It’s been nearly a decade since the United Nations recognized the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism, a set of principles to ensure “tourism’s contribution to mutual understanding and respect between peoples and societies.”1 In the same moment, a small group of historic site directors came together to explore whether tourism had a more active role to play: to inspire visitors to address injustices they encountered at home and abroad. This group identified themselves as Sites of Conscience, making a specific commitment to “draw connections between past and present,” “stimulate dialogue on pressing social issues,” “promote democratic and humanitarian values,” and “share opportunities for public involvement in issues the site raises.” Convened by New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum, they included sites as diverse as the Gulag Museum in Russia, preserving a Stalinist labor camp; the District Six Museum in South Africa, remembering forced removals under apartheid; and the Workhouse in England, exploring Britain’s attempts to deal with poverty from the nineteenth century to the present. At the end of their first meeting, they decided to form the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience to help each other transform historic sites from places of passive learning to centers for people to become engaged in shaping the most urgent problems they face today. To do this, they needed to reimagine both tourism and tourists and grapple with challenging contradictions in each of their cultural contexts. What would a Sites of Conscience tourism look like? Could tourism—so strongly associated with passive, if respectful, observation—inspire activism?
Soon after the coalition was founded to grapple with these questions, Arthur Frommer published a syndicated column strongly promoting Sites of Conscience tourism. “I urge you to study the message of museums of conscience,” he insisted, “and then to schedule a visit to one or more of them on your next trip.” Frommer characterized Sites of Conscience as “shocking museums… dwelling on the… tragedies that humankind has suffered, the horrors and the cruelty.” Their value lay in their darkness, as “repositories of humankind’s foibles and crimes,” and represented an important new way of exploring new places. Travelers could find a new understanding of both themselves and others by learning about a country’s local struggles with global moral questions. Citing the ways the Slave House in Senegal raised questions around slavery and its legacies, or the Terezín Memorial in Czech Republic around genocide, Frommer asked, “What more important issues could possibly be placed before any visitor to the cities in which these museums are found?” These sites could help tourists “absorb lessons that may perhaps enable us in our own societies to avoid similar enormities.”2
While the coalition’s fledgling museum collective counted itself lucky to have one of the industry’s international leaders trumpet its cause, Frommer’s characterization of Sites of Conscience and its tourism reinforced some of the stereotypes Sites of Conscience were struggling against. First, sites in the coalition were exploring broader ideas of what could inspire conscience: was it only extreme tragedy and persecution? What role did stories of resistance, daily life and culture, or even complicity play? Further, Frommer’s Sites of Conscience tourism still assumed fairly passive roles for both museums and visitors: sites needed only place an issue before visitors, and visitors needed only absorb it and hopefully avoid committing crimes against humanity. The question Sites of Conscience were grappling with was whether they had the potential as tourist destinations to inspire a more active global citizenry. To address this question, they had to develop a different experience of “return”—one that would use a journey back to catalyze action moving forward.
For example, in some cases, returning to a site of abuse mobilized survivors to demand restitution for past injustice in the form of material reparations or prosecutions. District Six was a thriving, culturally diverse working-class neighborhood in Cape Town. Under the Group Areas Act of 1966, it was razed to the ground to make way for a whites-only district. The District Six Museum began by inviting the thousands of people who had lost their homes and community to return to a Methodist church still standing near the destroyed neighborhood. The floor of the church was covered with a giant map of the former District Six. Ex-residents were invited to place themselves back in the neighborhood by marking their memories on the map—where they lived, worked, played. The process of gathering and reconnecting with former neighbors and sharing what they had lost, both emotionally and materially, served as a critical catalyst for organizing a movement to reclaim land as part of restitution for apartheid. Ex-residents launched a land reparations movement that succeeded in winning title back for many displaced people. One of the land courts that granted title back to displaced residents was held at the museum.
