Danger-zone tourism: Emotional performances in Jordan and Palestine

This thesis discusses danger-zone tourism in Jordan and Palestine. It explores emotional performances in tourist places of ongoing socio-political conflict. I bring together dark tourism, emotional, affectual and sensuous geographies as well as psychoanalytic theories on the death drive to examine danger-zone tourism as a form of tourism performance based on danger and conflict as enticing factors. Fieldwork was carried out in Jordan and Palestine during April 2009 and July-November 2010. Individual interviews, both face-to-face and online, small group interviews, non-commercial photographs, and written diaries are methods that have been employed for this research. A total of 79 participants were involved, out of which 25 are international tourists and 29 tour guides. The remainder 25 participants are other tourism industry representatives, such as tourism company owners and managers, taxi drivers, souvenir shop owners, as well as tourism governmental officials in Jordan and Palestine. I use a critical qualitative methodological approach to explore emotional performances of danger-zone tourists and local guides in areas of ongoing conflict. My discussion addresses three points to understand the ways in which danger-zone tourism is performed in Jordanian and Palestinian tourism spaces. First, I unravel the connections between tourism, danger and ongoing socio-political conflict so as to provide opportunities to foreground danger-zone tourists’ enticement to danger and conflict. I critique dominant tourism studies literature to argue that tourism and conflict are not mutually exclusive and tourists who travel to areas of political turmoil are fascinated with danger. Second, I critically examine emotional, affectual and sensuous geographies – that which is sensed, felt and performed – in Jordan and Palestine. It is maintained that affects, emotions and senses experienced in danger-zones disrupt some dominant dichotomies in tourism studies such as peace/war, safety/danger, fun/fear and life/death. Feeling fear, shock, anger and engaging haptically with tourist places and spaces provide a disruption of these binaries. Third, it is argued that danger-zone tourists can be understood beyond the existing labels of “morbid” and “ghoulish”. By accessing the death drive danger-zoners’ motivations and enticements to travel to dangerous places are rendered visible. I argue that by travelling to dangerous places some tourists seek to purge embodied memories and archaic traumas. This study offers a new way of theorising danger-zone tourism. Considering emotions, affects, senses and the death drive experienced and performed in an area of ongoing conflict encourages a more critical understanding of danger-zone tourism in particular and tourism studies in general

Souvenirs in Dark Tourism:Emotions and Symbols

This chapter explores the proposition that the act of ‘souveniring’ recent and/or ancient places of death, disaster, or atrocities is a more emotionally immersive experience—and thus less cognitively controlled—than in other tourism contexts. We introduce and explore the notion of ‘dark souvenirs’ which encompass unlikely forms, redolent of darkness, emotions, and affective experiences in the dark tourism context of places connected to death, disaster, or atrocities.<br/

Hospitality, peace and conflict:'Doing fieldwork' in Palestine

The focus of this paper is the interconnections among in/hospitality, peace, conflict and tourism. Using excerpts from interview notes and a field diary, the paper presents and debates the complex and embodied connections between a Palestinian local host, some tourists and a tourism researcher. Analysis of the data reveals the emotional entanglements experienced within the empathetic space formed during interviews with the distressed local host in Bethlehem. Her tragic stories of living under occupation touched the heart of the researcher. Feelings of sorrow, helplessness, anger, discomfort and guilt were negotiated. In this light, the paper contributes discussions and thinking on the emotional, situated and reflexive implications of fieldwork interactions in an area of ongoing conflict

Adaptation, interaction and urgency:a complex evolutionary economic geography approach to leisure

Local and regional governments in western European peripheral areas aim to spur leisure-led regional development. We explore planning for leisure by applying an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) approach from a complexity perspective. We identify conditions which enable and constrain leisure development and its effects on the region as a whole. This means combining the local level of individual adaptations with the institutional setting and with the regional scale. We examine the Dutch province of Fryslan and explore by means of case study analysis how current leisure development processes can be explained in a complex evolutionary manner. We explore economic novelty as a result of individual adaptations; how such adaptations through interactions create emerging spatial patterns; how these spatial patterns form self-organizing new types of order; and the way this process is dependent on previous paths whilst also creating new pathways. Our findings show that although development is dependent on individual adaptations often stemming from a few actors, for such adaptations to have an effect on the region requires a connectivity between actors and a sense of urgency amongst those actors. Using a complex EEG approach allows us to explain leisure-led regional development as the product of these conditions. This can help planners deal with the complexity and unpredictability of this process, focusing not on a desired end goal as such, but on creating the conditions in which a more autonomous development can take place

Complexity theories and ethnographies in planning for leisure-led regional development

Leisure-led regional development refers to leisure as a mechanism to achieve broad societal goals within a region: economic revenue, employment and service levels but also cultural or conservationist ambitions. Engaging in such leisure-led regional development proves a complex matter. Based on ethnographies of leisure in the Dutch province of Fryslân conducted over a five-year period between 2013 and 2018, this paper argues that combining theoretical understanding of complexity theories with analyses based on both evolutionary and discursive approaches results in enhanced understanding of the interactions shaping uncertainty in leisure development. Results of field observations, interviews, participation and document analysis show that planning for leisure-led regional development should consider autonomous and evolutionary processes, whilst focusing on purposefully influencing the interactions and perspectives of actors in leisure. More precisely, this means shaping the narratives and practices in these institutions which make specific interactions more likely to develop. This can be undertaken by including in planning efforts the individual perspectives and emotions among actors in the regional leisure sector. To cope with uncertainty at the heart of leisure-led regional development, an adaptive strategy should be adopted, both in the planning efforts taken and in how such efforts are monitored and evaluated.</p