Asia Pacic Viewpoint, Vol. 49, No.

3, December 2008
ISSN 1360-7456, pp318330

Dutiful tourism: Encountering the

Cambodian genocide
Rachel Hughes
Department of Resource Management and Geography, Melbourne School of Land and Environment,
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Email: hughesr@unimelb.edu.au

Abstract: This paper considers contemporary international tourism to a genocide museum in

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It argues that existing theorisations of dark tourism are inadequate for the
task of understanding the motivations, actions and experiences of visitors in such a place, or of such
sites as contested international institutions. The paper is concerned with the ways in which visiting
practices encouraged at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes in the immediate post-genocide
period (the 1980s) continue to affect visiting practices in the present. Moreover, the absence of
familiar curatorial practices and technologies of interpretation leads contemporary visitors to conceive of the space of the museum and their visit in unexpected ways. The dutiful comportment of
visitors at Tuol Sleng both supports and challenges the moral geographies enacted by contemporary
travel.
Keywords:

Cambodia, dark tourism, genocide, moral geographies, museum visitors

Introduction
Cambodia routinely appears in registers of dangerous destinations. From news magazine headlines like Pol Pot Park (Lyall, 2002) to academic
theories of dark tourism (Lennon and Foley,
2000), Cambodia is touted as a new form of
tourism destination. This paper seeks to critique
the current analytic categories and explanations
provided by tourism studies, especially as they
are applied to tourism in Cambodia. I examine
tourism to Cambodias national genocide
museum, the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide
Crimes, to raise questions about the salience
and operation of the term dark tourism.
Drawing on interviews and observations of
tourists at the museum,1 I discuss the specic
narratives and imaginaries that enable tourists
travel to, and experience of, this site. I attend to
particular motivations and to affect as a desirable element of tourists experience of the
museum. I argue that in place of the catch-all
label of dark tourism, more empirically
grounded analyses might better explain what
is, in practice, an array of tourisms, each
entailing different histories, geographies, tourist
2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Victoria University of Wellington

subjectivities and specic, embodied performances that continually (re)produce both dark
places and their visitors.
Theorising morality and mobility
Travel has long inspired debates about morality
and morals, especially concerning different
travel styles and the realities they appear to
conrm. As Judith Adler argues:
[T]ravel styles link representations of reality
with deliberately cultivated forms of subjectivity, throwing the traveller as a gure into relief
as well as charting the ground against which
this gure moves. (Adler, 1989: 1384)

In recent times, many scholars have made links

between transformations in travel forms and
travel availability and the different meanings
given to mobility under postmodernity (Kaplan,
1996; Clifford, 1997; Rojek and Urry, 1997;
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Cresswell, 2006).
Such work has explored mobile subjectivities
as key elements of (post)colonial, diasporic and
transnational conditions. Of all mobile gures,
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8373.2008.00380.x

Encountering the Cambodian genocide

however, leisurely ones, such as the tourist or

traveller, remain the most maligned and are
often cast as amoral. Zygmunt Bauman levels
one of the more hyperbolic charges:
No-one but the tourist is so blatantly, conspicuously dissolved in numbers, interchangeable,
depersonalised. . . . Moral proximity, responsibility and the uniqueness irreplaceability of
the moral subject are triune; they wont survive
(or, rather, they shouldnt have been born)
without each other. Moral responsibility vanishes when everybody does it . . . The tourist
is bad news for morality. (Bauman, 1996: 54)

Bauman considers the tourist as an allegorical

gure an every person of postmodernity and
twins the tourist with the vagabond. He suggests that both these gures seem to respond
sensibly to the chances our times offer and the
ambushes they hold (Bauman, 1996: 52).2 But
the gure of the promiscuous, amoral tourist
fails to explain tourism to places that are decidedly un-fun, places that appear to prompt
experiences of critical reection and sombre
remembrance.
With such sombre tourisms in his sights, Jim
Butcher (2003) nominates the new moral
tourist for scholarly attention: the tourist who
consciously seeks to mitigate against what are
perceived to be the exploitative and harmful
effects of mass tourism on host environments
and cultures. New moral tourists promote and
participate in alternative (and generally smallscale) tourisms. According to Butcher, it is the
perceived fragility of host sites and societies in
the face of increased tourism the ubiquitous
discourse of the tourism onslaught that has
produced this new breed of travellers. The
obvious detrimental effects of modern mass
tourism, Butcher argues, leads new moral tourists to deliberate about how and where they
should travel. As Butcher himself recognises,
some of his arguments with regard to this group
echo those already made about the posttourist: the tourist who rejects all claims to
authenticity and considers travel to be a series
of games or texts that can be played (Urry, 1990:
11). John Urry considers destinations such as
the Leprosy Museum in Bergen, the Japanese
Death Railway in Burma and the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin as typical of the out of the
ordinary experiences demanded by post 2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Victoria University of Wellington

tourists (Urry, 1990: 11). Urry has more

recently added the following places to his register of unexpected destinations:
Alaska, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Antarctica especially in Millennium-year, Changi Jail in Singapore, Nazi Occupation sites in the Channel
Islands, Dachau, extinct coal mines, Cuba
and especially its colonial and American
heritages, Iceland, Mongolia, Mount Everest,
Northern Ireland, Northern Cyprus under
Turkish occupation, Pearl Harbour, postcommunist Russia, Robben Island in South
Africa, Sarajevos massacre trail, outer space,
Titanic [and] Vietnam (Urry, 2003: 2).

