Dark Tourism - Literature review Example

Literature review (Dark Tourism) Literature review Dark tourism is a form of culture that has taken form recently. It involves people visiting places of death, human tragedy, and other forms of atrocities done to people in the world. There are various sites of correction and incarceration, which have been trending with numerous numbers of tourist visits. Some prisons like the Alcatraz and Robben Island have been part of the conversion from the places of disciplinary action to museums. In this literature review, there will be a recap on various literatures on the motivation, shades and the attraction of this kind of tourism. The world today has embraced the trend in dark tourism and many have used the urges to make money out of the curiosity that comes with death and disasters. Undeniably, death and disaster are components of the human life and to some preservation of areas where death happened is a form of heritage. Dark tourism is a new area of tourism research. Like defined by Foley and Lennon, the phenomenon encompasses a presentation and consumption by visitors towards death and disaster areas (Lennon & Foley1999). Dark tourism is common by the term thanatourism, has gained the attention from academic scholars and media imaginations. It has a growing body of literature in the representation and tourist experiences in the tourist economy. However, it is still in its infancy owing to the fact that there are numerous questions on the academic origins of the thanatourim concept and education. In addition, there are several queries on the contribution it brings to the broader social scientific study of tourism and the death education. The idea has received a substantial amount of marketization process within the academic realm in the past decade. There are arguments that the tourism studies and death studies collide making it available for further research in the broad spheres of thanatology (International Conference On Sustainable Tourism, Pineda, & Brebbia, 2010). Critical insights from Dr Philip stone (2013) in the study of dark tourism have been seen in scholarly articles describing the concept as a new avenue towards fruitful research avenues. He argues that the study of this art is rather a multi-disciplinary academic lens where one can scrutinize fundamental interrelationships of the contemporary marketization of death and the cultural condition of the society other that a mere fascination with death or the macabre (Stone, 2013). The onset of dark tourism may be associated with the first world war due to the countries involved in the ordeal were affected. These escalated due to the media showing the live battles in cinemas after the happenings. Another motivation to the concept is the sinking of the titanic, which can be said as the chronological point of the onset of dark tourism. The titanic ordeal is very apt since it raised many questions on the progress in technology but rather receded into relative obscurity. To maximize on the curiosity of the human nature cruises were made with the vessels mimicking the events of the ordeal. This created a trend in dark tourism easily by the year 1998 when the film on titanic was out it was a scholarly study. Motivations today Dark tourism comes out a paradox in itself. This is a place where history and modernity dwell together. The trend shows people sitting where thousands lost their lives for course. The biggest motivation of these sites is the fact that they remind people of the failure the prior generations and if taken into consideration they give humanity a great deal of wisdom on such issues. However, today dark tourism is education, commemoration and tourism all in one. Motivation in the world today may come from four basic emotions as explained by Tarlow (2005). These emotions are superiority, humility, gratitude, and insecurity. This controls the way people see dark tourism in recently (International Conference On Sustainable Tourism, Pineda, & Brebbia, 2010). It sparks multiplicity of reactions when one visits the places of dark tourism. Some people feel romanticism as they find themselves picturing the event with them in the battlefield fighting for a certain cause (Tarlow, 2005). In places or barbaric depictions like the concentration camps of the Nazi, the visitors may feel compassion for the people who had to experience the event. Others may feel superior for the fact that the decent was the perpetrator of the event. In many cases, the dark tourist sites are tied to the national identity, which may give the visitor a feeling of triumph that they had survived the event or it might give the sense of pilgrimage making the site important to the tourist. The closer the relationship to the site the greater the experience the visitor feels (Lennon & Foley, 2000). Another concept of motivation today is the searcher group of travelers who are tied to the fact that they have the urge to identify with new cultures, getting to understand themselves better or getting to know different places (International Conference On Sustainable Tourism, Pineda, & Brebbia, 2010). They are the explorative kind of tourists who want to know more about the dark tourist sites in order to feed their curiosity and the rush they have for the areas. In researches done, they are identified as people who tend