ethnographic essay

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Recommended: Tourism development: a blessing or a curse

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to analyze how the tourism sector may have contributed in pushing Batam’s local history to the back. Tourism have been generally accepted as an industry that brings positive changes and benefits, which includes economic growth and structural development if it is looked at from the macro level perspective. However, when looked at the micro level, there are bound to be some costs that these ‘lower levels of participants or stakeholders’ have to bear like for example local exploitation and environmental loss and destruction. One of the key factors in ensuring a destination becomes a successful tourist attraction destination is the destination image (Hunt, 1975). Through this created image, potential and returning tourists will then be able to decide on a suitable place for them to visit (Baloglu & McCleary, 1999). In this essay, the argument to be brought forth is that a destination’s local historical heritage may be hidden and forgotten in the process of marketing or image-making.

Location history

The location went to for the purpose of this essay is the island of Batam, Indonesia. This island roughly the same size as Singapore had a rag-to-riches story when a free trade zone was declared in 1989 and another with Singapore in 2006. Due to the tourists’ experiences as well as the image created by the local tourism promotion board (batam.com, 2012), Batam have come to be known as a shoppers’ paradise with its numerous shopping malls and luxury resorts.

Trip

The trip taken spanned over 3 days was to the island of Batam. Accomodation was located in the island center Nagoya, where the main bulk of the tourists and locals can be found. On the second day, a visit to the Galang Refugee Camp locat...

... middle of paper ...

...3) (Foley & Lennon, 1996). Introduction of such a place would bring about benefits in two ways, first, possible financial gains from the visitors to the island and secondly preservation of the site of the camp.

The concept of image making have been widely researched upon in the academic field with various articles bring forth new theories, frameworks and models (Baloglu & McCleary, 1999) (Gallarza, Saura, & Garcia, 2002) (Hunt, 1975), the concept of dark tourism is still relatively untouched in terms of the motivations of visitors for visiting the places, whether it’s supply- or demand-driven. As mentioned in the essay, although there have been proposed motivators, these points needs to be tested and verified scientifically. Since a big portion of the concept is yet to determined, there is still a big gap in the understanding process of this niche form of tourism

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