Chris Rojek also runs together a series of disparate sites in advancing his notion of Black Spots
as disaster sites and sites of notable deaths:
Examples include the Auschwitz death
camp, the killing elds of Cambodia, Dealey
Plaza in Dallas where John F. Kennedy was
assassinated . . . (Rojek, 1997: 62)

Sites of war and other forms of mass political

violence are disproportionately represented,
and yet undertheorised, in Urry and Rojeks
accounts.
John Lennon and Malcolm Foleys study Dark
Tourism (Lennon and Foley, 2000) attempts to
account for interest in places and sites linked to
violence, war and signicant loss of life. Like
Rojek, Lennon and Foley make passing reference to Cambodia, and note the existence of
Tuol Sleng as The Museum of Human Genocide, Cambodia (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 25,
163). They trace the production of interest in
dark places through global communication
technologies, arguing that global, mediatised
representations of such places allow hosts to
commodify and promote historical sites in order
to secure tourists impulse purchases. According to Lennon and Foley (2000: 23), tourists at
dark tourism sites include: specialists who
are not a crucial, or even important, part of
dark tourism, those who visit due to serendipity, the itinerary of tour companies and those
who are merely curious [and] happen to be in
the vicinity. Questions of tourist agency (over
serendipity) and tourists complex motivations
and experiences (over mere curiosity) regarding travel to sites of violence are largely elided.
319

R. Hughes

Lennon and Foley argue that dark tourism is

an intimation of post-modernity, but subsequently remark that they do not wish to enter
into any philosophical debate over the use of
this term except to recognise the signicant
aspects of post-modernity which are broadly
taken to represent its main features (Lennon
and Foley, 2000: 11). Such statements reveal a
refusal on their part to engage with prior theorisations of tourism that draw sophisticated links
between postmodernity and mobility, and theorisations of war tourism more specically (see
for example Diller and Scodio, 1994). What is
missed in this refusal is the recognition that
international tourism can rarely be thought of
if not through war and violence (Diller and
Scodio, 1994: 25; Smith, 1997). Far from the
reication of dark tourism as a largely unidirectional and unprecedented form of leisure
mobility, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scodios
analysis traces the symbiosis between tourism
and war in terms of the historic movements of
armies, travel as a key element of armed forces
recruitment strategies, the protraction of war
through tourism, and the explicit targeting of
tourism sites and industries by warring states
(see also Van Den Abbeele, 1994).
I consider the label dark tourism and theories that position tourism as either morally decient or morally surpassing to miss the analytic
mark as explanations of tourisms to specic
sites of mass political violence. It is not enough
to suggest that contemporary tourists are interested in such places because they offer out of
the ordinary experiences in a world of touristic
play both at home and abroad. Detailed case
studies of dark destinations are far fewer
than are passing references to such sites in the
pursuit of general theories and typologies. This
is especially true of dark places outside of
Europe and North America. Where such sites
are examined, tourisms of war and violence
tend to be characterised as contributing to the
commodication and sanitisation of war and
violence (Henderson, 2000; Kennedy and Williams, 2001; but see as exceptions: Alneng,
2002; Colvin, 2003). Analyses of non-Western
sites are often engaged in a kind of double
denigration: of tourists for their apparent passivity in being led to such sites, and of national
governments and cultural institutions of other
(often post-conict) countries for developing
320

protable sites that politicise historical events.

