DEEP VIEW
Tourism and places of
memory: exploring the political
side of tourism and the spatial
dimension of memory.
Anne Hertzog
Assistant Professor in Geography
University of Cergy-Pontoise, France
T
he “Martyred cities” of Vukovar or Sarajevo, the Ground Zero in New York, the
Gallipoli battlefield in Turkey are just a few examples of places of memory that are
among the most popular destinations for tourism. Nowadays, the Somme Battlefields
in France, have become cosmopolite places where visitors from Canada, Australia or
Germany may meet travelers from India, South-Africa or New-Zeland. Multilingual signs
installed by the local administration of tourism allow them to interpret a landscape dotted
with cemeteries, memorials and monuments of the Great War. Their tour may be organized
by a guide of British origins, whose wife runs a typical English bed-and-breakfast in one
of those typical rebuilt village of Picardy! These few examples show how tourism and
places of memory interact in many ways, regarding cross-cutting issues, such as politics,
economics or social and cultural practices. This contribution aims to draw a picture of the
contemporary reflections and debates this globalized phenomenon generate, exploring
different meaning of “memory”.
The notion of places of memory was popularized by the French historian Pierre Nora
in the 1980s. According to Nora (1984), places of memory were defined as remains: «The
extreme form in which a commemorative consciousness remains in a history that calls it
because it ignores it». Places of memory refer to material or immaterial objects, such as
memorials, archives, associations, songs, etc. They also reflect a “work of memory”, e.g. an
active practice of remembering of a various range of stakeholders.
In this text, a place of memory relates to conflicts, trauma, violence, repression,
confinement, and pain. This is a widely adopted approach, even if it doesn’t cover the larger
meaning of the notion. The strong connections between places of memory and tourism have
been extensively and systematically studied, discussed and researched since the 1990s. As
“remembrance tourism” or “post-conflict tourism” emerged as research fields, the studies
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3