Gateway and garden : a kind of tourism in Bali

Generally speaking, the heritage places encountered by tourists are clearly defined spaces featuring architectural or archaeological remains, these remains being the central focus of the visitor's attention. This is the case at places like Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City. Even where heritage comes in the form of cultural landscapes - the Banawe rice terraces, Chinatown in Malacca, the ruins of the former Thai capital, Ayutthaya - these are spatially circumscribed and clearly distinguished physically from what surrounds them. Framed in terms of heritage tourism, heritage places often take the form of what Tim Edensor (1998, 2001) has described as 'enclavic' spaces, meaning they are 'single-purpose' places carefully managed to focus the visitor's attention on the heritage items and 'minimize underlying ambiguity and contradiction' (Edensor 2001: 63). Such places are eminently visitable. The subject of the first part of this chapter is a kind of heritage not so easily visitable and not enclavic in Edensor's terms. It comprises the physical traces of events that occurred during the Cold War in Asia, events which in the decades after they occurred were subject to censorship and sanctions against public acts of remembering, amounting to an imposed forgetfulness. The events saw the violent mass death of civilians at the hands of the state during circumstances of political polarisation in which other fractions of the civilian population were either complicit in the suffering and death of the victims or unsympathetic to their fate. This was the case with the massacre of civilians in Bali in late-1965 and early-1966, which took place as part of the Indonesian army's purge of communists. Unlike some other instances of the mass killing of civilians (the Jewish Holocaust obviously comes to mind) the violence in Bali was not spatially concentrated at nodal sites. There were no centralised death camps. The killings were dispersed at numerous sites across the island and there was no dedicated infrastructure created to facilitate them. The heritage of the events of 1965-66 is not, then, 'visitable' at particular sites. Not merely is it not visitable, for the most part it is not even visible- it exists 'below the thresholds at which visibility begins' (de Certeau 1984: 93). It seems unlikely that even an interested and historically informed tourist would succeed in finding any physical traces of these events. And yet, insofar as the whole island in 1965-66 was gripped by a violence that directly or indirectly extended everywhere, there is a sense in which millions of us today, by going to Bali as tourists, do unconsciously visit the 'heritage' of the killings. Many of the older Balinese we as tourists see on the island today, working in the fields, walking to the temples or sitting on the beach, experienced the events of 1965-66 or even participated in them. With an eye to the theme of the present volume, I pose the question of what potential there exists for a tourist to communicate with the human dimension of this history. By this I mean communication in the form of empathy, distinct from or in addition to any effort that might be made to achieve a political or intellectual understanding of the events. I am aware that governments and non-governmental institutions sometimes mount determined campaigns to encourage people to empathise with those in the past who experienced traumatic events. Graham Carr (2003: 65-8), for instance, describes various efforts to encourage Canadian students to empathise with the D-Day experience of Canadian soldiers on the Normandy beaches in June 1944, efforts which extend to staging pilgrimages to those beaches. While places and physical traces certainly also play a central role in my discussion, I am more interested in the possibilities of an empathy that is voluntary rather than encouraged or coerced. Meaghan Morris (2006: 5) has urged scholars in the humanities to develop a 'critical proximity' to their subject matter, as distinct from the usual critical distance that 'objective', instrumentalist academic writing usually strives for (see also Simon 2010). I am interested in the potential of heritage tourism to put people in situations of critical proximity to past events and perhaps precipitate them into moments of empathy with past others.