In Argentina victims conducted “returns” to sites of torture and detention to demand legal accountability for these crimes. After the restoration of democracy, amnesty was declared for any agents of the military dictatorship, leaving the fates of thousands of disappeared people unknown and uninvestigated. Families of the disappeared returned to sites across the city of Buenos Aires where their loved ones had last been seen. These sites—ranging from back rooms of local police stations to the massive Naval Academy campus—were places people passed every day, hidden in plain view, secretly co-opted by the state for detention, torture, and disappearance. Families worked to make the sites and their stories visible to a public and a state eager to move on, holding repeated public demonstrations and marking the sites with temporary art. After years of struggle, the amnesty law was overturned and prosecutions began. Sites that had been identified by the returns of the families became some of the starting points for investigation, with archaeological excavations yielding critical evidence for the trials.
If returning to sites of abuse has mobilized direct survivors to take action, what about those visiting for the first time? It’s precisely the presumption of tourists’ passivity and disengagement that’s led many survivor communities to reject tourism to the most sacred of their sites as inherently voyeuristic. This is particularly true when part of a site’s social mission is to create a healing space for survivors: when it promises a therapeutic experience of return to a site of trauma. In Argentina, after President Néstor Kirchner declared the most emblematic site of torture and detention under the dictatorship, the Naval Academy in Buenos Aires (Escuela de las Mecánicas de la Armada, or ESMA), as a “Space for Memory and Human Rights,” many survivors and victims’ families successfully lobbied for the massive campus to be kept closed to all but those with a direct experience of the site. Others argued that a new generation, one with no memory or experience of state terrorism, would need to see and learn from the site in order to prevent such practices in the future.3 The District Six Museum in South Africa faces a related dilemma. The museum was first developed by ex-residents as a site of return and recovery of a lost community, collaborating with organizations providing both personal redress (counseling services) and collective reparations (land reclamation). But the museum soon became a celebrated destination for international tourists eager to learn about the human experience of apartheid. The museum now struggles with how, in its very small space, it can both maintain a respectful, private atmosphere for its primary community of ex-residents to mourn losses and celebrate endurance while sharing the lessons of this resistance movement with foreigners. But both the District Six Museum and the ESMA Space for Human Rights were explicitly founded to ensure that the abuses they remember do not recur. While deeply committed to social healing, both wrestle with the question: can a mission of preventing future atrocities be fulfilled without tourism?
The image of the invasive, voyeuristic tourist has been solidified in the growing debate over “dark tourism” or “trauma tourism,” the practice of visiting sites of tragedy and suffering. Here public places remembering difficult histories have often been critiqued as trivializing or exploiting suffering.4 But Sites of Conscience, as the coalition’s founders conceived of them, are not inherently sites of tragedy. Instead, founders believed that conscience can and must be inspired by the full range of human experience and ethical dilemmas. Sites of Conscience include museums exploring social change movements, such as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, and daily experience with social issues, such as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Many Sites of Conscience that do remember atrocities resist being understood simply as sites of suffering, as they might be labeled under the “dark tourism” framework, sharing instead many layers of stories, including resistance, the struggles of daily life, as well as blurrier moments of complicity or cowardice.
Sites of Conscience, then, do not only offer a return to a moment of trauma for those who experienced it. They can also invite a return to a crossroads: to a moment or a series of moments when individuals, states, and societies grappled with questions we are still grappling with today and made decisions we are still living with. The British National Trust’s Workhouse invites visitors to tour this rare surviving example of the system of grim buildings built in the Victorian era to shelter Britain’s “worthy poor” and deter the “idle and profligate.” In use through the 1970s, when it served as a shelter for homeless mothers, the building was both a witness and an instrument of dozens of different approaches to social welfare. After touring recreations of an 1830s and a 1970s bedroom, visitors are invited to a concluding exhibit titled, “What Now, What Next?” Through chalkboards, bulletin boards, and interactive kiosks, the exhibit asks visitors to respond to a series of questions about social welfare policy past and present, including, “How do you define poverty? What solutions to poverty have been tried before? Is what we are doing now better, or worse? What new solutions might we try?” The space includes temporary exhibits on different organizations addressing social welfare issues today, with information about how visitors can participate in their efforts. Most recently, the Workhouse has developed a public dialogue program in which trained facilitators open conversations on personal experiences and opinions on supporting people in need.