Such analyses imply that the development of
such sites is propagandist rather than curatorial,
but fail to critically investigate the concept of
propaganda or acknowledge that the same
criticisms can and have been levelled at major
metropolitan museums and sites in the West
(see for example Charlesworth, 1994; Hurley
and Trimarco, 2004).
This paper takes its theoretical bearings
instead from studies that have reinvigorated the
concept of moral geographies in relation to
travel and citizenship (Matless, 1994, 1997)
and colonial philanthropy (Lambert and Lester,
2004), as well as from work on the performativity of tourism and other forms of mobility (see
Desforges, 2000; Crouch, 2001, 2004; Cresswell, 2006). There have been consistent calls
for attention to norms, ethics and morality in
the discipline of geography since the 1970s,
especially around questions of social justice
(see Jackson, 1984; Driver, 1988; Smith, 1997,
2000; Proctor, 1998). David Matless reconsiders
moral geographies through detailed attention
to mobile gures. Matless shows that particular
leisure pursuits in the English countryside were
historically presented in terms of the necessary
production of the modern citizen and constituted a set of embodied practices and representations or moral geographies (Matless, 1994,
1997). Matless himself warns that it is not easy
to make analogies between England of the
1930s and 1940s when landscape and its
pleasures are set up primarily in terms of the
nation (Matless, 1997: 141) to contemporary
places. In place of the nation, he observes, citizenship and belonging have increasingly clustered around local and global environments
(Matless, 1997: 141).
It is to a global site and discourses of humanitarian belonging that my analysis turns. In place
of the national citizen travelling into the
national countryside, I consider international
tourists travelling to and through a specic overseas institution and memorial site. Of note are
those narratives and affects that are linked to
extra-national or geopolitical discourses and
also to discourses of global humanitarianism
and memorialisation. Lambert and Lester refer
to channels of compassion linking the west and
its colonial periphery that were instituted
above all by colonial philanthropists and pro 2008 The Author
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Encountering the Cambodian genocide

ductively suggest that these moralities of closeness, distance and connection are relevant
to contemporary humanitarian mobilisations
(Lambert and Lester, 2004: 322323). I now
turn to moralities of closeness, distance and
connection at Cambodias Tuol Sleng Museum
of Genocide Crimes, beginning with a sketch of
the place of the museum within contemporary
tourism in Cambodia.
Promoting Tuol Sleng Museum of
genocide crimes
For more than a decade now, tourism has provided an important source of foreign capital for
Cambodia. Visitor arrivals to Cambodia in 2000
(when research was conducted for this study)
totalled 466 365, a gure which represented a
27% increase on 1999 arrivals. Visitor arrivals in
the Royal Kingdom exceeded one million in
2004, representing a 50% increase on the previous year (Royal Government of Cambodia,
2005). The capital city of Phnom Penh continues to play a gateway role for tourism to the
rest of the country, despite the direct ights now
available from major southeast Asian cities to
the northern Cambodian city of Siem Reap,
home of the famed Angkor temples.
Discourses of Cambodias darkness and
intrigue draw heavily on the Phantasmatic
Indochina of French colonial rule in mainland
southeast Asia, an imaginative geography
whose luminous aura sustains . . . erotic fantasies and perpetuates exotic adventures of a
bygone era (Norindr, 1996: 1). More recently,
lm and television portrayals of the political
grouping known as the Khmer Rouge led by
the notorious Pol Pot have inected this exotic
imaginary with the brutality that characterised
Khmer Rouge rule between 1975 and 1979.3
Media reports of the peacebuilding undertaken
by the United Nations in the country in the
early 1990s, and of ensuing hostilities between
Cambodias main political parties, contribute
to a widely held perception that Cambodia is a
politically unstable place.4 The abduction and
murder of internationals by the Khmer Rouge is
sometimes noted by tourists when discussing
their prior perceptions of Cambodia. These
associations of Cambodia with violence, danger
and dependency are amplied by representations and practices generated from within Cam 2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Victoria University of Wellington

bodias burgeoning tourism industry (Williams,

2004; Winter, 2006; Wood, 2006). The most
ubiquitous souvenir of tourism in Cambodia is
the Danger: [Land] Mines sign with its stark
skull and crossbones motif.5 Tim Winter draws
attention to:
the allure Cambodia holds as a place of insurrection and danger. Sales of T-shirts emblazoned with images of military ordinance or the
words I survived Cambodia illustrate how this
framing is communicated to, and thus circulates across, the broader touristic community.
(Winter, 2006: 45)

While only a small number of tourists take up

the more extreme opportunities offered in
Cambodia such as ring off various types of
weapons at Phnom Penhs shooting range
discursive trips into Cambodia as a heart of
darkness (also a long-standing Phnom Penh
nightclub) remain hugely popular.
The Tuol Sleng Museum in inner city Phnom
Penh occupies the site of S-21 (security facility
21), a Khmer Rouge interrogation and torture
facility central to the conduct of the genocide of
19751979 (Fig. 1). Tuol Sleng was opened in
1980 as a national level memorial site only
months after the end of Khmer Rouge rule.6 It
exhibits photographic portraits of victims, physical structures and instruments used for incarceration and torture, documentary photographs
and maps, and disinterred human remains. The
museum does not appear in Ministry of Tourism
publications.7 Ministry ofcials consider images
of Tuol Sleng and its sister monument, the

Figure 1.

Building A, Tuol Sleng Museum

321

R. Hughes

Figure 2.

