Death as the Ideal Playground? Dark Tourism, Tour Guide and Tourist Performances and Empathic Concerns at the Buried Village of Te Wairoa, Rotorua, New Zealand.

Abstract

This thesis explores tour guide and tourist performances and interactions at a ‘Dark Tourism’ site. The work is important because ‘Dark Tourism’ presents with more questions than answers; the trope of the ‘dark’ is itself under-examined, and previous studies are deemed ‘theoretically fragile’. Rather than the pursuing of ‘why’/motivational questions which underpin many previous studies, and/or the inclination towards ‘strait jacket’ approaches emanating from typologies, this thesis instead offers a new coherence and approach in a performance study which is concerned with the ‘doing of’ tourism at a Dark Tourism site.

The thesis is based upon an ethnographic study of The Buried Village of Te Wairoa, Rotorua, New Zealand, the site that suffered the loss of some 150 lives, and livelihoods of its survivors, in the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886. In participant observation, sensing the ‘live’ physicality of a ‘being there’ (one cannot just read about it) allows for both the silences (of what is ‘not said’) and the affordances of the body - all those cognitive, sensual, somatic, visceral propensities - in that which is ‘felt’, to emerge. The study utilises paradigms of performance, and emotion, to examine that ‘how’ or ‘doing of’ (rather than the ‘why’ with its sticky morality subtexts and hints of ‘deviant leisure’). Emotion in general has largely been denied, avoided, suppressed, or downplayed in this field; empathy, in particular, has also been paid insufficient attention in both anthropology and tourism studies to date. Consequently, empathy is an emotion of particular interest here; empathic concerns are scrutinised, alongside the vicissitudes of ‘empathy’ itself.

The findings show that tour guides engender at least the possibility of empathy. Tourists need to personalise the site in some way (in that they are ‘sold’ their own emotion), to experience empathic attunement. Humour, (both black, and comic) is also a surprising reveal. Black humour is used to negotiate the light/dark dichotomy of a currently regenerated parkland site, a site that is at once about eruption, death and destruction, on the one hand - and colonial ‘life and living’, on the other.

Whilst matters of ‘motivation’ are not foregrounded here, questions of ‘death as the ideal playground?’ and ‘what is the attraction of Dark Tourism?’ do find an answer in this thesis: that it is one’s own emotion, rather than death per se, that matters at Dark Tourism sites. Humour, regarding those ‘lighter’ aspects presenting in Dark Tourism, needs further investigation. Emotion must also be allowed a standing of greater significance in tourism studies, and cultural studies more generally. Tuhourangi’s plight – not just a loss of life, of land, of an economic base and livelihood, but also of a critical loss of identity – is also discussed, and a renaissance noted.