Dark tourism (also black tourism or grief tourism) is tourism involving travel to sites associated [1] with death

and tragedy. Thanatourism, derived from the Ancient Greek word thanatos for the personification of death, is associated with dark tourism but refers more specifically to violent death; it is used in fewer contexts than the terms dark tourism and grief tourism. The main draw however to these [2] locations is mostly due to their historical value rather than their associations with death and suffering.

As a field[edit]
Dark Tourism became a field of study in 1996 when the term was coined by Professor John Lennon and Malcolm Foley of Glasgow Caledonian University. Scholars have analyzed both recent and ancient settings which attract visitors and are associated with death. Scholars of the field hope to understand [8] tourist motivation for visiting such locations. Dr. Philip Stone, a senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, is another one of the individuals currently studying this field. He has written several journals and given presentations on the subject. He has tried to determine moral and social effects of dark tourism, pointing out how individuals come together in these places associated with grief and death. Stone has also stated how dark tourism represents immorality so that morality may be [9] communicated. In Latin America, Maximiliano E. Korstanje continued the contributions of Stone to expand the current understanding of disasters, mass-death and sanctuaries such as the tragedy of Croman where 194 attendants lost their life in a music festival. Dark tourism would be a mechanism of resiliency that helps society in the process of recovery after a disaster or cathastrophe, a form of [10][11] domesticating death in a secularized world.

Other viewpoints[edit]
Dark tourism has been seen as a form of exploitation. Entrepreneurs may attempt to use the emotional reactions of the visitors to the site to generate profit. Traffic to areas such as "ground zero" in New York [12] City enables commercial activity related to dark tourism. Demarcations, such as signs and historical markers, may remind the dark tourists of the subject of their endeavor and may prompt them to purchase merchandise.

Dark tourism as the act of travel to sites of or sites associated with death has gained significant attention with media imaginations and academic scholarship. There is a growing body of literature on the (re)presentation and tourist experience of deathscapes within contemporary visitor economies. As such, dark tourism is now a recognisable field of academic study, which include interdisciplinary perspectives of the darker side of travel in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, thanatology, and business management. The Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR), based at the University of Central Lancashire (UK) and led by Dr Philip Stone, is a world-leading academic centre for dark tourism scholarship, research and teaching. Dark tourism as an academic field of study is where death education and tourism studies collide and, as such, can shine critical light on the social reality of death. Dark tourism can also reveal tensions in cultural memory, interpretation and authenticity, and political and moral dilemmas in remembering our heritage that hurts. Dark tourism is also a recognised research brand in which scholars around

the world can locate and analyse a diverse range of death-tourism related sites and tourist experiences. The iDTR promotes ethical research into the social scientific understanding of tourist sites of death, disaster, and atrocities, and the tourist experience at these places. Dark tourism is not simply a fascination with death or the macabre, but a multi-disciplinary academic lens in which to scrutinise fundamental interrelationships of the contemporary commodification of death with the cultural condition of society.

Thanatourism, as dark tourism is known in academia, derives from the ancient Greek word thanatos, or the personification of death. Of course, tourists' fascination with death is nothing new -- think of the many people who traveled to watch the gladiators at the Roman Coliseum battling until one was killed or the onlookers at the sacrificial religious rites of the Maya. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims traveled to tombs, sites of religious martyrdom, and public executions. And this interest in death intensified during the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries with attractions like Waterloo and the ruins of Pompeii, which early dark-tourism researcher Tony Seaton called the greatest thanatoptic travel destination of the Romantic period. The primary focus of the study of modern-day dark tourism is on sites where death or suffering has occurred or been memorialized, such as battlefields, concentration camps, dungeons, prisons, or graveyards. But it is also about locations where the pain is not so much physical as economic -- for example, the Fabulous Ruins tour in Detroit, which memorializes the city's fall from glamour. Branding An Academic Field To make the field of study more accessible and attractive to researchers and tourism experts, John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, professors at Glasgow Caledonian University, coined the term dark tourism in 1996. But not everyone in the field enjoys its adopted title.

Tonie and Valmai Holt, who spoke at a symposium during the iDTR's dedication last week, said they are uneasy about the name dark tourism. It gives one the impression of voyeurism, Valmai Holt said, and that's something we want to distance ourselves from. We've spent the last 34 years trying to explain to the general public that there is nothing macabre or ghoulish about it. There's a place for this type of tourism. The Holts pioneered the first modern commercial battlefield tour in 1978, and many at the time delighted in branding their tours as morbid. The basic principle of everything we've ever done is to make it absolutely clear that we will be either reading about or walking on ground where people fought and died, and it's absolutely vital to remember that at all times, Tonie Holt said. It's important that one should pause and remain silent to remember and acknowledge what has happened on that ground. If we ever feel ourselves emotionally uninvolved, then we'll stop doing what we're doing. It's no good just being a scholastic, detached group of people, Tonie Holt added. If you're going to be involved in this, you must have this fundamental conviction. The inaugural symposium was attended by some 100 delegates from around the world. The online Dark Tourism Forum, which allows academics and industry professions to make research connections through the Internet, now boasts more than 1,500 members. The Dark Tourist Dark tourism comes in many shades, but iDTR Executive Director Stone's approach to the material is a pragmatic one: Why are these sites produced? How are they consumed? If you look at tourism as a movement of people, we're understanding the consequences of this movement, Stone said. Some tourists come looking for catharsis -- they search for answers when memory of the actual event fades: Why did the Khmer Rouge murder its own countrymen? How could

