Commemorative events at destination memorials – a dark (heritage) tourism context

In the past, sites and events related to war and atrocities were viewed in the wider context of heritage tourism. The term ‘dark’ was added with the aim of recognising heritage sites closely related to death and suffering. Given that commemorative events as part of dark heritage are not prevalent in heritage and tourism literature, there is a need to understand the behaviour of visitors involved in visiting these sites or attending this type of event, which presents a special challenge. Public commemorations, especially those that mark particularly disturbing occurrences, such as ‘The Great School Hour’ – an event which is presented in the artistic form of a ‘school class’ – are unique form of tourist activity that has not been thoroughly investigated previously. Thus, the aim of the study is to explore the influence of the main motivators on revisit intention and willingness to recommend for those who attended the commemorative event ‘The Great School Hour’ in Kragujevac, Serbia, with a particular focus on younger people. The results suggest that learning, emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on revisit intention, while emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on willingness to recommend.     

Ethics of heritage: locating the punitive state in the historical penal landscape of Taipei

Research into prison tourism and prison heritage has not taken enough time to understand how historical change has left impacts in urban contexts, which sometimes continues even after the prisons are decommissioned. This paper discusses the punitive state in the context of the historical penal landscape of Taipei through an exploration of how an historical prison was designed, built, partially demolished, preserved and redeveloped under three political regimes. It draws attention to the neglected relationships between punishment, colonial modernity and heritage. Drawing on the literature of dissonant heritage and dark tourism it argues that the way in which the government erased the heritage and evicted squatters without regard for colonial histories and large-scale, post-war migration is yet another way of writing imprisonment into the landscape and ‘othering’ the punished. Furthermore, in tracing the place memories, both within and outside of the high prison walls, it demonstrates the possibilities offered by ethics of heritage, with which we may counter the culture of punishment in the remaking of cities.     

From Old Practices to New Governance Models: Contractual Schemes in Africa’s Political Development

Drawing on various historical documents, the article uses process tracing methods and analytic narratives to establish a relationship between historical contractual practices and state formation in nineteenth-century East Africa. I trace the process through which local political leaders historically sought to secure monopolistic deals over trade with foreign entrepreneurs through incomplete contracts for tangible economic goods (arms and slave trades, manufactured goods) and intangible political goods or services (security, knowledge, independence). By showcasing agents’ bargaining strategies in contractual agreements, the article sheds light on notions of sovereignty and independence articulated through public contracting in Africa’s political development. Historical understandings of notions of independence and sovereignty by procurement practitioners in East Africa provide seeds for thought in controversial debates about government outsourcing today. Is outsourced sovereignty always threatening? Can we outsource sovereignty and remain independent? These are perhaps the most important conceptual queries that make East Africa’s historical contractual experience pertinent today as new public-private partnerships for development, including government outsourcing, increasingly call for the use of private means to solve public problems in the developing countries.     

« L’argument vassalique » au service de la prédication des croisades en Terre sainte (fin XIIe – XIIIe siècles)

In the late twelfth century we can observe important changes in the propaganda of the crusades to the Holy Land. The popes and the preachers started to stress that the Holy Land should be defended and, after the disasters of 1187, should be reconquered because of its importance personally for God. Six arguments of the crusade propaganda which were invented or became widespread at that time can be mentioned here. Among them there is one that we can call the “vassal argument”, by means of which the papacy and the preachers pointed out that God should be defended when his beloved land is attacked by heathens because he is the Lord and the listeners are his vassals. It seems that the idea was created by the crusade preachers at the end of the twelfth century and then came to be used by the papacy as well, from Innocent III onwards. In the thirteenth century it was extensively enriched by such preachers as Jacques de Vitry and Humbert of Romans who made the vassal argument more illustrative.     

Beach Boys Do It Too: Subculture and Commoditised Desire in a Transnational Tourist Site in Kerala,South India

This article is based on an ethnographic study of a group of Scheduled Caste (SC) male youth in a globalised tourist site in Kerala, South India, who participate in situational sexual and romantic relationships with predominantly tourist women from the global north. We first aim to expand on the “sex and romance tourism” literature of such encounters to provide an Indian context. Secondly, we aim to highlight how young men involved in such encounters undertake complex mediations of localised and global forms of consumption and commoditisation to participate in the neoliberal tourist market place. Mainly by way of a subculture known as the Jungees, we describe how young men utilise the former processes to seek economic and social mobility for themselves and their families but also to valorise and re-imagine their identity along racial, gendered, caste and class-based dimensions. Finally, we explore the young men’s articulation of a hierarchy of preferred encounters that draws on gendered, sexualised and racialised local and global imaginaries of commoditised desire(s) of tourist women from the global north. We highlight the ways in which participants actively utilise the neoliberal context to engage in a range of self-generated livelihood strategies and to contest their marginality.     

