Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
historians have reminded us of the fluidity of touristic practices over time, anthropology has documented the ways in which tourism continues to evolve and to present new challenges. Anthropologists began to take up the study of tourism in earnest in the 1960s, and by the 1980s one could identify a fairly coherent field of tourism studies within anthropology. While economists and political scientists had certainly contributed empirical analyses of the phenomenon, the emergence of tourism studies in anthropology happened to coincide with the field’s “linguistic turn,” that is, its receptivity to postcolonial theory and to poststructuralist theories of language. So when anthropologists began pursuing tourism studies, they did so with a critical awareness of the limitations of empirical methodology.24 Emerging from their self-critical turn in the wake of postcolonial critique, anthropologists sought to understand their own position as visitors to other cultures and their own production of the foreign and the exotic as discursive formations.25 In other words, anthropologists began to appreciate the ways in which social science did not simply observe phenomena but also participated in and even produced them through social-scientific discourse. Anthropology’s investigation of culture based on otherness, it turned out, helped to produce the very otherness it sought to explicate. As the anthropologist Dennison Nash explains, this insight has led some within anthropology to shun tourism studies. “To be accused of exploitation is a very black mark indeed for anthropologists. So in the anthropological community the study of tourism could be construed as an invitation to guilt by association with things that anthropological work definitely is not supposed to be: the pursuit of pleasure; superficial observation; and the exploitation of peoples.”26 But, Nash and his colleagues argue, the study of tourism actually provides an opportunity for anthropologists to reflect both on the ways in which anthropology is itself complicit in the packaging and selling of the Other and on the ways in which tourism, so easily maligned, is itself a more complicated practice than meets the eye.
The thrust of anthropological approaches to tourism is the encounter between two cultures, that of the tourist and that of the native. Tourism is one of the ways in which intercultural contact is managed, negotiating what is available from the native for display or performance and what is desired by the tourist for consumption. While the aim of social-scientific inquiries into tourism is to offer an empirically based account of its various forms and practices, the research often leans toward stressing the troublesome aspects of tourism, informed by the anthropologist’s ideological commitments—hence the abundance of Marxist, postcolonialist, environmentalist, and feminist approaches to tourism. The result is a dominant portrayal of tourists as the “exploiters or unwitting representatives of exploiting forces such as international hotel chains, airlines or other national or international agencies which have become involved with native populations.”27 By the same token, the native is regarded either as vulnerable to exploitation, susceptible to cultural contamination, or complicit in the less sincere aspects of the tourist industry.28
Such accounts are critical and point to real problems in tourism, but they do not exhaust the range of touristic practice that occurs in the world today, nor do they claim to. Indeed, anthropology regards the study of tourism as a wide-open field in its early stages of development. Nor should we assume that a field as large as tourism can be exhausted by anthropological inquiry. For one thing, anthropology is predicated on the intercultural encounter between the foreign and the native or between the present and the distant past. But not all modes of tourism emphasize cultural difference. The visitor to historical museums, for example, may be in search of some affirmation or deepening of an already-embraced cultural identity. Similarly, the heritage tourist may be in search of some knowledge about one’s own ancestors so as to better comprehend one’s current position at home. Meanwhile, the eco-tourist travels with a critical awareness of tourism’s impact on the environment; in an effort to reduce the harmful effects of poorly managed resource exploitation, the eco-tourist attempts to minimize or even eliminate the harmful environmental and social effects typically associated with mass tourism. While such types of tourism can be evidence themselves of a kind of unequal cultural dynamic (e.g., the unequal distribution of economic resources required to engage in heritage tourism or ecotourism), there are motivations at work in the individual tourist’s journey that resist a reduction to intercultural encounter between natives and foreigners.
As we shall explore in the chapters ahead, Holocaust tourism is another mode of tourism that cannot be contained so easily by the familiar paradigm of the foreign and the native. In the context of the Holocaust, one must question if the notion of culture has any real meaning at all, unless we want to speak of an encounter with the disappearance of culture. When one enters the grounds of a former concentration camp or visits streets once located inside a Jewish ghetto, one is confronted with absence: the absence of those who made the place one of significance for the tourist. We confront the inherent paradox in the phrase “Nazi culture,”29 where the traces and relics we seek once aimed for the fulfillment of a racist fantasy of Aryan superiority by erasing a culture marginalized as Other. Instead of culture understood as the signifying practices of life, we come upon the death of culture. In the vacuum created in such places, we erect a substitute—a culture of memorialization. Or of amnesia. Different locations manage the dialectics of absence and presence in different ways, and that variety will be one of the recurring topics in the chapters that follow. The point here is that Holocaust tourism complicates the anthropological understanding of tourism as the encounter between foreign and native cultures by seeking something more radical than cultural difference—cultural destruction.30
There are other reasons not to cede the cultural analysis of Holocaust tourism, or of any other kind of tourism, solely to anthropology.31 As a social science, anthropology regards tourism as interconnected with other modes of making sense of the world and sees its diverse manifestations as instances of a larger phenomenon subsumed under the name of “culture.”32 Touristic encounters in turn enter into some relation, whether affirmative or critical, to other forms of cultural expression back home. As one manifestation of culture among many, tourism provides a lens through which the ethnographer locates particular beliefs and values that mediate the encounter of the traveler with a new location. While the practices and beliefs of the tourist may become the subject of theoretical (e.g., feminist, Marxist, poststructuralist, ecological, economic) analysis, the anthropological fieldwork of tourism studies is premised on the close observation of touristic behavior disentangled from the personal biases of the anthropologist. The anthropologist’s approach to tourism necessarily embraces a form of cultural relativism, in which one culturally positioned subject (the anthropologist or ethnographer) documents the signifying practices of another culturally positioned subject (the tourist), preferably in its own terms.33
Here again, Holocaust tourism presents challenges to anthropological assumptions. Given the Holocaust’s positioning within Western thought as a limit case of morality, an exemplar of ultimate evil, the anthropological commitment to observation must stumble in the face of the moral imperatives that the Holocaust demands. Observation of atrocity unaccompanied by an expression of moral condemnation risks the appearance of indifference, complicity, or approval. In the case of Holocaust tourism, the object of study is not just any kind of travel but, rather, travel to sites where Western humanistic and scientific values (of which modern anthropology is one manifestation) utterly collapsed.34 The rationality that shapes anthropology (and all modern science since the Enlightenment) itself becomes suspect in its encounter with the Holocaust. After all, barbarity reasserted itself under the Nazi regime with unparalleled destruction, despite the advances of the Enlightenment’s promise toward emancipation from ignorance and its humanist principles of reason and equality.35 Can there be reliable, accurate, or adequate representations of the event that do not reinstantiate the instrumental logic that enabled the Holocaust in the first place?36 This epistemological problem, first articulated in 1944 by the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of the Enlightenment), and further developed by Adorno in subsequent works, has proven generative of an immense body of scholarship.37 The anthropology of tourism certainly affords a window onto one way of confronting the genocide, but like any window, it cannot uncover what lies outside of its frame. The questions arising from Holocaust tourism exceed any anthropological inquiry into touristic practices and cultural transfers between the foreign and the native.38
Anthropology is hardly unique in its limitations; if anything, the field