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Tourism, Remembrance and the Landscape of War Geoffrey R. Bird

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Tourism, Remembrance and the Landscape of War Geoffrey R. Bird Tourism, Remembrance and the Landscape of War Geoffrey R. Bird A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University of Brighton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between tourism and remembrance in a landscape of war, specifically the Normandy beaches of World War II where the D-Day Landings of June 6, 1944 took place. The anthropological investigation employs a theoretical framework that incorporates tourist performance, tourism worldmaking, landscape, cultural memories of war and remembrance. The thesis also examines the tourism-remembrance relationship by way of the various vectors that inform cultural memory, such as the legend of D-Day, national war mythologies and war films, and how these are interpreted and refashioned through tourism. Adopting a constructivist paradigm the ethnographic fieldwork involves observation of thirteen guided bus tours and the annual D-Day commemorations in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The research also includes over 50 key informant interviews representing management, visitors, tour guides and veterans in the war heritage force field, along with a visitor online feedback tool. Reflexive journaling is also employed as a central method in collecting and analyzing data. In this context, the research draws upon ethnography as a means of understanding social meaning and behavior as they relate to the cultural phenomenon of war remembrance. This involves researching both the visitor experience and how it is negotiated and mediated by tourism worldmaking agencies such as museums, tour guides and travel guide books. The research findings demonstrate the complexity of the context, conflicts and contributions of the tourism-remembrance relationship. This thesis contributes to knowledge in several ways. First, it reveals how tourism manifests itself as an act of remembrance, exposing clichés that present tourism as a negative force. Second, the thesis identifies how tourism plays a worldmaking role at different cosmological scales, providing a central role in managing, coordinating, planning and interpreting remembrance. Finally, the thesis also contributes to knowledge by modeling war remembrance as a graduated emotional and cognitive phenomenon. The most powerful form of remembrance involves the emotional and spatial proximity to war memory that is imparted by a mediated tourism experience in a landscape of war. 2 Table of Contents ABSTRACT .................................................................................................... 2 LIST OF APPENDICES ................................................................................... 10 LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................... 10 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................... 12 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................ 18 DECLARATION ............................................................................................... 19 CHAPTER 1. Context and Theoretical Framework ........................................ 20 Introduction .................................................................................................. 21 Aim and Purpose of the Research ............................................................... 24 Selecting D-Day landing beaches and the Battle of Normandy environs for this research ................................................................................................ 26 Research Methodology: Constructivist Inquiry Paradigm ............................ 29 Ontology ....................................................................................................... 30 Epistemology................................................................................................ 32 Methodology ................................................................................................ 33 Theoretical Framework for Examining Tourism and Remembrance ............ 34 Key Theories and Concepts ......................................................................... 36 War Remembrance ...................................................................................... 38 Cultural Memories of War ............................................................................ 41 Myth and Legend as Elements of Cultural Memories of War ....................... 43 3 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 44 CHAPTER 2. Cultural Memories of War and what is Remembered ............... 48 Introduction .................................................................................................. 49 The History of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy ....................................... 50 The Legend of D-Day ................................................................................... 52 Situating National War Memories of World War II ........................................ 59 Great Britain ................................................................................................. 60 Canada ........................................................................................................ 61 United States................................................................................................ 63 France .......................................................................................................... 65 War Films as a Vector of War Memory ........................................................ 66 The Voice of Veterans as a Vector of Memory ............................................. 69 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 71 CHAPTER 3. War Remembrance in the Landscape of War: Markers and the Role of Tourism ............................................................................................... 74 Introduction .................................................................................................. 75 Section I: Remembrance in the Landscape of War ........................................ 76 Memorial Markers as Symbols of War/Battle ............................................... 78 Commemoration as a Memorializing Marker ................................................ 87 Multi-Vocal Character of Commemorations ................................................. 88 Sustaining Commemoration through Fictive Kinship .................................... 90 4 „Auratic Quality‟ of the Otherness of Death: the Sense of Place in the Landscape of War ........................................................................................ 92 Section II: Tourism as a Mediating Agency in a Landscape of War ................ 96 Tourism as a Worldmaking Agency .............................................................. 96 Heritage Dissonance .................................................................................... 97 Commercialism ............................................................................................ 98 Politics of Remembrance: the Heritage Force Field ..................................... 99 Museums and their Objects: Education, Authenticity and Boundaries of Representation ........................................................................................... 101 Battlefield Tour Guides and Interpretation .................................................. 106 Travel Guide Books .................................................................................... 108 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 109 CHAPTER 4. Tourist Performance of Remembering, Thanatourism and Visitor Meaning-Making ............................................................................................ 112 Introduction ................................................................................................ 113 Section 1: Framing the Tourist Performance of Remembering: Power, Knowledge and Discourse ......................................................................... 113 Meaning-Making and Remembrance ......................................................... 116 Conceptualizing Remembrance and Tourism to Battlefields ...................... 118 Section 2: Lenses of Meaning and the Tourist Performance of Remembering ...................................................................................................................... 123 National Identity ......................................................................................... 124 Social Identity ............................................................................................. 125 5 Death and War ........................................................................................... 127 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 130 CHAPTER 5. Methodology ........................................................................... 132 Introduction ................................................................................................ 133 Methodology: Inspired by an Ethnographic Approach ................................ 134 Research Methods ..................................................................................... 138 Interviews ..................................................................................................
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