IF YOU have ever been to the world war battlefields in northern France, the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, a Holocaust museum or even a military cemetery, then you鈥檝e participated 鈥� perhaps unknowingly 鈥� in dark tourism. The term applies to the increasingly popular pursuit of visiting sites where people have suffered or died in tragic or spectacular circumstances. The killing fields of Cambodia, the gulags of the former Soviet Union and the ruins of New Orleans have all become tourist hotspots, while more than half a million people visit the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau each year.
鈥淢ore than half a million people visit Auschwitz-Birkenau each year鈥�
It鈥檚 a phenomenon that has caught the eye of sociologists, historians and psychologists, some of whom met at a conference at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK, this week to consider the latest research (see ). No one is claiming dark tourism is a new thing, though. Pilgrimages to the graves of martyrs are an ancient tradition, and public executions were once a popular spectacle in Europe (they still are in North Korea). Watching battles as they unfolded used to be a common spectator sport among nobility. What鈥檚 new is the extent of dark tourism, and the academic interest it has aroused.
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Why do people do it? They may give many reasons: to pay respects to a loved one who died; to connect to an event that touched them through media coverage or family stories; to learn more about what happened; or simply out of curiosity.
Other motives may be more complex, according to Philip Stone, who studies dark tourism at the University of Central Lancashire. He argues that death has been almost completely hidden from everyday public life in most western societies. In a paper awaiting publication, he suggests people might engage in dark tourism to redress this balance 鈥� to explore the meaning of their own mortality and to indulge their curiosity about death in a socially acceptable public context, in a way they could not in private, when such contemplation is more likely to lead to dread or terror.
Others have suggested similar explanations for the mass exhibition of public grief after the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in a Paris underpass 鈥� a site which, inevitably, has become a popular shrine.
There is no doubting that people are fascinated by death. The rise of that unsavoury genre of home video, the snuff movie, is testament to one extreme of that fascination, as is the astonishing number of people who have watched the beheadings of western hostages in Iraq on the internet. Our imaging technology means that voyeurs no longer have to go out of their way to visit death.
How dark does real-world dark tourism get? Consider the James Dean fanatics who 鈥渞e-enact鈥� the actor鈥檚 death each year at the place and time it happened, often driving cars similar to his, to experience his final moments for themselves. What they are seeking is anyone鈥檚 guess.
