Dark Pilgrimage and Implications in Dissonant Heritage Consumption: A Short Introduction

Introduction

It is not simplistic to say that dark tourism has exponentially grown in recent years consolidating as one of the trending topics and paradigms of the current tourism research (Hooper & Lennon 2016; Light 2017). Leading journals commonly publish one or two papers on dark tourism per issue. This happens simply because dark tourism has captivated not only the attention of journalists globally but also academicians -even some of them coming from social sciences (Shekhar & Valeri 2022; Tarifa-Fernandez, Carmona-Moreno & Sanchez-Fernandez 2022). At a closer look, the abundance of publications has accelerated a dispersion in the produced knowledge as well as the multiplications of definitions and application of the phenomenon (Hooper & Lennon 2016). Dark tourism is often associated with similar terms such as mourning tourism, black tourism, thana tourism or grief tourism -to name some of them-. The debate regarding the nature of dark tourism seems not to be easy to summarize. However, two main families of theories prevail. On one hand, Philip Stone and the thanaptopic tradition focus on dark tourism as a human attempt to contemplate the proper life through the “Other´s death”. For this tradition, the secularizing process has relegated religiosity to a private sphere while rising a negation of death. As a rite of passage, dark tourism deals with the complexity of death interrogating furtherly the own finitude through the lens of the “Other´s death” (Seaton 1996; Stone 2012; Stone & Sharpley, 2008). Secondly, the heritage tradition emphasizes dark tourism as a type of pilgrimage based on the need of creating a dark heritage that mediates between the present and a troublesome or bloody past. Dark tourism in essence plays a leading role not only in educating citizens but also reminding the origins of disasters (Cohen 2011; Collins-Kreiner 2016; Olsen & Korstanje 2019). Under some conditions, the formation of this dark heritage is mainly marked by the intervention of authorities that sometimes emulate or lead to ideological discourses (Sather Wagstaff 2016; Tzanelli 2016; Korstanje 2016). In the present book chapter, we go in the opposite direction. We offer a historical sweep on the formation of dark tourism and its conceptual evolution to our days. The chapter is not a summary of the specialized literature but a debate on the evolution of dark tourism and dark pilgrimage as a result of the turn of the century. Though sophistically at a closer look, the argument is not very difficult to understand. Echoing British sociologist J. Urry who claimed that tourism tends to be consumed in decentralized forms, we hold that dark tourism ultimately devotes efforts to resolving the dilemmas of the precautionary platform and risk perception theory to make safer destinations. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed not only more global risks and radicalized violence but also the urgency to impose a new paradigm to mitigate hazards such as terrorism, natural disasters or even the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In this new epoch, the concept of prevention sets the pace invariably to adaptancy. Henceforth, dark tourism consumption emerged from the need to make more resilient destinations in an every-risky -if not uncertain- world (Korstanje 2020).