Heritage That Hurts

Joy Sather-Wagstaff is an assistant professor of anthropology at North Dakota State University. Her research focuses on tourists' experiences at memorial museums and commemorative landscapes, material, visual and intangible culture, memory, community history collection, vernacular photography, cultures of collecting, and disasters. Her publications include: Beyond Content: Thematic, Discourse-centred Qualitative Methods for Analysing Visual Data (forthcoming in 2010, in An Introduction to Visual Research Methods in Tourism); Folk Epigraphy as Intangible Heritage at the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City and Beyond (2009, in Intangible Heritage Embodied); Picturing Experience: A Tourist-centred Perspective on Commemorative Historical Sites. (2008, Tourist Studies: An International Journal).

• Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Memory, Space/Place, Tourism: Paradigms and Problems; Chapter 3 Unpacking “Dark” Tourism; Chapter 4 Consumption, Meaning, Commemoration; Chapter 5 Marking Memorial Spaces, Making Dialogic Memoryscapes; Chapter 6 The Material Culture of Violence and Commemoration in Public Display; Chapter 7 The Social Life of Things: Material and Visual Culture of Travel and Personal Historiography; Chapter 8 Conclusion: The Contest of Meaning and Cultures of Commemoration;

"As an anthropologist, tourist, and artist, Sather-Wagstaff investigates the traumatic events of 9/11 as a site of contested meaning. Her exercise in visual ethnography examines the various social practices of tourists in their engagement with the tangible and intangible essence of 'heritage that hurts.' This innovative study adds substantively to the evolving role of the 9/11 events and, in doing so, embarks on new methodological and theoretical approaches. Appropriately illustrated, referenced, and indexed. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries." --CHOICE "...the book leads us to consider the fascinating question of why and how we are driven to construct and visit sites that memorialize mass death and horrific tragedy, and what uniquely human needs are fulfilled when we do so."... --Museum Magazine "Drawing on five years of intermittent ethnographic research at the WTC site, and analysis of in-depth interviews, photographs, graffiti, and souvenirs, Sather-Wagstaff compares the 9/11 memorial with other dark tourism sites--the Oklahoma City National Memorial, Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, and others--to show how tourists construct and disperse knowledge through performative activities, which make painful places meaningful both individually and collectively. The analysis reveals the complex cultural mediation of suffering at such sites, particularly with regard to consumer practices such as purchasing commemorative items and souvenirs. As such, the book makes important contributions to the anthropology of suffering and the anthropology of material culture, as well as the anthropology of tourism. See the full review: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=4223"--Rebecca Forgash, Anthropology Review Database