Interpretation in the heritage context has been defined as a set of communication techniques
with varied degrees of effectiveness which can be used to convey particular messages to
groups of people (Uzzell, 1992). Interpretation in this sense is an adjunct to the
communications industry and so the heritage industry can be said to be ‘in the business of
mass communication, and the boundary between museums and media, and that between
reality and fantasy, between myth and mimesis in both sets of institutions is becoming
increasingly blurred, increasingly indistinct’ (Silverstone, cited in Uzzell, 1992:138).
Horne (1984, cited in Hollinshead, 1999:271) develops on the argument of the use of
interpretation at tourism attractions and destinations as broadcasting media to influence
visitor understanding and perceptions in reflecting that:
“…when peoples, nations and even whole continents are made real or authenticated in or by tourism they constitute ideologically constructed places and iconologically appropriate spaces; imagination and re-imagination in the business of tourism and representation and evocation in public culture are so frequently coterminous agendas”
The memorial operation has been described in the heritage context as self-contained, and
detached from daily life (Young, 1993). It has been suggested that the illusion of memory will
always be there to remind us and that we take leave of these memories and return only at our
convenience so that the memorial does our memory work for us (Ibid). Such agendas have
been the subject of academic inquiry into the representation of culture (or ideologically
comment on the highly emotional contagion effect that the Auschwitz ‘visitor experience’ has
on the visiting public. The authors point out that much of the tour taken by the visiting public
has been constructed to maximise audience engagement. For example, the famous gate with
signage above reading ‘Arbeiten Macht Du Frei’ (‘work will set you free’) has been imported
from its original position to a location near the end of the tour to create a ‘high’ (or perhaps
low) point and a controversial conclusion to the ‘experience’. Other artefacts and structures
have been imported from various peripheral sections of the camp and set out in such a way as
to create a ‘chronologically correct’ tour amounting to a slow crescendo of increasingly
challenging interpretation. Indeed Lennon and Foley (Ibid) note that the ‘main gate’ into the
camp is in fact some five kilometres into the site of the original site as it was ‘found’.
It is the manipulation of interpretation and consequent visitor reactions through the enforcing
of various political and social agendas inherent in interpretive techniques that concern realist
and Marxist authors such as Horne (1984, cited in Hollinshead, 1999:271) who states:
“Such rapid and repeated projections of the authenticities of the public culture of peoples, of places and of pasts have an almost untraced potential in the contemporary age to bedazzle and bewitch ‘the modern pilgrims’ of tourism”
Horne (Ibid:271) argues that ‘projected’ authenticity can make all kinds of visitable objects
dangerously transcendent and even ‘silly, deadening or deprived’. He suggests that the seeing
of people and places can prodigiously be used to arouse sincere and genuine curiosity about
the world, or it can spread its own ‘wanton and material sickness’. Whitmarsh (2001) takes the
argument into the context of British war museums questioning the preference of these
institutions to present technological marvels, such as tanks and aeroplanes whilst too often
eschewing the human costs of war. Such museums, he suggests, have traditionally exhibited
technology, not only because it confers major military advantage and social progress, but also
because it represents a safe, sanitised version of war and is ‘easy to digest’ for visitors. The
precisely measured and are seldom the subject of moral debate. The author points out that
military uniforms are also predominantly on display in order to further represent the
legerdemain of warfare in museums. Uzzell, 1989 (cited in Whitmarsh Ibid: 5) records his
astonishment at ubiquitous exhibits of uniforms in war museums stating that it is ‘...as if the
most remarkable thing about so many thousands, if not millions of people killed in battle is the
clothes in which they died’.
To develop on dilemmas over the uses of interpretation and dilemmas over authenticity, some
authors have explored tourism discourses that are linked to visitor interpretation at dark
tourism sites at the level of the marketed destination. For example, Siegenthaler (2003) carried
out Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse the salient representations of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in Japanese guide books. His observations of the various images and texts exposed
the centrality of what he called ‘site sacralisation’ in the sense that both destinations are
advertised as ‘sacred’ places and victimhood is never referenced. The bombings themselves
are seldom referred to in the guide books and are instead presented as events outside of time
or historical circumstance. Interestingly, Siegenthaler concludes that the guide books respond
to attitudes surrounding the sites that they cover. If juxtaposed with research into western
dark tourism sites, he suggests, a key difference is that interpretation in the West tends to
elicit visitor reactions (as a form of ‘reactive interpretation’) whereas in Japan, and specifically
in terms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reactions to tragedy inherent in discourse in various
genres dictate subsequent representations in such formal narratives as guide books. Some
further approaches to methodology in the pursuit of knowledge around dark tourism are