Abstract
Since many sites of dark tourism are loci of events that took place in the past, tourists may require a form of mediation in order to understand what happened there, why, and to whom. Some such sites, like the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, are well-mediated. This chapter explores some of the problems the tourist may encounter when faced with sites that are un- or under-mediated: sites with no more than a brief sign (Dean MacCannell’s “markers without a sight”) or to whose still-existing remains tourists are not directed. In many cases, mediating material exists, but is not available to the tourist “on site.” Using the examples of the Bennett-Arcane Long Camp, the Oatman Massacre site, and the Poston War Relocation Center, this chapter explores ways in which knowledge of such material might affect the experience of the tourist. Questions of the role of literary production by participants, “authenticity” of the touristic experience, and the interrelation between dark tourism and the broader field of tourist studies are also considered.
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Notes
- 1.
“Vintage Season,” which C. L. Moore published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, has been reprinted many times; I have used the version in C. L. Moore, The Best of C. L. Moore, edited by Lester Del Ray (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 315–364; quotations at 315, 327, and 332. The story is attributed to Moore and her husband, Henry Kuttner, as co-authors; but most believe that Moore alone was responsible for the whole, or the majority, of the writing (see the rather vague comments of Lester Del Rey, “Forty Years of C. L. Moore,” in the Best of C. L. Moore, xii). Scholarship on Moore’s fiction tends to focus on her stories “Shambleau” (1933) and “No Woman Born” (1944), both available in Moore, The Best of C. L. Moore; nothing I have noticed deals explicitly with “Vintage Season,” despite its iconic status in the science fiction community. For the significance of “perfect” English as a marker of alterity, see Christine Ferguson, Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle. The Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006).
- 2.
Kleph also needs drugs to help mediate her experience. The role of psychotropic drugs as a medium for mediating strange places—Michel Foucault’s now-infamous LSD trip in Death Valley may stand as a type experience; see now Heather Dundas, “Michael Foucault in Death Valley. An Interview with Simeon Wade,” Boom California, September 10, 2017, and Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2019) with Heather Dundas’ “Foreword”—deserves its own, separate investigation.
- 3.
Dark tourism—also known as “death tourism,” “trauma tourism,” and “thanatotourism,” among other terms—has a burgeoning literature. I have consulted Brigitte Sion, Death Tourism. Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscapes (London: Seagull Books, 2014); on the various terms for dark tourism, see E. Willis, Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship. Absent Others (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2–4, 19, Laurie Beth Clark, “Coming to Terms with Trauma Tourism,” Performance Paradigm 5 (2009), 16–17, and Jennifer Dawes’ introduction to this volume.
- 4.
A note on terminology: the anthropological literature treating tourism often uses “framing” to capture the ways that tourist sites are marked out. I have preferred “mediation” (see Leanne White and Elspeth Frew, “Beyond the Dark Side. Research Directions for Dark Tourism,” in Dark Tourism and Place Identity. Managing and Interpreting Dark Places (London: Routledge, 2013), 278, writing of Chantal Laws, “Pagan Tourism and the Management of Ancient Sites in Cornwall,” in Dark Tourism and Place Identity, edited by Leanne White and Elspeth Frew, 97–114, as showing how “mediation, interpretation and (re)imagining play a key role in understanding place”; Laws, however, does not herself use the word “mediation”) here because the metaphor of the “frame” emphasizes the separation of the framed from everything else, whereas I am interested in the mechanisms that shape the tourist’s experience.
- 5.
https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm (accessed September 10, 2018).
- 6.
See Dean MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 10: “[A]ny belief in authenticity—that is, any notion that one might bypass the symbolic and enter into a complete, open, fully authentic relation with another subject—obviates questions of ethics. Authenticity as a substitute for ethics can be regarded with suspicion that it is either intentionally or unwittingly unethical” (his italics, and see his further discussion at 2013, 91–107).
- 7.
https://nnss.gov (accessed September 10, 2018). See William L. Fox, Playa Works. The Myth of the Empty (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002), 51–76, for a good idea of what a visit is like.
- 8.
The literature is large. Clark, “Coming to Terms with Trauma Tourism,” 7–13, gives a nice summary account of mechanisms of mediation, although she does not use that term. See also Beth Notar, “Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands. Lonely Planeteers and ‘Local’ Cosmopolitans in Southwest China,” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2008), 616, 622, and Willis, Theatricality.
- 9.
Paul Bailey, City in the Sun. The Japanese Concentration Camp at Poston, Arizona (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1971); Jeffery Burton, et al., Confinement and Ethnicity. An Overview of World War II Japanese-American Relocation Sites (Washington, DC: Western Archaeological and Conservation Center, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1999), 215–242; Thomas Fujita-Rony, “Arizona and Japanese American History: The World War II Colorado River Relocation Center,” Journal of the Southwest 47 (2005), 218; Lawson Fusao Inada, Only What We Could Carry. The Japanese-American Internment Experience (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2000) 420, 17,814 was the maximum one-time population.
- 10.