A Sites of Conscience tourism practice would need to harness the possibilities these sites have to mobilize both local and international engagement in the legacies of their histories. These practices would need to maintain a deep commitment to those most in need of healing, such as immediate victims of a recent atrocity. But ultimately it will need to challenge strict dichotomies of insider and outsider, of returning and visiting, and open different forms of ownership of the site—and therefore responsibility for the issues it raises. Outsiders in one place are insiders in another and can participate in effecting change in their own localities or contexts. A Sites of Conscience tourism needs to imagine everyone as active participants or stakeholders—recognizing not everyone has the same stake and that each has a different role to play. The potential of the site is to activate all these participants to address the issues in their own contexts.
Sites of Conscience in a variety of different contexts have creatively exploited overlaps between insider and outsider, “tourist” and “local” in an attempt to inspire tolerance and activism in all visitors to the site. The most obvious examples are sites that treat “outsider” visitors not as people there to learn the story of others, but as people with an active role to play in shaping human rights both locally and globally. These sites call attention to the role of international actors in shaping what happened there and what continues to happen in the country, opening responsibility and possibility for social action to people with a variety of relationships to the site’s history. The Villa Grimaldi Peace Park outside Santiago in Chile remembers a secret torture and detention center from the Pinochet dictatorship. Tours led by survivors and students connect individual stories of prisoners and guards to the larger international forces that placed them there—including the role the U.S. played in training secret police. Tours also raise questions about how societies allow human rights violations to take place under their noses as well as the strong role international actors can play in resisting abuse, such as when Pinochet was finally arrested in London. For some survivor guides, the site’s mission is to inspire a commitment to human rights in everyone, raising awareness of international visitors’ unwitting support for these practices and inspiring them to be more aware of the actions of their government both inside and outside their country.5
The Liberation War Museum in Dhaka remembers the genocide against Bengali people during Bangladesh’s struggle for independence in 1971. Although its audience is primarily local school children, they devote a significant section of the main exhibit to the involvement of the U.S. in supporting Pakistan and of India in supporting Bangladesh. The museum also celebrates popular foreign support for the Bangladeshi cause, hosting annual commemorations of George Harrison’s concert for Bangladesh and recalling the power of collective citizen action in bringing public attention to the issue.
Sites remembering creative social action have as important a role to play in inspiring this kind of conscience as those remembering human destruction. The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis not only features over two centuries of struggle for African American civil rights but also connects visitors to new struggles in Memphis and around the world. A permanent exhibit on global human rights includes a video titled “We Want to Be Free,” featuring social movements in South America, Russia, China, and the U.S., as well as kiosks through which visitors can explore other issues and movements further. The museum collaborates with Memphis’s M. K. Gandhi Institute and a wide range of social justice organizations on an annual conference on nonviolence that uses the histories of Gandhi and King as the starting point for workshops in which youth identify the most pressing issues they are facing in Memphis today—gun violence was one—and how they might organize to address them. In addition to inviting movement “insiders” to return to the iconic balcony where King’s body fell, the museum invites a broader public to return to a moment when so many took action.
