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The Khmer Rouge forbade the conduct of any funeral rites at the time of the death of the estimated two million people who perished during their rule (1975–79). Since then, however, memorials have been erected and commemorative ceremonies performed, both public and private, especially at former execution sites, known widely as the killing fields. The physical remains themselves, as well as images of skulls and the haunting photographs of prisoners destined for execution, have come to serve as iconic representations of that tragic period in Cambodian history and have been deployed in contested interpretations of the regime and its overthrow.
is at odds with most of the literature on ‘dark tourism’ (Foley and Lennon 1996 ; Lennon and Foley 2000 ; Stone 2006 ; Stone and Sharpley 2008 ; Tarlow 2005 ). This literature explores the (predominantly, but not exclusively, postmodern) phenomenon of pilgrimages and guided tours around sites of death and destruction. In explaining the attraction of dark sites to the tourist, a variety of
tourism has been the subject of very little critical attention to date. While there is a robust body of scholarship focused on the polar tourism industry, few studies look in any detail at the particular attractions and impact of encountering ice itself as part of this experience. One exception is Anita Lam and Matthew Tegelberg's ‘Dark Tourism in Iceberg Alley’, which focuses on sightseeing off the Newfoundland coast (along with the commercial harvesting of Arctic icebergs for bottled water and other drinks). 1 Lam and
foundation was not attended with an idea of prolonged human suffering in mind. Lunatic asylums had no singular purpose to pin a very dark history too, but they are undoubtedly sites of difficult emotional history. According to Philip Stone’s typology of dark tourism sites ( 2006 : 151), lunatic asylums stand somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, occupying a dark-grey space between the darkest heritage and the lighter shades of difficult histories: they were constructed for long timescales and huge, diverse populations; they have been maintained for first practical and
’. 11 Recent studies of ‘Dark Tourism’ have noted (for example) how ‘the reality of Auschwitz-Birkenau [in Poland] is now consumed as a surreal tourist attraction under curatorial remits and museum codes’. 12 Nevertheless the particular difficulties encountered by post-war Austria in negotiating its history (seen in the previous chapter in relation to Alfred Hrdlicka’s Mahnmal Gegen Krieg und Faschismus ) suggest that the speed with which its post-war government sought to reinvigorate the tourism industry
impact on tourists’ plans and experiences (e.g., Bolan et al ., 2015 ), as well as the sources of their attraction (see, for instance, Depken et al ., 2017 ; and Markelz, 2017 ), including the distinctive ‘dark tourism’ pleasures of sites associated with death and torture (see Murray, 2016 ; Mathews, 2018 ). Very little of this goes on to consider the kinds of fandom that might be attracted to site tours or the kinds of involvement that tourists have with the places that they visit (see, for instance, Reijnders, 2015 ), or the ways that tourist experiences
expertise,28 as a counterpoint there has sprung a whole industry of ‘dark tourism’, a ‘thanatotourism’, along with a leisure and entertainment industry revolving around the creation of permanent displays or temporary exhibitions in museums, as well as dramas, documentaries and publications of all types. Sites of burial and exhumation may in this respect be regarded as symbolic and material ‘resource banks’, containing a highly varied selection of resources to suit a range of actors who differ radically from one another in terms of their investments. For instance, in the
implode without leaving cosmic fallout. Days after his arrest, the owners of Café Very tried to cash in by installing a commemorative plaque on the table where Ravachol had been sitting when the gendarmes pounced. This shrewd marketing move may have placed the café at the top of Paris’s dark tourism list for years to come, were it not for the fact that shortly after the plaque was installed the café was destroyed by a bomb that took at least two lives. The fear of more Ravachol avengers was potent, the more so given that
Nazis’ wonderful achievements’. 99 While these important considerations should be borne in mind when developing heritage offerings, these views banish the sites of forced and slave labour to the narrow definition of ‘dark tourism’, thus ignoring the other reasons why individuals might want to visit. 100 This failure to consider the needs of the descendants of the labourers (who survived and died), students, educators or the wide range of individuals who wish to pay their respects to those who perished
venues for horror and fear. Enduring public discomfort with mental illness into the modern period has, in many ways, been transferred to the material sites in which mental illness was treated. In their study of the phenomenon of dark tourism, John Lennon and Malcolm Foley cite film and television media as vehicles for popularising scenes of dark or difficult history, such as the sinking of the RMS Titanic and its portrayal in cinema throughout the twentieth century ( 2000 : 17–18). Asylums are a particularly frequent reference point in fiction. The Danvers State