Location of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields Memorial,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Choeung Ek Killing Field site southwest of the

city (see Fig. 2), as undesirable for major promotional advertising. The Ministry is concerned
that images of these two national sites may give
322

the impression that Cambodia is not a good

destination for a holiday.8 The view that these
sites should not be marketed to international
visitors is in direct contradiction to government
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Encountering the Cambodian genocide

policy of two decades prior; in 1979 and 1980,

foreign journalists were among Tuol Slengs rst
visitors.9
Beyond the formal representations sponsored
by the Ministry of Tourism, tourists are routinely
directed to Phnom Penhs genocide museum by
publications provided free in bars, restaurants
and guesthouses. In one such publication, the
Phnom Penh Visitors Guide, Tuol Sleng is listed
as one of seven points of interest for tourists in
Phnom Penh. The Visitors Guide states that the
site is:
a former detention and torture facility [that]
has been preserved in the state in which the
KR [sic] left it. (Phnom Penh Visitors Guide,
2000: 4)

Locally produced tourist maps also promote the

museum. Perhaps most importantly, however,
Tuol Sleng is featured in international traveller
guidebooks, including Lonely Planet (Cambodia), Lets Go (Southeast Asia) and the North
American Moon Travel Handbook (Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos), among many others.
Lonely Planet suggests that Tuol Sleng is testament to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge (Taylor
et al., 1996: 82) In the guidebooks Things to
see [in Phnom Penh] section, the museum
appears second only to the National Museum of
Khmer Arts and Culture. The entry for the
museum warns that:
Altogether, a visit to Tuol Sleng is a profoundly
depressing experience . . . wall after wall of
harrowing black-and-white [victim] portraits
conjure up images of humanity at its worst.
Tuol Sleng is not for the squeamish. (Taylor
et al., 1996: 83)

In the context of a travel survival kit (the subtitle for the Lonely Planet series), such a statement implicitly valorises a decision to visit Tuol
Sleng: if travel is something to be survived,
then a warning of difculty might be read as
encouragement. Having consulted their guidebooks, most tourists arrive at Tuol Sleng with
some knowledge of the sites sinister role during
the Khmer Rouge period. They also arrive
with signicant anxiety about how they might
respond to the museum and the expectation that
Tuol Sleng will educate them about Cambodias
recent past.
2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Victoria University of Wellington

To know more: Visiting Tuol Sleng as

an interpretative project
When I asked interviewees directly about their
motivation for coming to the museum Why
have you come to the museum? many paused
before offering a response. Some asked if they
could come back to the question later in the
interview. It became clear that it was impossible
for interviewees to respond by stating that they
had come unthinkingly or indifferently to the
museum. Whether or not their visit was indeed
an impulse purchase of the sort that Lennon
and Foley suggest, it could not be countenanced or reported as such. This pause, and
the normative statements that often followed it,
reveal a moral imperative at work in tourists
relationship to the museum:
Its a stop [on itineraries], a must stop, which is
not [a] bad [thing], not bad at all. Angela:
34-yo female, USA citizen, 7 day visit [Interview 270302].

This imperative posits a visit to the museum as

proper conduct, at least for international visitors
to the country.
Visitors discursive repertoires and dispositions
Tourists narratives of their experience as a
visitor to Tuol Sleng range from direct responses
to the museums displays, to recollections of
past times and places in which they were aware
of Cambodia or the Khmer Rouge (often involving media reports, books or lms), to stories of
experiences of similarly disturbing places. Such
narratives are not generally framed in terms of
meaning. As Gillian Rose observes, interviewees talk instead of practice, process and
the facticity of objects, and for very good critical
reasons (Rose, 1997: 318). I have been mindful
of this gap between talk of practices, processes
and things and any claims to meaning in my
analysis of tourists narratives. Like Rose, I
understand this gap in terms of a specic and
important politics of interviewees interpretative
projects a deliberate openness about what
such a place might mean to different people and
in different times.
Visitors nonetheless make sense of the
museum and their experience there through
various discursive repertoires or imaginaries.
323

R. Hughes

These include: (i) Cambodia as an impoverished

place; (ii) Cambodia as an excessive and paradoxical place (see also Winter, 2006), beautiful
but weighed down by the trauma symbolised by
specic sites like the museum and the generic
spatiality of killing elds;10 (iii) Cambodia as a
pawn of larger geopolitical powers (the former
colonial power of France, the United States of
America, Vietnam); and (iv) Cambodia as a
place of international memorial signicance
necessary to prevent further genocide. While
the rst two discursive repertoires conceive of
Cambodias difference from other nation states
or destinations, responses to the museum are
rarely limited to these. Reports of Cambodias
uniqueness and isolation were often followed
with statements about Cambodias connection
to international events and processes.
These repertoires are tempered by various
affective dispositions (see Jackson, 2001). For
example, while sometimes these imaginaries of
the museum and Cambodia were raised as
uncontroversial, they were just as often cited as
ideas to be opposed or contested. Such imaginaries were rarely discussed in the abstract,
rather they were attached to the facticity of
objects encountered in the museum (museum
signs, photographs, instruments of torture,
walls, shackles, barred windows, paintings by
survivors, human remains, etc.), and to the
embodied and emotional experience of moving
through the various spaces of the museum (see
Fig. 3). Visitors to Tuol Sleng are variously
supportive, studious, disturbed, self-effacing,
sympathetic,
ambivalent,
uncomfortable,