In other cases, sites challenge ideas of insider and outsider to create common ground among people with different backgrounds and encourage a common possibility for participating in social change. The heart of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is a five-story apartment building at 97 Orchard Street where more than seven thousand immigrants from over twenty different nations lived between 1863 and 1935. Millions of European Americans trace their roots—real or imagined—back to the Lower East Side and “return” to the neighborhood to reconnect with this mythical old world in the new.6 They arrive to discover streets filled with people from China, the Dominican Republic, Bangladesh, and over thirty other countries quite different than those of their ancestors’—40 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are foreign born, and more than 60 percent speak a language other than English at home. Who is the immigrant, the tourist, the outsider to this place, and who is the local? This can cause confusion and consternation among some visitors. As Josephine Baldizzi Esposito, a former resident of 97 Orchard Street put it, “It was one of my dreams to get back into that house…. When I came in contact with immigrants coming here now…. I would say, ‘Oh my God, what country am I in? These are all foreign people. What are they all doing here?’ Then I realized that these poor immigrants now are doing the same things my parents did.”7
The museum hopes all visitors will experience such an epiphany—that the site can serve as a common ground for people who share both a sense of insider connection to the place and an experience or memory of feeling excluded. To achieve this goal, museum tours invite visitors to reflect on connections between the stories of different generations of immigrants in an attempt to forge understanding between people with different backgrounds and challenge anti-immigrant stereotypes. The museum’s programs also seek to give those who have been made to feel like outsiders a sense of belonging and, specifically, a sense of agency and entitlement to organize for change. In Shared Journeys, the museum brings people learning English to “meet” their historic counterparts—immigrant families who lived at 97 Orchard Street a century ago—and learn how they organized to improve conditions for future generations of immigrants.
The museum also recognizes that outsiders coming to the neighborhood may be passive observers of the local scene but are actors in their own spheres. To that end, they try to use the specific history of the local place to raise awareness of its connection to issues in visitors’ own contexts and what visitors can do about them. In Kitchen Conversations, visitors from Atlanta to Australia are invited to participate in discussions over tea about their personal experiences with immigration. In these facilitated dialogues, visitors are asked to share stories and opinions of immigrants and immigration issues in their own communities and reflect together on whether and how it should be different. At the conclusion of the discussion, participants receive “10 Ways to Make a Difference,” a pamphlet describing how individuals in different communities effected change for immigrants.
Other sites bring together people from very different parts of the world to develop a sense of collective responsibility to be exercised differently in each of their different contexts. The Monte Sole Peace School outside of Bologna remembers the massacre of area villagers by Nazi troops and Italian Fascist forces on September 29 and October 5, 1944, as part of a campaign of terror toward the end of the war to suppress partisan resistance. Up to 770 people, mostly women and children, were killed. Now converted into a nature park, this silent and peaceful landscape pays testament to the terrible violence against civilian populations in this region during World War II. The Peace School Foundation of Monte Sole “promotes training and peace education projects, non-violent transformation of conflicts, respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence among different people and cultures, and a society without xenophobia, racism and any other kind of violence towards human beings and their environment.” The school began by bringing youth representing two groups in conflict—such as Israelis and Palestinians—to “return” to the scene of conflict at Monte Sole, deconstruct the mechanisms of violence, and discuss how to address the current violence between their communities. But confronting the problem directly proved too difficult, the divides between the two groups too hard to bridge. Instead, the school invited two other groups of youth to join, local Italians and Germans, representing nations involved in the Monte Sole violence who had long since made peace. In the resulting “Peace and Four Voices” camp, all participants were simultaneously locals and tourists: the Italians may have been “locals” to the site itself but were tourists to the experience of violent conflict, while their Palestinian cohorts were outsiders to the place but not the issues. Educators designed workshops that facilitated exchange of the varied experiences of both violence and peace within each group of youth as the starting point for all four groups to work together to identify how to confront conflict in their own communities. Perhaps because this playing field was more level—or precisely because it was more variegated—educators found dialogue could finally open.8
