Dialogical Memorialization, International Travel and the Public Sphere: A Cultural Sociology of Commemoration and Tourism at the First World War Gallipoli Battlefields
As part of a larger ethnographic research project, this article analyses the history of memorialization on the First World War Gallipoli battlefields and its relationship with international travel and tourism. It contrasts the original Australian and New Zealand memorialization on the site with Turkish memorials constructed there in the late 20th century, a significant proportion of which are characterized by direct symbolic recognition of the ‘other’. Drawing on Bakhtin’s writings on referential discourses I refer to these as being dialogical. At Gallipoli this dialogical memorialization facilitated the rise of Australian tourism to the battlefields by allowing for a cosmopolitan reimagining of the military campaign, which included emphasizing extraordinary cases of humanity and framing soldiers as tourists. A cultural sociology of the public sphere is proposed as a way of comprehending such tourism, one that avoids assumptions about the severing of meaningful cultural ties with the events and institutions of modernity.