apologetic, cynical, deferential, frustrated,

sceptical, derogatory, prescriptive and excited
in relation to these imaginaries. In their comportment, visitors at the museum are almost
always silent for extended periods of their visit,
and they appear (and speak of being) concerned
to behave appropriately. Many do not feel comfortable taking photographs or video footage
inside the museum, and express shock, revulsion, amazement and sometimes anger as they
move through the various exhibits. I now turn to
the fourth repertoire noted above Cambodia
as a place of international memorial signicance and some of the particular dispositions
associated with this imaginary.

Proximate but unknown: The international

signicance of Cambodia
Visitors to Tuol Sleng cede great importance to
the relatively recent nature of the Cambodian
genocide, often reecting that they were alive
when events depicted at the museum were
taking place:
I remember being on a bus in Detroit . . . going
to work, when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer
Rouge, so I remember that. And then I remember following the [media] reports about what
had happened here . . . Mike: 52 yo male,
USA citizen, NGO worker in Thailand,
12 week visit [Interview 270302].

Another interviewee
distinction:

drew

the

following

If youre looking at the dungeons, fourteenth

century dungeons or something like that and
Ive been many places, a few places like Gallipoli, where lots of people died you just get
a sense of an enormous tragedy, but youre at a
long way away from it. For me . . . youre a
little bit more involved with things [that happened] twenty or thirty years ago. Tim: 27 yo
male, UK citizen, teacher, 6-month visit [Interview 030402].

Figure 3.

324

Victim photographic portraits on display at

Tuol Sleng Museum

Recent historical events are considered more

proximate, and thus of greater interest, than
events outside ones own lifetime. Cambodias
proximity to, or distance from, world attention
during and following the Khmer Rouge period
was a common topic of conversation that fol 2008 The Author
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Encountering the Cambodian genocide

lowed from this observation, and was often

accompanied by expressions of disbelief, exasperation, cynicism or anger. It was generally felt
that too little was known of Cambodias past in
Europe, Australia and North America. A geopolitics that positioned Cambodia as peripheral
to the concerns of other nations and peoples
was acknowledged but criticised:
I mean its so cruel and this happened recently,
and Im surprised that there doesnt [sic]
show more on TV . . . everyone knows about
Hitler . . . and Pol Pot killed three million
. . . but . . . why is it not spread around the
world? Tanya: 36 yo, Swedish citizen, 7-day
visit [Interview 030404].

The rhetoric of Never Again employed by a

number of interviewees, and the comparisons
made between Tuol Sleng and European Holocaust sites and museums elsewhere, drew
Cambodias past into an analytic relation with
European experiences. This is an interpretative
strategy that is encouraged by popular writings
on the Pol Pot period, innumerable mass media
representations and also guidebooks (see
Williams, 2004). Lonely Planet makes a direct
comparison: [l]ike the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge
were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism (Taylor et al., 1996: 83) The Cambodian
Government itself provoked comparisons of the
European Holocaust and Khmer Rouge rule
throughout the 1980s, and Tuol Sleng ofcials
themselves visited sites in East Germany in
198211 (see also Ledgerwood, 1997; Hughes,
2003). On the whole, however, tourists at Tuol
Sleng generally invoked European Holocaust
sites in terms of the emotions they had personally felt during their visits, rather than through a
discussion of any deliberate curatorial link.
The secret bombing of Cambodia conducted
by the United States at the end of the Vietnam
War also remains an important extra-national
narrative for tourists. It too is a narrative set
down in guidebooks, and it is one often
approached through dispositions of shame
and guilt. One interviewee reported that the
museum had led to his thinking about:
how the country [Cambodia] got caught up in
macropolitics, you know, Americans, Chinese,
Vietnamese all [with] their own interests
2008 The Author
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. . . and [it] ended up with Pol Pot. Brian: 36

yo male, UK citizen, social worker, 8 day visit
[Interview 030405].