As generations pass, and new social challenges emerge, Sites of Conscience will need to continually expand the moral of their story—mining the complexities and questions of their histories to confront new issues that arise. But this again can infringe in painful ways on the healing of immediate survivors. On the one hand, many survivors’ groups are committed to imparting the lessons of their experience to a new generation. On the other hand, a class of fifth graders—gum chewing, gaping, and giggling—can desecrate a space faster than any imagined dark tourist. Some sites have found that as long as the story is confined to the past, to the experience of the adult narrating it, the issues threaten to remain abstract and irrelevant. Instead, sites like the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park have worked with teachers and students to identify the most pressing concerns in the classroom today and are developing new tours of the site that draw more direct connections between the history of the site and the challenges young people now face, such as violence among students or racial discrimination. One of the most devastating legacies of the dictatorship for young people today is a severely impoverished culture of activism, as youth who organized against the Pinochet state were disappeared, tortured, and detained. To address this, Villa Grimaldi’s newest programs draw on successful examples of youth activism to help young people design a project they can implement in school to address the issues they have identified as most critical for them. Some survivors may have been appalled at comparing the systematic torture they experienced to bullying in the school yard. But Villa Grimaldi’s educators believe that the site must be appropriated by different generations for different reasons if the goal of “Never Again” is to be reached.9
As Sites tap into aspects of their histories and face new realities, new groups of stakeholders may challenge the old for primary personal connection to the site. In 1995 the justices of the new South African Constitutional Court decided to build their court building on the very spot where justice had been most perverted under apartheid, the Old Fort Prison. The justices envisioned a public space where people could visit a museum about the history of the prison and learn of struggle for justice in the apartheid era and then visit the new Constitutional Court and observe the justices debating questions facing South Africa today. The Old Fort Prison held high-profile movement leaders like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. But it also held ordinary people who committed acts that were criminalized under apartheid, such as traveling without a pass, and people who committed crimes like murder or robbery that were still against the law in the new South Africa. So which lessons of the prison’s past were best for the present? On what foundation did the justices want to build a new South African conscience?
The team charged with developing the museum began by inviting all these types of former prisoners, as well as former guards, to return to the site, share their stories, and physically “map” their experience by identifying how different spots on the site were used. The team discovered dramatic differences between the past experiences of different categories of prisoners as well as between their views on how democracy had affected their lives since. They decided to capture these differences in their first exhibit by profiling diverse individual prisoners held at the Old Fort for dramatically different reasons. This provoked “strong debate,” as one museum team member remembers: “Should the story of a murderer be represented alongside far more noble people who had fought for their freedom and been unjustly imprisoned?”10 Where growing numbers of South African heritage sites celebrated anti-apartheid leaders and drew a stark line between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, the Constitution Hill museum team recognized that for many South Africans, both those who suffered and those who benefitted from apartheid, the past was still very much unresolved. Rather than building a linear narrative celebrating the end of injustice, the museum team sought to create a space for diverse South Africans to grapple, in an ongoing way, with how justice should now be defined. In the exhibit space, above the profile of the different prisoners hung the question “Who is a Criminal?” Visitors are invited to write their responses to the question and post them on a wall of the exhibit. Instead of creating an exclusive site of physical return for those who suffered at the Old Fort, the team invited South African society to return together to the place and time when the country was battling over this key question, one still unresolved today. After touring the museum, visitors can enter the Constitutional Court and observe justices debating the same question in new forms.
The museum continually looks to new aspects of apartheid’s history to provide perspective on the latest debates before the court. As its marketing director explained, “Just like South African society itself, [Constitution Hill] will never be completed, for every generation of visitors will add its own experiences and memories to the site.”11 In the wake of the court’s decisions on gay marriage, the museum opened an exhibit on the struggles of LGBT communities in South Africa’s past and present—a history that had made little appearance in the increasingly coherent national narrative supported by other museums and school curricula. Nor had it emerged as a story of the museum’s primary stakeholder community of ex-prisoners. In fact, many survivors of the Old Fort Prison, and many other South Africans, might not agree that apartheid was fought in order to bring gay people the right to marry. In continuing to raise questions of conscience, once marginalized stakeholders may appear as new “tourists” in national narratives.
These dialogues were held as part of Constitution Hill’s lekgotla programs. Lekgotla refers to a practice of gathering villagers under a shady tree to address community issues. Drawing on this cultural memory and reference, Constitution Hill developed a range of structures for modern lekgotla on a variety of issues raised at the site, all of which took place in the plaza between the court and the historic prison, between old and new visions of justice. The lekgotla were not intended to bring specific conclusions or resolutions but rather to create a space for people to gain new perspective and understanding of the issues and one another, to understand their rights and responsibilities under the constitution, and to be inspired to participate as citizens. The goal was to model democratic engagement on the site that could be replicated in society. Lekgotla structures included conversations between school children, talks and Q&A with ex-prisoners or others with direct experience, discussions between community leaders or policy makers on certain issues, or discussions between people with differences of perspective on an issue, such as whether homosexuality or gay marriage is a right to be protected like racial equality.
