and psychological need for closure and disclosure. (9) In analyzing this desire, one can begin to understand variety of impulses to visit tourism sites. In terms of closure, a visitor may to a site in order to confront past, forgive perpetrator, or mourn victims. If desire is for disclosure, a visitor's impetus might be to facilitate awareness and keep tragedy or criminal act in forefront of people's minds. The foreign visitor may come for educational or historical purposes. Most problematic is voyeur--the visitor motivated by morbid curiosity. Various organizations undertake development of trauma tourism sites. Governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private corporations, private foundations, social activists, and concerned individuals may all have vested interests in a site's development and purpose. Site managers may be interested in promoting awareness, education, and history. …