For others, visiting the museum is an exercise in

testing the status of Cambodia as place of
memory against popular texts that depict the
geopolitics of the mid-1970s (such as the lm
The Killing Fields), as well as against their
own touristic experiences.12 Lennon and Foley
suggest that dark tourism sites introduce
anxiety and doubt about modernity and its
consequences (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 12).
The quotations above demonstrate rather that
anxiety and anger, as well as interest and sympathy, were emotions often experienced before
visitors arrived in Cambodia. Furthermore,
their doubts were associated with much more
immediate and explicitly political concerns
than modernity, including their own countries
complicity in conicts in mainland southeast
Asia in the 1970s, the specic ideology of the
Khmer Rouge, and the role of mass media coverage and their subsequent personal investigations in bringing Cambodia to their own and
others closer attention.
Unassisted passage
Overall, however, tourists generally exit the
museum in a state of confusion. Their desire to
know more about Cambodias past in short to
be directed in an interpretative project
remains largely unrequited. Aside from some
brief text on an initial signboard, there is little at
Tuol Sleng in the way of permanent technologies of interpretation such as labels, captions or
text panels. The English-language visitor brochure given out to tourists on receipt of their
entrance fee presents some information about
the S-21 prison and the Pol Pot period more
broadly, but the exhibitions within the museum
itself are object and image-based with scant
interpretative text. Visitors feel signicant
anxiety about this lack of commentary, explanation and analysis. By their own admission,
explanatory signage is a familiar feature of
museums at home and is looked for by visitors. In short, while many arrive at the museum
with the expectation of a better understanding
of the Pol Pot period, they leave with the hope
that their being there was at least signicant. In
325

R. Hughes

other words, the experience is no longer epistemological but testimonial, not I now know
more but I visited. The next section offers
some further thoughts on why this might be
the case.
From interpretative project to the symbolics
of visitation
As I have suggested, tourists generally expect
that their visit to the museum will assist in their
interpretation of the Cambodian genocide. Visitors are generally disappointed in this regard,
and express concern at a lack of guidance or
instruction on the part of the museum. The
paucity of interpretative materials is because of
the original design of the exhibition, a design
that relied on the explanation of objects and
images by guides. Because of a long-term lack
of funding for the museum, this original mute
exhibition has not been signicantly renovated
since 1979.13 As this original exhibition is the
one encountered by present-day visitors, some
discussion of the curatorial logic that characterised the inception of the museum is necessary.
Tuol Sleng testimonies
As noted, the development of Tuol Sleng
Museum began soon after the end of Khmer
Rouge rule. The demise of Pol Pots regime was
brought about by Vietnamese and allied Cambodian (anti-Khmer Rouge) forces that invaded
Cambodia from the Vietnam border in late 1978.
In what was to become the last decade
of the Cold War, Vietnams invasion resulted in
Cambodias isolation from an international
political system dominated by Vietnams recent
foe, the United States. While aid and cooperation was received from other socialist nations
and some international non-governmental
organisations, the United States, China and the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
all refused to recognise the new Vietnameseassisted Cambodian state, then known as the
Peoples Republic of Kampuchea (PRK).
Those granted visas for travel to the PRK
during the rst decade after 1979 included technical experts assisting in reconstruction efforts,
as well as journalists, aid workers, and delegations from sympathetic socialist states and
political organisations (such as womens
326

groups, lawyers associations, peace organisations, workers parties).14 These early international visitors were escorted on compulsory
tours of Tuol Sleng Museum as a condition of
their visa.15 At this time, the PRK government
looked to such international visitors to act as
witnesses who might support and disseminate
news of Cambodias suffering (see Hughes,
2006: 153188). Foreign visitors were to return
to their countries of origin and tell people what
had really happened in Cambodia (Ledgerwood, 1997: 90) that Vietnam had liberated
Cambodia from its genocidal rulers, but had not
invaded or occupied its smaller neighbour.
Thus it was hoped that visitors would help to
turn the tide of popular international opinion
against those powerful geopolitical actors who
were shunning the PRK, thus ushering in a new
era of aid, assistance and international political
legitimacy.
In keeping with this larger geopolitical aim,
Tuol Sleng Museum was designed for international, as well as national, audiences. Guided
tours of the museum for international visitors
were originally provided by museum staff,
including Ung Pech, a survivor of S-21 and the
rst Director of Tuol Sleng Museum.16 Guides
escorted formal delegations, journalists and visiting scholars through the exhibition, pointing
out aspects of the original buildings and providing explanations of the images and objects on
display.17 While there is still a view among
Cambodian government and civil society
leaders that Tuol Sleng does well to expose
foreign visitors to Cambodias past suffering,
there is far less interest now from state
authorities as to the effects of such exposure.
Cambodia now enjoys international political
recognition, and has joined the ranks of its onetime detractor, the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations. There is signicant ambivalence
about the future of the museum and the funding
and assistance necessary for its continuation are
increasingly being sourced through private
organisations.18
At the present time, guided tours of the
museum are rare for those arriving independently of organised groups. A request and additional payment can solicit a guided tour, but
there is no displayed information about tours
and a guide is not always available. The authoritative narration given by survivors of the
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Encountering the Cambodian genocide