Tourism to historic sites that raise challenging social issues should neither be dismissed as unethical nor embraced as a guarantee of Never Again. Instead, deliberate practices must be developed to harness the potential of these sites to inspire civic engagement. Sites of Conscience are working together to develop a wide diversity of such practices, sharing some common principles, including
• Posing open-ended questions on the implications of the past for the present and providing space and time for a variety of stakeholders to respond.
• Supporting different opportunities for those who hold a different stake in the site—such as immediate survivors, school children, and international tourists—to experience the space separately. This could be at different times—such as holding closed ceremonies for survivors on certain critical anniversaries—or different spaces—such as separating exhibit and dialogue rooms from reflection and memorial rooms.
• In addition, opening structured opportunities for engagement between and among “insiders” and “outsiders” on common questions.
• Developing youth programs that teach new generations about what happened at the site in the past, then inviting them to identify for themselves what legacies of the sites’ histories they live with today, what lessons the site offers to help them address those legacies, and what actions can be taken.
• Providing information or opportunities for people to become involved in shaping the issues of greatest concern to them today. Some sites provide visitors with lists of organizations that address the issues from different perspectives; others register people to vote on-site; others work with specific groups to design and carry out an action.
These practices will always struggle with the contradictory needs of those who need to mourn and those who seek to engage and debate. But these practices must begin with an expanded and critical notion of tourist and local, insider and outsider, that implicates everyone in both the problem and the solution. This requires an organic approach to heritage, one that recognizes the meaning of each site is not fixed, rather its legacies evolve with each passing day. A “conscience” tourism needs to continually return to the questions heritage sites pose for us to find new answers for our ever changing present.
Notes
1. World Tourism Organization, “Global Codes of Ethics for Tourism,” 1999, http://www.gdrc.org/uem/eco-tour/principles.html.
2. Arthur Frommer, “Tourists Turning from Art to ‘Museums of Conscience,’” SFGate.com, August 28, 2005.
3. Sebastian Brett, Louis Bickford, Marcela Rios, and Liz Ševčenko, “Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action” (2007), 9, http://www.sitesofconscience.org/wp-content/documents/publications/memorialization-en.pdf.
4. Michael Foley, and John Lennon, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000).
5. Brett et al., Memorialization and Democracy, 16.
6. Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7. Lower East Side Tenement Museum, A Tenement Story (New York: Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2003), 4.
8. Nadia Baiesi, Marzia Gigli, Elena Monicelli, Roberta Pillozoli, “Places of Memory as Tools for Education: The Peace in Four Voices Camp at Monte Sole,” Public Historian 30, no. 1 (2008).
9. “Never Again” has emerged as a slogan used by a wide variety of groups to convey remembering an atrocity in order to prevent its repetition in the future. Originally popularized in reference to remembering the Holocaust—some credit Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane’s 1972 book N ever Again! A Program for Survival, though it has since been used by Jewish leaders from other perspectives. When Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, titled his book 2003 book Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, he told the Jewish Daily Forward that some had assured him the phrase was for Holocaust survivors alone. Foxman himself believed that “We, the Jewish people, do not have a patent on that phrase.” Beth Schwartzapfel, “Never Again, Again,” Jewish Daily Forward, October 6, 2006. Regardless of Kahane’s or Foxman’s views, the phrase has been adopted by many different groups, not only referring to acts of genocide, but other large-scale human rights abuses: perhaps most famously, it was used as the title of the 1984 report on Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. Moving further from the original meaning, former Attorney General John Ashcroft used the phrase in the title of his 2006 book on 9/11.
10. Lauren Segal, ed., Number Four: The Making of Constitution Hill (London: Penguin, 2006), 127.
11. Ibid., 219.