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Laurel-Leaf Books, 2012); Ansel Adams and John Hershey, Manzanar (New York: Times Books, 2012).
- 11.
A striking and unusual example of a dark visit to Hiroshima occurs in Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2006), 233–247, in which J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, transported from the first explosion of a nuclear bomb in 1945 instantaneously to 2004, travel to Hiroshima to see the site of the reification of their scientific work. In the converse, Kyoko Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, translated by Eiko Otake (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, Inc., 2010), recounts the experiences of the author, a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) who lived through the bombing of Nagasaki, when, years later, she undertook a pilgrimage to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the bomb that devastated her town and killed many of her friends was born. Hers is a journey of double darkness, from darkness reified to darkness adumbrated. I am grateful to Kyoko Matsunaga for pointing me to this book.
- 12.
Four additional lines add: “State Registered Landmark No. 444. Marker placed by California Centennial Commission. Base furnished by Death Valley 49ers, Inc. Dedicated December 3, 1949.” Arcane’s name is sometimes spelled with, sometimes without, the final “e.”
- 13.
William Manly, Death Valley in ’49. The Autobiography of a Pioneer (San Jose: The Pacific Tree and Vine Company, 1894), 106–107.
- 14.
Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 107.
- 15.
The account that made the incident notorious is R. B. Stratton, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls. Being an Interesting Narrative of Life among the Apache and Mohave Indians (New York: Printed for the Author, 1858). My attempt to visit the site took place on June 9, 2015.
- 16.
GPS coordinates: 33° 0'9.17"N, 113° 9'17.65"W.
- 17.
I visited the monument and site on June 10, 2015. MacCannell’s concepts are explained later in the chapter.
- 18.
R. B. Stratton, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls. Being an Interesting Narrative of Life among the Apache and Mohave Indians (New York: Printed for the Author, 1858), 81–89.
- 19.
There were all kinds of grandiose plans for irrigation works, extensive farms, and permanent settlement of the interned in the Parker Valley, a vision looking ahead “for forty years” in the eyes of John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs: see Bailey, City in the Sun, 123.
- 20.
Richard Reeves, Infamy. The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), 102, 107–108, 123–124, 127–135; Bailey 1971; Fujita-Rony 2005; Inada, Only What We Could Carry; Precious Yamaguchi, Experiences of Japanese American Women during and after World War II. Living in Internment Camps and Building a Life Afterwards (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); Joanne Oppenheim, Dear Miss Breed. True Stories of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference (New York: Scholastic Nonfiction, 2006)—a small selection of a much larger literature.
- 21.
Yamaguchi, Experiences, 48, 49, 59. Reeves, Infamy, 134–135, on gangs and riots at Poston.
- 22.
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class with a New Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 112, 115, 128.
- 23.
See Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) for a comprehensive overview of this process of transformation.
- 24.
Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 76.
- 25.
Richard E. Lingenfelter, Death Valley and the Amargosa. A Land of Illusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 40–47. In Manly’s telling many of the experiences of the Jayhawkers are elided in his treatment of the group; in particular, he condemns their route out of Death Valley as impossible, even though in fact they made it into California (possibly by a northern route).
- 26.
Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo. The Life of Olive Oatman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) has done a splendid job of uncovering the story. See also Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, “The Captive and her Editor: The Ciphering of Olive Oatman and Royal B. Stratton,” Prospects. An Annual of American Studies 23 (1998), 171–192, on the ways Stratton shaped the narrative he published, Jennifer Putzi, Identifying Marks. Race, Gender and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), and Brian McGinty, The Oatman Massacre. A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); briefly, Gary Reger, “Naked on the Deserts of Mars,” Extrapolation 57 (2016), 321–323.
- 27.
Toyo Kazato in Inada, What We Could Carry, 98–100, and see also her poem “This Too, Is a Holy Place,” at 100–101. I have not been able to track down Inada’s source, Stray Clouds, tr. Ernie Kazato and Helen Hasegawa (see 426).
- 28.
Inada, What We Could Carry, 237–251, now also in Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Updated with Four New Stories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 20–33.
- 29.
Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism,” in Tourists and Tourism, edited by Sarah Bohn Gmeich and Adam Kaul, 25–26. MacCannell’s 1973 essay on authenticity is reprinted with a new introduction as Dean MacCannell, “Staged Authenticity. Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” in Tourists and Tourism, edited by Sarah Bohn Gmeich and Adam Kaul, 29–44. For an instance of dark tourism directed at present-day suffering, see Rami K. Isaac, “From Pilgrimage to Dark Tourism? A New Kind of Tourism in Palestine,” in Tourists and Tourism, edited by Sarah Bohn Gmeich and Adam Kaul, 179–186.
- 30.
Visitors’ data: https://www.nationalparked.com/death-valley/visitation-statistics (accessed March 21, 2019).
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Reger, G. (2020). In the Dark Without a Light: Understanding Unmediated Sites of Dark Tourism. In: Dawes, J. (eds) Dark Tourism in the American West. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21190-5_9
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