Tourism as a Form of New Psychological Resilience: The Inception of Dark Tourism

Abstract

Tourism industry is considered as an activity based on higher tolerance to frustration, in other terms as a resilient industry. At some extent, the diverse threats that impinge on tourism in late modernity not only did not alter its logic, but strengthened its presence worldwide. Concepts as dark tourism or thanatourism started to be adopted and applied in tourism-related research. Nonetheless, these studies are not interested in revealing neither the anthropological roots of the issue nor the representation of founding trauma (as sacralisation of the dead). Natural and made-man disasters give lessons to communities that are rechanneled by means of mythical mechanism of resiliency. Tourism, from our end, does not seem to be a resilient industry but it works as a mechanism (one among many others) society develops to intellectualise the disaster.

Keywords: disaster, trauma, death, society, tourism