Tourism–conservation enterprises as a land-use strategy in Kenya

Since the early 1990s, nature conservation organizations in Eastern and Southern Africa have increasingly attempted to integrate their objectives with those of international development organizations, the land-use objectives of local communities and the commercial objectives of tourism businesses, in order to find new solutions for the protection of nature and wildlife outside state-protected areas. The increased inclusion of the market in conservation initiatives has led to diverse institutional arrangements involving various societal actors, such as private game reserves, conservancies and conservation enterprises. The Koija Starbeds ecolodge in Kenya – a partnership between communities, private investors and a non-governmental organization – serves as a case study for emerging institutional arrangements aimed at enabling value creation for communities from nature conservation. Based on a content analysis of data from individual semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, as well as a document and literature review, this article reveals a range of benefits for community livelihood and conservation. It also identifies a range of longer term governance challenges, such as the need to address local political struggles, the relations between partners and transparency and accountability in the arrangement.     

An investigation of factors determining cycling experience and frequency

A bicycle tourism destination is composed of complexes of different attributes that are crucial for the determination of tourist satisfaction levels. However, the relative impact of sector-specific destination attributes on bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency has been both poorly understood and studied. This study is an attempt to fill this literature gap by exploring a demand-side perspective on the important contributors of overall satisfaction with cycling experience and the key determinants of cycling frequency. The 28 sector-specific destination attributes were drawn from the relevant literature, and then modified by a panel of industry experts. Using exploratory factor analysis, three destination-specific attribute-level satisfaction factors were identified in descending order of satisfaction degree: ‘provision of signage services,’ ‘provision of safety and emergency services,’ and ‘quality of bicycle routes.’ Among these factors, ‘provision of safety and security services’ and ‘provision of signage services’ were found to be the most important contributors to overall satisfaction. Finally, ‘monthly income’ was proven to be a significant predictor of cycling frequency. This study is of great importance as there is a growing body of evidence that the use of bicycle for leisure, recreation, and tourism is undergoing a resurgence worldwide. The findings of this study may be of interest to scholars in Western countries where bicycle tourism is mature and highly developed and in Asian countries where the sector is at an early stage of development. Since bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency can be increased by modifying destination marketing and management practices, the government and industry sectors should focus more attention on ensuring the provision of multi-functional grocery and convenience stores along designated bicycle routes, developing an informative and visible signage system for designated bicycle routes, and targeting middle- to high-income bicyclists with diverse bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience options.     

Perceptions of trekking tourism and social and environmental change in Nepal's Himalayas

The Himalayas are among the world's youngest mountain ranges. In addition to the geologic processes of mountain building and erosion, they are also highly vulnerable to human influenced change, occurring at local, national, regional, and international scales. A photo-elicitation methodology is employed to show how residents perceive those changes from historical perspectives, as well as their current conditions and impacts on their daily lives. Nepal's Khumbu region has undergone major social and environmental transformations since the 1960s when international trekking first began to influence the area's economy. The current perceptions of Khumbu residents of these changes are assessed through photo-elicitation interviews. Their responses are placed in the historical context of: (1) institutional and political changes, most of which have been driven by national government policies; (2) social and economic changes, for which the tourism economy has been central; and (3) environmental changes, reflecting the impacts of resource management and climate change. The mostly positive perceptions of Khumbu residents toward how their region has changed reflects general improvements in the physical and cultural landscapes of the Khumbu over time, as well as its continuing geographic isolation, which has helped to slow the rate of globalization, while also keeping the region a dynamic and popular tourist destination.     

Cultural impact of modernization and tourism on Dai villages in Xishuangbanna,China

The development of tourism can have a considerable sociocultural impact on ethnic communities, but few studies have attempted to separate the unique impact of ethnic tourism from the overall impact of modernization and describe its mechanism clearly. This paper describes a quasi-natural experiment performed in three typical Dai villages in different stages of tourism development. A crosswise and longitudinal comparative study was performed on Dai village culture. The study indicates the following: (1) spiritual culture has been transmitted relatively unchanged across generations in three Dai villages, but material culture has undergone various degrees of change. (2) The changes in material culture and some parts of institutional culture have been caused primarily by the pressure of overall social modernization. (3) Currently, the overall thrust of modernization in mainstream Chinese society has driven some ethnic cultural practices out of use, while the endogenous driving force of tourism development in ethnic communities has pulled them back into use. (4) Under the influence of modernization, the issue of whether ethnic tourism communities can be developed in a sustainable way depends on both bottom-up and top-down factors: the leading role played by community elites internally, developing useful parts of ethnic culture and discarding useless parts during repeated games in the tourism field, and government policy and guidance facilitating planning.     

Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador,Brazil

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’