to have less stimulation and seek the rush in different things during holidays. The latter happens when people are over stimulated and thus seek tranquil. Therefore the dark tourism sites may give some people the rush and others tranquility making the areas a two sided attraction site (Leanne & Elspeth, 2013). Others may explore the area as research subjects to identify things they feel are not clearly elaborated and to give more insight on the areas they have visited. In the generation today, the media is an effective motivator towards every reaction in the daily routines. Television, internet, film and several other modern dark tourism, which people have taken time to take observe at the comfort of their surrounding is one of the motivators of the visits to the dark tourism sites (Stone, 2011). They are motivated by the events they see on the media and makes them have the urge to visit the places making the dark site a phenomenon worth a visit. This is a contemporary way to consume dark tourism and many have commercialized successfully. People are easily attracted to these areas first because the media is constantly on the cases and making the places popular for the urge to visit these sites (Lennon & Foley,2000). Nevertheless, generally the entirety of the motivational factors is still elusive in the researches made by various change factors related to the preference of people. Some have the urge to relate others just a record of visiting the site others just the association with the people who visited the area in order to foster faster relations with new people. Some motivations come from the urge to form a career out of studying the events and thus lead to the dark tourism (Levi, 1994). Numerous sites need to be scrutinized, surveyed and understood in order to make for the deficits in the contemplation of motivation towards dark tourism in the modern world. Scholars have a room to take into account their findings while they compare them with the various studies done by other academics (International Conference On Sustainable Tourism, Pineda, & Brebbia, 2010). This will help people contemplate and give a good opening on the study. To make the researches more plausible they need to make sure they have different prognosis on the different kinds of dark tourism sites. This will be relevant in establishing the correct motivation factor in sites of barbaric atrocities and cites of historical happenings. Perhaps, some dark tourism studies have been characterized by a triviality that rather exemplifies incomplete theoretical foundation or allows for limited corrective deductions (Leanne & Elspeth, 2013). Therefore, in order to alleviate any structural insufficiencies in dark tourism as a rational body of information, suggestions to intellectuals need to contravene customary punitive borders and concerns, and to accept post-disciplinary investigate approaches that are characterized by improved rationality, elasticity and comprehensiveness. Consequently, proposition of important, however, not essentially select, elements of a probable dark tourism research plan that are decisive to building a post-disciplinary system. Ultimately, the offer these literatures as an invitation to all academics to come up with future researches that are without narrow mindedness of the discipline or tenets. The dark sites give the tourist a taste of the past Czech political life. The tourist gets informed on the numerous events in the making of the republic the country is now. The picture depicted by the dark tourism sites gives grief and passion in the political scene. They commemorate the political giants who were killed at the sites and this is still evident as there is an added cross that honors Martin Fruvejn. This is political symbolism of the countries past, which give the people a good lesson of the past political arena. Dark sites in Prague give the people the peace of mind since they live in an error where the brutality is not intense. Politically some sites give the Czech population a sense of pride like the Cyril church where the Reich assassinators met their heroic demise. This is good form of integration into the society. References  Leanne White, & Elspeth Frew, 2013. Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places, published by Routledge Lennon, J. & M. Foley (1999). Interpretation of the Unimaginable: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,Washington, D.C., and “Dark Tourism”. Journal of Travel Research, 38(8), 46-50. LENNON, J. J., & FOLEY, M. (2000). Dark tourism. London [u.a.], Continuum. Levi, P. (1994). Revisiting the Camps. In Young, J. (Ed.) The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in94History. New York & Munich: Prestel-Verlag. Dr Stone.p.(2013) "Dark Tourism Scholarship: a critical review"International Journal of Culture, Tourism & Hospitality Research7.3 :307-318. Stone, P.R. (2011) Dark Tourism: towards a new post-disciplinary research a genda. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, Vol 1, No 3/4, pp. 318-332. c. Dark tourism: The appealing “dark” side of tourism and more. In M. Novelli (Ed.),Niche tourism: Contemporary issues and trends and cases (pp. 47–58). Amsterdam: Elsevier International Conference On Sustainable Tourism, Pineda, F. D., & Brebbia, C. A. (2010). Sustainable tourism IV. Southampton, WIT. Read More