揭秘黑暗旅游：分类学研究、概念定义与实践探索

Abstract

Dark tourism is the act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre. Today, within socially sanctioned dark tourism sites, visitors tour gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, fire rifles on former battlefields in Vietnam, inspect human skulls at Cambodian stupa memorials, gaze at preserved corpses in Rwanda’s genocidal landscape, or purchase commemorative 9/11 souvenirs of tragedy at Ground Zero. Consequently, dark tourism has gained significant traction in scholarly and media parlance over the past twenty years or so. Yet, despite its increasing use to intellectually frame difficult heritage, dark tourism remains divisive as a concept as well as being ethically contentious in practice. Much of this discordance is shaped by taxonomical and definitional disagreements of dark tourism, the conceptual frameworks that it adopts, as well as the imposition of darkness on those who both produce and consume ‘heritage that hurts’.

黑暗旅游，顾名思义，即人们前往曾发生过死亡、灾难、痛苦，或令人震惊的悲剧事件的地点进行纪念、参观、探访、游览等活动的一种行为现象。如今，在全球范围内被大众所周知的黑暗旅游目的地当中，参观二战时期规模最大的集中营——奥斯威辛集中营比克瑙毒气室、透过战争中使用的步枪寻访昔日越南战场上的历史痕迹、凝视柬埔寨佛塔纪念碑上陈列的遇难者头骨以及卢旺达种族灭绝纪念中心中保存完好的遇难者遗体，或到“911”事件中被摧毁的世贸大厦遗址“归零地”参访并购买纪念品等，都是黑暗旅游这一活动兴起以来最具有代表性及对参访者们最具吸引力的名副其实的“黑色之旅”。因此，在过去的二十余年里，黑暗旅游作为旅游研究中的一个重要领域，受到了学术界和大众媒体的广泛关注。然而，尽管黑暗旅游业已逐渐被越来越多地作用于理性地构筑灾难历史遗产的保护与研究，但其作为一种独立于其它类型旅游行为的概念仍存在分歧，其产生的实践活动在道德伦理考量范畴仍颇具争议。这种不和谐很大程度上是由黑暗旅游在分类学和定义研究中的不一致性，它采用的概念框架，以及生产和消费这些“创伤型遗产”的人们所背负的阴影而造成的。

I argue in this essay, therefore, that those who fret about dark tourism typological and conceptual frameworks should focus more, perhaps, on how dark tourism can traverse disciplinary borders, challenge social scientific subject gatekeepers, and engage directly with heritage-producers and tourist-consumers. Dark tourism as a global scholarly brand canconnect difficult heritage with visitor experiences and, in so doing, enlighten the (im)possibility of (re)presenting death and disaster within contemporary visitor economies.

因此，作者在本文中主张，那些为黑暗旅游的分类学和概念框架而焦虑的人们不妨将目光焦点投向黑暗旅游是如何穿越了学科边界，去挑战社会科学学科的“看门人”；并更加着眼于研究其进而如何与“遗产——生产者”和“旅游者——消费者”产生直接互动。黑暗旅游作为一个全球性的学术研究热点，凭借着将创伤型遗产与游客的体验感建立关联，从而揭示了在当代旅游经济中重新呈现死亡和灾难景观的可能性。