Thanatourism: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

Philip Stone (2012) has proposed a paradigmatic approach to thana (death) tourism in contemporary secular Western, “death-denying” societies, departing from Giddens’ (1991) argument on the weakening of “ontological security” in the contemporary world. Stone proposed that sites of dark tourism constitute what could be seen as a functional substitute for religious institutions which in the past enabled individuals to come to terms with their mortality (Stone 2012; Stone & Sharpley 2008). Dark tourism is thus conceived as a non-religious mediating institution between the living and the dead, offering an opportunity of thanatopic contemplation in face of inevitable (and meaningless) death. Stone quotes Lennon and Foley’s (2000) assertion that dark tourism is “primarily a Western phenomenon” (Stone 2006). This resounds with my own conviction in the past that “tourism” is primarily a Western phenomenon. However, such Eurocentric attitudes have been recently dispelled by a revised conceptual approach, which argues that tourism is a global phenomenon, though manifested in diverse ways in various parts of the world (Cohen 2015). We should ask, therefore, do dark tourism phenomena exist in non-Western emergent world regions, though based on different ontological assumptions about death, than those of the secular West? Stone’s paradigmatic approach could thus be broadened into a comparative conceptual framework, in which Western thanatourism would be just one particular case. This procedure resembles one I have recently applied to the comparative study of roadside memorials, a phenomenon first studied in the contemporary West, but found in different disguises in many societies outside the West (Cohen 2012).