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Historical-themed guided tours are a basic format of the touristic storytelling industry. By understanding them as spatially bound rituals of collective gazing in which images of the past are drawn collaboratively by the guide and the tourists, this article argues that guided tours provide a lens through which to examine the making of history. Focusing on commercial communism tours in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava, the article shows that the promise to bodily experience the communist past via immersion enables ludic performances that can both strengthen and unsettle historical images. As a paradoxical result, communism tours evoke both nostalgia for a simple, easily understandable world and a negative image of an unwanted, difficult past.
Keywords: tourism; memory; public history; guided tours; communist heritage; performance; authenticity
Global tourism constantly (re)produces stereotypes of cultural difference, and tourism scholars widely agree that the travel industry constitutes a "vehicle of Othering par excellence."1 Since its beginning, tourism has embedded images of the Other in an idea of spatial asynchronicity, with premodern life being the object of a nostalgic longing for the untouched, for the authentic. Especially in ethnic tourism, various stakeholders actively market primitivism and contribute to images of colonial nostalgia or even the "noble savage." Yet contemporary city tourism also conflates spatial with temporal images of alterity. Although anthropologists have not only researched the implications of such problematic projections of differences but also reflected on the discipline's own entanglement with tourism practices, the relationship between tourism and public history is still undertheorized.
This article aims to take a closer look at the (re)production of spatiotemporal otherness in contemporary tourism by analyzing a historical-themed tourist niche characterized by a specific "Western gaze": communist heritage tourism. It focuses on guided city tours as a basic format of sightseeing to enrich our understanding of the impact of tourism practices on memory making. To this end, I start from the assumption that touristic modes of memory are essentially different from other forms of popular memory (such as television or novels): tourism involves all human senses; it demands physical movement and a significant separation from everyday life.2 In addition, it is concerned with a specific quest for authenticity in different respects. Therefore, this article argues that, to understand the impact of tourism practices...