Adolf Hitler initiate the Holocaust? They try to empathize with the victims and understand the motivations of the perpetrators. Others are historians, genealogists, or researchers. Whatever the type, there's no code of conduct for visiting these disaster sites, nor are there rules on how to memorialize them. Once I observed some people at Auschwitz, Stone said. They were smiling for a photo and their friends said. 'Oh, don't smile -- we are in Auschwitz.' This, he said, typifies the self-regulating aspect of dark tourism: You are really judged as a tourist, especially by other tourists. Framing The Message The line between memorialization and commercialization is fuzzy, and there are no clear guidelines on the ethics of marketing and promoting these sites. There is a trend in memorial venues to incorporate not just how people were killed but how they lived -- to breathe some life into a place of the dead. This often involves reminding us of who the heroes were and why we should consider them as such. Yet, because dark tourism essentially provides a lens through which to look at society at present and in the past, the message evolves over the years. African-American descendants of slaves fought to make sure slavery was fully represented in history, and their struggles changed the way Southern memorials are presented. Many Southern plantation sites now tell not only the story of the plantation owner, but also the stories of the slave families who lived and worked there, framing a more complete picture. Gay activists fought for representation in Holocaust memorials, and as a result many of them now include homosexual victims as a part of their exhibitions. Similarly, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York will likely change over time. What is now viewed as an American tragedy may take on a more global narrative as decades pass.

Time affects sites of tragedy in other ways, too. There is the issue of chronological distance, Stone said. When it's safely in the past, there is an argument that it can be exploited for commercialization -- it's been blocked into history, so we can begin remembering the dead with, arguably, kitsch ideas. This makes it OK to honor, say, the Titanic with a lavish memorial cruise full of costumed participants and raucous recreations. If we didn't, they would likely be forgotten. Then there are sites like Grutas Park, popularly known as Stalin's World. The theme park draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to Grutas, Lithuania, a republic in the former Soviet Union. From Stalin's World to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the message at each of these dark-tourism sites is varied. At Auschwitz, for example, there is little recognition of the motivations behind the facility, while at the 9/11 Memorial, there is a message of peace and tolerance. There is also a sliding scale of authenticity. How realistic can you make a memorial site without it being too real and too horrific for people to comprehend? Or, looked at another way, how much can you sanitize the story with symbolic representations before you lose the inherent message? This, Stone said, is the challenge: to codify our inconvenient histories in such a way that they replicate a feeling of the past while instilling a symbolic message of rebirth. In other words, tourists may enter into a dark place, but the goal is to always have them return to the light.

Dark tourism - often referred to as thanatourism in the academic literature - is the act of travel to sites, attractions and exhibitions of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre. Dark tourism is a broad ranging and often-contentious consumer activity that can provoke debate about how death and the dead are packaged up and consumed within the modern visitor economy. Dark tourism as an 'academic typology' or 'scholarly brand' has raised many research questions about fundamental interrelationships between contemporary society and the commodification of death. These include, but are not limited to, issues of commemoration, memorialisation and secular pilgrimage. Importantly, dark tourism has historical pedigree and has arguably ocurred ever since people have had the means and motivation to travel for leisure. For example, early dark tourism might have constituted attendance at Roman gladiatorial games, or spectator events at medieval executions, or undertaking morgue tours of 19th century Europe, or even tourististic visits to battlefields such as to Waterloo or Gettysburg in the immediate aftermath of the conflicts. However, dark tourism today does not present death per se but, rather, represents certain kinds of death. As such, dark tourism and the commercialisation of death and disaster is referred to as a contemporary mediating institution between the living and the dead. Therefore, touristic visits to former battlefields or to war sites, slavery-heritage places, prisons, cemeteries, particular museum exhibitions and 'macabre-themed' visitor attractions, Holocaust sites, or to natural and man-made disaster locations might constitute the broad realm of dark tourism. Over the past decade or so, a growing body of interdisciplinary research has been undertaken that revolves around the concept of death-related travel. At the same time media interest in the concept of dark tourism continues to grow, the juxtaposition of the words dark and tourism undoubtedly providing an attention-grabbing headline. However, to date, the academic literature remains eclectic and theoretically fragile. Our understanding of both production and consumption of dark tourism remains limited especially considering the relationships between dark tourism and the cultural condition and social institutions of contemporary societies. The Institute for Dark Tourism Research aims to shine a critical light on dark tourism activities. In so doing, our research can help provide a lens through which life and death may be glimpsed, thus revealing relationships and consequences of the processes that mediate between consumerism, heritage, and the tourist experience. Our research also aims to reveal the dynamics through which

people are drawn to sites redolent with images of death, as well as the manner in which they are induced to behave there. Particularly, our research focuses on providing critical insights into dark tourism and society, culture, politics, as well as ethics and morality.