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Memorial sites are vernacular spaces that are continuously negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed into meaningful places. Through in-depth interviews, photographs, and graffiti, the author compares the 9/11 memorial with other hurtful sites to show how tourists construct knowledge through performative activities.

Memorial sites, sites of \"dark tourism,\" are vernacular spaces that are continuously negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed into meaningful places. Using the locale of the 9/11 tragedy, Joy Sather-Wagstaff explores the constructive role played by tourists in understanding social, political, and emotional impacts of a violent event that has ramifications far beyond the local population. Through in-depth interviews, photographs, graffiti, even souvenirs, she compares the 9/11 memorial with other hurtful sites-the Oklahoma City National Memorial, Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, and others-to show how tourists construct and disperse knowledge through performative activities, which make painful places salient and meaningful both individually and collectively.

Historical sites that commemorate tragic events are not automatically commemorative or otherwise historically salient important simply because a disastrous event occurred; they are instead places that are continuously negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed into meaningful places through ongoing human action. While usually understood as static places of \"official\" cultural expression (history and memory), they are actually sites that both generate and are informed by official, public and individual memory and historicity through acts of local and non-local place consumption. In this dissertation I analyze such consumption through the lens of tourist practices and perspectives, focusing primarily on the former site of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City. Rather than representing a passive, socially destructive, and morbid \"dark tourism,\" tourists' dynamic cultural practices and experiences on-site and post-visit are instead argued to be a means for marking and making commemorative sites historically salient for official, public, and individual memory and historicity. My dissertation has four interrelated objectives necessary to generating an understanding of tourism and tourists as legitimate components in the social construction of commemorative places. First, I identify and question current distinctions and paradigms regarding tourists and tourism, specifically the scholarly perspectives that view consumption and tourism in general as destructive or inauthentic rather than socially constructive in any manner. As a result, I offer a theory on tourist consumption that both builds upon and diverges from existing theories on authenticity, consumption, and meaning within the multi-disciplinary realm of tourism studies. Second, my approach to consumption is one that is based on ethnographically derived empirical evidence. From within tourism studies and specifically the anthropology of tourism and museums, my research departs from most existing studies in that I center tourists as my focal ethnographic subjects, something that numerous scholars have called for but few have actually done. This allowed for a richer understanding of the powerful experientiality of and social effects resulting from actual encounters with commemorative landscapes, museum exhibits, photographs, and souvenirs. A focus on what tourists actually do, say, and feel both on-site and post-visit enables a rich understanding of consumptive practices as socially constructive and meaningful. In focusing on a mobile population, I also contribute to expanding our methodological toolkit and traditional definitions of fieldsite(s) and fieldwork. Third, in examining the contemporary material and visual culture of travel and museums as a means through which identities, memory, and historicity are constructed over time and in space, I focus ethnographically on individuals' use of such culture rather than limit my analysis solely to the objects and images. This approach contributes to our understanding of identity, memory, historicity as dynamic, processual, mediated through polysensory experiential and narrative practices, and highly varied over time, space and communities of belonging. Fourth, in looking to the materiality and visuality of memory as expressed through vernacular practices such as folk epigraphy, commemorative assemblages and photography, I trace the popularization and formalization of such practices as contemporary phenomena for making both places and selves. As commemorative places of scale continue to emerge and incorporate vernacular memory practices and a memory industry geared towards personal historiography in the everyday grows, my work contributes to further understanding the dialogical relationships between place and identity-making across social and individual spheres.

‘Memory’ eludes any neat definition. It is as difficult to define as it is for any one of us to stop and consciously note its use as we engage, as part of our human being-ness, in our everyday memorywork of collecting, recollecting and employing knowledge gained through experiences in and of the past. In human practice, memory, perhaps at its most basic, may be defined as acts of recounting or remembering experienced events, a conceptualization of memory as something intangible but performed in some manner over space and time. Yet memory is also simultaneously agentic in that it is an aspect of the social construction, production and performance of everyday, lived social life which, by extension, includes heritage and identity. This is memory manifested through forms of memorywork, ranging from individual reverie and oral narratives to physical individual or collective performances such as dance or the enactment of daily routines, secular and religious rituals, or festival celebrations.