genocide, so much a part of early visitors

experiences, is no longer heard. Tourists, being
unable to witness the testimonies of others, feel
their knowledge of this place to be incomplete.
Rather than continuing to pursue interpretation
and knowledge, many visitors respond to this
situation by reconceptualising their visit to
Tuol Sleng in terms of a symbolic gesture.
In this sense, tourism is considered as a form of
second-order humanitarian work. In this way of
thinking, individual tourists actions in Cambodia are aligned with the practical and symbolic
work of other international, moral travelling
gures such as diplomats and peacekeepers.
Tourists and humanitarian belonging
The shuttling from a tourist subjectivity to that of
a humanitarian actor is common among travellers in Cambodia, and is often associated with
the imaginary of Cambodia as an impoverished
place:
Ive heard of all the difculties, the civil war,
and I wanted to, you know, not necessarily see
the civil war, but just see how things were after
that, if theres a way because I still have a
desire of helping out an NGO if there
something I could do here. Jennifer: 33 yo,
USA citizen, education consultant, 9-day visit
[Interview130401].

This participation in global humanitarianism

recalls the discourses and moral geographies of
colonial philanthropy. Transglobal philanthropy
included two strategies that continue to operate
within contemporary humanitarian appeals
identication and empowerment:
The former functions when the other comes to
be seen as part of ones shared moral universe, while the latter is based on the recognition that there is something that can be done
about the issue of concern. . . . [B]oth strategies were at work in the colonial philanthropic
campaigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, which sought to bridge the physical
and imaginative distance between here and
there, us and them (Cohen, in Lambert and
Lester, 2004: 333).

Interviewees spoke of their intention to donate

money or efforts to local organisations, another
of giving away most of her clothes before she
2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Victoria University of Wellington

returned home. Two young Canadian interviewees were empowered to answer an advertisement posted in their guesthouse in which a
local hospital asked for blood donations. With
so much discussion among tourists regarding
the manifest poverty they encounter in Cambodia, philanthropic donations of personal effects,
time, energy and even bodily uids evidence a
desire to depart from monetary-based encounters (such as giving money to people begging in
public spaces).19
These sorts of practices necessitate a return to
the discussion of the moral/amoral tourist. The
donation of blood, as a bodily uid, references
other embodied donations routinely given by
tourists in Cambodia: those associated with sex
tourism. Sex tourists in Cambodia are widely
gured to be amoral individuals whose acts
are unremittingly exploitative and debasing.20
While sex tourism and war tourism in Cambodia are simultaneous considerations of some
popular travelogues, few academic pieces offer
an analysis that links these travel forms. Such an
analysis would necessarily entail discussion of
the increased prevalence of sex work in Cambodia that has accompanied successive military
interventions in the country and of the ongoing
exoticisation, feminisation and infantalisation of
Cambodians, both men and women, in tourism
representations. For some tourists, moral
tourism to Cambodias genocide memorials and
other cultural sites is made all the more imperative by the perceived amorality of fellow travellers engaging in sex tourism. Like Matlesss
anti-citizen (Matless, 1997: 143) sex tourists are
constructed within the moral geographies of
contemporary tourism as self-interested, antisocial, vulgar and alien to sites of memory such as
Tuol Sleng, as well as to sites and experiences
of Cambodias culture, art, architecture and
natural environment. This is not an abstract
opposition, rather it is relationally enacted in
response to the places, practices and representations associated with sex tourism, and in
interpersonal encounters with self-nominated or
suspected sex tourists themselves.
Conclusion
Tourisms to sites of mass political violence are
signicantly more complex than current darktourism or (a)moral tourism theories suggest,
327

R. Hughes

in large part because such theories generalise

and diminish that which they purport to
explain. The decisions of contemporary visitors
at Tuol Sleng are regurings of the world from
within various discourses of morality. They
(re)construct moral geographies which bring
events of the past into proximity, allow political
concerns to travel along with them and act
in ways (albeit minor) that they believe will
improve the lives of those in the places they
visit. Their visiting involves returning to a moral
terrain in which mass political violence and its
ongoing social and (geo)political effects are
approached through dutiful exposure. Among
tourists to Tuol Sleng, there is an expectation
that the place will help them learn more about
Cambodias genocidal past. The museum is
instead experienced as a space in which they
may demonstrate sympathy for the victims of
this period and, for some, for victims of mass
political violence in other places and times.
Many who visit Tuol Sleng do so because they
desire to be haunted (see Till, 2005). Moreover,
as global humanitarians, they feel they ought to
be haunted. In such a situation, knowledge is
less authoritative than affect: it remains ultimately desirable to have submitted oneself to
the ghosts of others.

