Tourism imaginaries and the selective perception of visitors: Postcolonial heritage in Con Dao Islands, Vietnam
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Identifying the reasons why people visit places associated with death and suffering remains a key stake of dark tourism research. Such research, however, remains largely framed by Anglo-American perspectives and assumes visitors largely hail from the West. Less is known about the motivations of dark tourists from developing countries. This paper contributes to the debate by examining the case of tourism in Con Dao Archipelago, Vietnam. Once labeled as a ‘Hell on Earth’, the island is a famous site of both postcolonial and natural heritage, displaying former colonial prisons, prisoners’ cemeteries and memorials. Over the past five years, pilgrimage tours to the tomb of Co Sau, a national hero, in Hang Duong cemetery have increasingly attracted visitors from the Vietnamese mainland. Focusing on both the supply and demand sides of dark tourism, the research uses the theoretical lens of tourism imaginaries and visitors’ selective perception to investigate what attracted people to these tours. Document analysis, ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with key informants show that a complicated set of factors (tourism commodification, geographic location, culture and beliefs) intersect to influence the emergence and transformation of penal sites’ imaginaries in Con Dao Islands. Despite being presented with three different imaginaries of Con Dao, visitors from Vietnam are engaged in a form of ‘spiritual tourism’ focused on the sacred element of the martyrs’ deaths and suffering, making this their main reason for visiting the island. The popularity of spiritual tours in Con Dao thus underlines the importance of looking at the islands’ heritages beyond Western conceptions of dark and resort tourism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".