On September 9, 2006, I returned to New York for my yearly anniversary visit. This year was particularly important, because it was the fifth anniversary of the attacks. I noticed an unusually large number of young people milling about in my hotel lobby and on the sidewalk outside. They appeared to know one another, blending themselves into small groups that stayed together and then separated again, whereas most tour groups of size tend to cluster together tightly in hotel lobbies. What was even more unusual was that these people were almost all male, and all were wearing similar black T-shirts illustrated with 9/11 iconography. Once I arrived at the WTC site, I learned that they were representatives of the 9/11 Truth Movement from around the country. They were here planning to stage the largest protest at the WTC to date, calling for transparency regarding the events of 9/11, citing conspiracy, and requiring an end to the national and global inequality and political power struggles that they believe enabled this tragedy. 1

The performative activities that mark visitor's presence in commemorative memoryscapes, are they that of the WTC or other sites, include graffiti and other epigraphical forms of literally marking the site, the making of commemorative folk assemblages, the purchase of souvenirs, and taking photographs. At both the WTC and the Oklahoma City sites, this range of folk epigraphy is a means for speaking to and of the dead and expressing individual and collective sentiments regarding the events and their aftermath in current contexts. Contrary to what is often assumed, the WTC site is not wholly dominated by a single political, formal commemorative narrative of victims, heroism, and patriotism. At the WTC and other temporary sites some visitor markings are actively promoted and archived in highly creative ways by both individuals and various civic organizations not directly involved with oversight of the commemorative sites.

Material and visual culture are devices for memory and identity representation, narration, performance, and reenactment in public spaces and in tourist's post-visit domestic and work spaces. The photographs taken by these visitors are an enduring material representation of what Kugelmass describes in his texta deeply meaningful pilgrimage to a sacralized place where participation in rituals that mark membership in particular religious communities of identity are tightly linked to national identities. After having located a soldier's name on the wall, visitors would ask one of the National Parks Services guides to make a rubbing of the name or to provide them the materials for doing so. Souvenirs do serve as material connection to specific places and experiences regardless of what forms they take. Pictures taken and souvenirs collected during travel inhabit multiple spaces and serve as material and visual culture that \"make special\" the experiences, lives, memories, and identities of those who collect, display, and use this visual and material culture.

This chapter discusses a number of issues with both museums and memorial sites as places of collection of the material and visual culture of tragedy and of the public places for recollecting memories and constructing historicities. And as with the contest of meaning over what these material landscape elements should mean or do mean and what should or should not be included in commemorative landscapes, the display of the material culture of tragedy in local and national museums. Terrence Duffy, writing on museums of human suffering, says that exhibitions on such topic are \"implicitly controversial, since human rights cannot be easily separated from the political domain\". As Paul Williams notes, visitors come to memorial museums \"with a sense of history personal conscience then becomes the reference point for a dialogue with what we physically encounter\". The visual images chosen for display in the Oklahoma City Memorial Museum represent only a tiny fraction of the photographic collection held in the vast.

Booklets, pins, flags, postcards, and gold-plated crosses like the one propped up on the World Trade Center (WTC) site are just an offering of what can be bought at WTC site. As indicated in the first epigraph, street vending around the WTC site is seen by some as a form of insensitive opportunism and blood-stained capitalism. In particular it prevents people from understanding how the processes of commemoration and memorialization that are expected to be exempt from the realms of commodification and consumption do occur in these realms with both positive and negative results, not just destructive ones. In the frameworks that guide many scholars of tourism, it is precisely this artificial manipulation of the sign and its resultant inauthenticity in the form of superficial and contrived experiences that is so highly problematic. Consumption is the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape.

The former site of the WTC towers is a destination for tourist and local visitation both despite and because of the absence of the iconic twin skyscrapers that were once a key New York City tourist attraction. Scholars of tourism have begun to delineate tourist destinations that are sites of or places that represent death, violence, and disaster as part of a specific phenomenon: \"thanatourism\", or more popularly and as previously noted, \"dark tourism\". As Peter Slade writes of Australian and New Zealander tourists at the battlefield of Gallipoli, the feelings they have \"in respect to the dead are not likely to be for the dead as about them\". The position that consumption is equivalent to an erasure of the \"real\" and to superficiality is foregrounded in Sharon Zukin's essay on New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. With a cynical nod to the American super-shopper and the mall-riddled US landscape, Rall also includes a \"Mall of the Martyr\".