Acknowledgements
I offer my sincere thanks to all the interviewees
that took part in this research. Thank you to
Helen Jarvis and the Documentation Centre of
Cambodia in Phnom Penh for their eldwork
support in 1999 and 2000. A version of this
paper was given at the joint International
Geographical Union/Institute of Australian
Geographers/New
Zealand
Geographical
Society 2006 Brisbane conference I am grateful to all those who responded there. I also wish
to acknowledge the support of the Center for
Khmer Studies, Siem Reap. I am indebted to an
anonymous referee of this paper, and to Linda
Malam, Katharine McKinnon and Katherine
Gibson, for their expert assistance.
Notes
1 Observations and interviews were conducted at the
museum between January and May 2000. It was not
my intention to attempt a comprehensive study of visitors to the museum. I was instead interested in the

328

10

motivations and responses of a highly articulate and

active visitor group of non-Cambodian, English speaking, free independent travellers (i.e. not members of a
larger tour group). The narratives and practices of the
interviewees accessed are loosely representative of a
larger free independent travellers group, but not illustrative of the entire visitor population. I use the terms
interviewees and visitors interchangeably in this
paper, but it should be noted that other types of visitor
are present at the museum.
Bauman further argues: the vagabond and the tourist
are not postmodern inventions. What is new is that in
the postmodern world, the vagabond and the tourist
are no longer marginal people or marginal conditions
(Bauman, 1996: 54). Bauman allows a third (collective)
gure into his allegorical drama the natives or
locals who occupy the spaces and places through
which the vagabond and the tourist move but fails to
explore the consequences of this gure for his larger
schema. For a critique of the gendered nature of gures
of mobility in contemporary theories, see Jokinen and
Veijola (1997).
The pre-eminent lm in this regard is the 1984
Warner Bros lm The Killing Fields, (produced by
David Puttnam and directed by Roland Joff), but this
group also includes John Pilgers 1979 documentary,
Year Zero: The silent death of Cambodia and more
recent lms such as S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing
Machine (2003) by Cambodian-born, Frencheducated lmmaker Rithy Panh.
The 1996 edition of Lonely Planet Cambodia states that
[a] visit to Phnom Penh, its surrounding attractions
and to Angkor need be no more dangerous than a trip
to any of the countries surrounding Cambodia. Adventurous travel, on the other hand, is irresponsible (Taylor
et al., 1996: 9). This warning has been removed from
the guidebooks 2005 edition.
This sign must also be recognised as an oblique signier of Cambodias genocide sites. Uncremated human
remains are prominent in tourists experiences of
national memorial sites like Tuol Sleng, but remain
unrepresentable in the souvenir economy.
For a discussion of Cambodian visitors to the museum
in the period immediately following its inauguration,
see Hughes (2003).
An entry on the Ministry of Tourisms main Website for
Phnom Penh (see http://www.mot.gov.kh) is the only
direct advertising of the museum provided by the
Ministry.
Personal communication with His Excellency Rous
Ren, Undersecretary, Ministry of Tourism, Royal Government of Cambodia, 6 March 2000.
The more recent plans to develop the former Khmer
Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng in Cambodias
northwest for domestic and international tourism is,
however, in direct contradiction of this sentiment (see
Wood, 2006).
Interviewees often spoke about such haunting arising
from the personal suffering of Cambodians a condition of too much memory, or too many bad memories,
an inability to forget or work through this excess of
memory.

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Encountering the Cambodian genocide

11 Personal communication with His Excellency Chey
Sophera, Director of Tuol Sleng Museum, 14 March
2000.
12 See Alneng (2002) for a discussion of tourists in
Vietnam living their own travel experiences through
lmic representations of the war.
13 Some changes have occurred after the research that
forms the basis for this paper was completed. Most
importantly, the exhibit known as the map of skulls
a wall-sized map of Cambodia made of human skulls
has been dismantled. Human remains are now exhibited within large sealed cases, and are accompanied by
a Khmer Buddhist funerary stupa (monument) as well
as a colour photograph of the original exhibit.
14 Visitor books, Tuol Sleng Museum, viewed March
2000.
15 Personal communication with Bill Herod, Phnom
Penh, 25 April 2000.
16 Ung Pech and a small number of fellow prisoners
survived S-21 by virtue of their skills as artists. Ung
Pech subsequently became the rst Director of Tuol
Sleng, and personally received many international
visitors to the museum during the 1980s (personal
communication with His Excellency Chey Sophera,
Director of Tuol Sleng Museum, 14 March 2000).
17 Personal communication with Bill Herod, Phnom
Penh, 25 April 2000.
18 Personal communication with His Excellency Chey
Sophera, Director of Tuol Sleng Museum, 14 March
2000.
19 A more recent example of this phenomenon has seen
the advent of tours to orphanages in Phnom Penh,
where food is often donated.
20 Reports of the paedophilic activities of internationals
visiting or working in the country are especially prominent in local news media, as are the campaigns of local
and international non-governmental organisations to
prevent such conduct.

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