Manipulating Dark and Thana Tourism

Running head: MANAGEMENT
Dark and Thanatourism Management
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Introduction:
The essay provides an insight into the extent of authenticity in manipulating a dark
setting for tourism for meeting political ends. Recently, tourism represented an important global
industry. The arrival of visitors in addition to revitalizing cultural resources also generates the
economic resources for particular destinations. It has been found that spaces of disasters or mass
death like Hurricane Katrina hitting the New Orleans or Tsunami in Sri Lanka might be recycled
through adoption of the tourism policies that considers death as the key attraction. This kind of
tourism has been found to attract criticism from post Marxist sociologist as a mark of the sadist
spectacle. Scholars has been found to discover the issue for better understanding the apparent
fascination in seeing the other’s suffering. In this context, dark tourism has been found to allude
the newer types of consumption through tourism that are different from the products of typical
tourism that includes sea, sun and sand (Podoshen 2013). One such aspect which defines the dark
tourism happens to be a negative landscape that triggers fascination amongst the others. Dark
tourism happens to encompass a huge spectrum of subtypes and modalities. As all the sites have
not become deep routed tourist attractions they display great mourning that obstructs mass
tourism. The essay aims in providing a study that unravels the validity in handling a dark tourism
for political reasons. The essay also helps in digging why certain dark sites remains tourism
prone.
Discussion:
The concept of dark tourism brought in academic attention the interesting issue for the
specific sites of atrocity, disaster and death. It became the epicenter for discussion of the tourism
based scholars and the social scientists like psychologist, sociologist and the anthropologist. The
objectives of the dark tourism has been in exploring the tourist experience and the visitor site

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thereby leading to the better understanding of the experiential aspects of mortality and death 2
(Stone 2013). Hence, the phenomenon represented an effective attempt in critically exploring the
apparent fascination and the contemporary representation with the death. According to Kang et
al. (2012) and Lelo and Azim (2008), exploring the reasons of why as well as what the visitors
happen to seek at the place of death has been portrayed as a key concern in studying the dark
tourism in various guise. What seems crucial here is subjective experience of the tourist that
serves in explaining why the people required to mediate towards the dark places.
According to Korstanje and George (2015), dark tourism depicts the sites where suffering
or death has been able to determine identity of specific community and it is where a public
commemoration or private commoditization takes place. The commercialization of dark tourism
put across the need for defining an issue in context of allegory of its meaning. For example, a
particular place where the public shrine gets established puts across a message that remains
interlinked with practice of ordinary people around national and local communities. Korstanje
(2015), has put across that fascination or curiosity with the death might portray as a key aspect in
characterizing the dark tourism and it is also vital in not losing the sight of how the experiences
of the ‘dark tourist’ gets usually framed under the shared values which tightens the social
bondage.
Further, dark tourism has been defined as the ‘spiritual’ experience through particularly
considering the fact that by undertaking a sightseeing of others death there lies the inherent
tendency of contemplating self-death through means of thanaptosis (Stone 2012). Here it is of
vital importance to understand the notion of thanaptosis. Korstanje (2013) quite recently tried to
trace roots of the thanaptosis in the concept created by William Cullen Bryant, an American poet
in the year 1817. The term had been coined for expressing the need of humans in anticipating