Heritage of death: Emotion, memory and practice

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes a new landscape of death around an older death site through online activity. It details highly diverse and ambiguous responses in the locally affected area in tension with a very particular form of dark tourism among international visitors. The book considers the problem of cemetery conservation by England's official heritage office, English Heritage. The many heritages of death change in shape, content and effect over time. Heritages of death are vernacular as well as official, sanctioned as well as alternative. And, importantly, death is one of a growing range of phenomena that has been adapted and heritagized to suit the tourism industry. Tourism's direct and celebratory approach to death is otherwise peculiar in modern, Western society given its oft-observed reticence toward mortality.