ABSTRACT
During the Middle Ages, a journey to gaze upon relics of the saints offered the only valid excuse for leaving home (Rufus 1999). However, while religious pilgrimages to view the sacrosanct dead or sacred places associated with their life or death have been common over the centuries, in an age of (western) secularisation, a new ‘secular pilgrimage’ is emerging (Hyde and Harman 2011; Margry 2008b). Arguably, these new types of secular pilgrimages involve the ‘darker side of travel’ (Sharpley and Stone 2009a), or what has commonly become known as ‘dark tourism’ (Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone 2005, 2006). From visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the Killing Fields of Cambodia or to Chernobyl – the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident – dark tourism is ‘the act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre’ (Stone 2006: 146). Accordingly, dark tourism as secular pilgrimage is an activity that can constitute ceremonies of life and death which, in turn, have the capacity to expand boundaries of the imagination and to provide the contemporary visitor with potentially life-changing points of shock. Indeed, dark tourism may be perceived as a rite of social passage, given its transitional elements and its potential to influence the psychology and perception of individuals (Biran et al. 2011). Furthermore, dark tourism occurs within liminal time and space and, as such, locates the activity within constructivist realms of meaning and meaning making (Sharpley and Stone 2009a). Therefore, dark tourism provides a lens through which life and death may be glimpsed, thus revealing relationships and consequences of the processes involved that mediate between the individual and the collective Self.
