Abstract

The travel experience filled with personal trauma; the pilgrimage through a war-torn place; the journey with those suffering: these represent the darker sides of travel. What is their allure and how are they represented? This volume takes an ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach to explore the writings and texts of dark journeys and travels. In traveling over the dead, amongst the dying, and alongside the suffering, the authors give us a tour of humanity’s violence and misery. And yet, from this dark side, there comes great beauty and poignancy in the characterization of plight; creativity in the comic, graphic, and graffiti sketches and comments on life; and the sense of profound and spiritual journeys being undertaken, recorded, and memorialized.

“The greatest insights and discoveries come from actively exploring and mapping out the fertile connections between the different essays. If readers are willing to do this, they will, I think, ultimately find that the book provides a very stimulating engagement with both the dark side of travel, and the dark side of travel writing.”  ·  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“This volume is truly coherent and contributes to a better understanding of a little appreciated aspect of contemporary tourism. It will certainly become a standard reference work in the field of anthropology of tourism and tourism studies. Despite the “darkness” of the issues addressed, it must be considered a very colourful success.”  ·  Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale

Jonathan Skinner is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Before the Volcano: Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat (Arawak Publications 2004), and co-editor of Managing Island Life (University of Abertay Press 2006) and Great Expectations: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism (Berghahn 2011).