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Accepted Paper:
'Living' history: ghost tourism in the UK
Carrie Clanton
(Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
"Ghost toursim" lures visitors to tourist and heritage sites to consume the exotic other at home and through time (rather than through travel), while simulatenously evoking a generalised past that lucratively authenticates "historical" places and routes.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout the UK, many tours of historical and heritage sites are billed as "living history," despite their reliance upon presenting ghastly elements of the past (torture, executions, epidemics) via representations of the dead. "Ghost tourism," whether as performances in which tourists are guided or entertained by actors playing ghosts, as history walks taking in haunted locales, or as ghost-hunting expeditions to haunted structures, relays a particular form of heritage and re-enchantment through fiction using selected facts of the past. Using examples from fieldwork carried out in London, Brighton, Edinburgh and other "haunted" UK tourist sites, I question how the experiential spiritualism on offer at heritage and tourist sites, whether billed as infotaining consumer spectacles or as quests, may fit in with Hewison's assertion that heritage is always a salvage activity (much like classical anthropology), in which history and culture are re-written according to concerns of power and capital in the present. Ghost tourism also raises questions of how tourists may consume the exotic " at home" through travelling selectively through time rather than through space.
Sacred landscapes, esoteric journeys: challenges of tourism, anthropology and spirituality in European and British contexts
Session 1