A happy experience of a dark place: Consuming and performing the Jallianwala Bagh

Abstract

This article adopts a phenomenological, ethnographic approach to examine place consumption and place experience through visitors’ practices in situ. It focuses particularly on an examination of the embodied practices and performances of both tourists and the local community. Viewing memorial places as ‘performative fields’, we argue that a set of processes are simultaneously at play: while consuming the place and its representations (place consumption), visitors are also producing the meaning of the place through their embodied practices (place production) and, simultaneously, form and project a construct of their own selves (self-identity construction), within wider social narratives (social/national-identity construction). The simultaneity of these processes is empirically illustrated and supported by the findings from the qualitative research in the Jallianwala Bagh Memorial in Amritsar, India, where British colonial forces massacred more than one thousand peaceful protesters in 1919.