Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the search for home, for belonging, by tracking the activities of a New Age spiritual tour guide and his clientele in Sydney, Australia.

Paper long abstract:

For some Australians, belonging is far from straightforward: it must be acquired. Unresolved colonial guilt, the feeling that non-Aboriginal Australians can never truly be 'indigenous', can unsettle an easy sense of home. For some Australian practitioners of alternative spiritualities such ambivalent belonging, of an unhomely home, is even more keenly felt for it threatens a sense of self that is, in part, predicated on an essential unity between human and non-human nature, in this case between persons and the Australian landscape. One of the ways in which this unease is expressed and ameliorated is through travel to 'sacred' places; such travel both celebrates and lays claim to the land. Because it is often to the metaphor of the Aboriginal sacred that Australians turn when expressing, or seeking, a sense of belonging, the sites of Australian spiritual tourism are frequently (real or imagined) Aboriginal places. Rather than roots tourism, this is rootless tourism; or rather, tourism in search of roots, even is such roots belong to someone else. This paper discusses the search for home by tracking some of the practices of a spiritual tour organizer and his clientele in Sydney, Australia.

Paper short abstract:

Presenting the case study of German roots tourists in Lithuania, I will focus on the question of what exactly draws "roots tourists" to their "places of origin".

Paper long abstract:

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, German "homesick tourists" have begun travelling "to the East" to revisit the birthplaces they had fled at the end of World War II. Some of these places, such as Nida on the Baltic Sea in contemporary Lithuania, have become huge attractions and meeting points for roots tourists originating from all over former German East Prussia and beyond. Focusing on the case of Nida, the aim of the paper is to analyse the making, performing and consuming of places in the context of roots tourism. I will first of all reveal the practices, expectations and imaginations of the German tourists involved.

Secondly, I will show how "roots" have become a significant albeit highly contested political and economic resource in the making of a post-Soviet tourist destination.

I argue that the key to understanding what draws roots tourists to this place lies in the conjuncture of a longing to return to family places and the satisfaction of common tourist desires. Roots tourists are provided here with a comfortable tourist infrastructure enabling them to undertake individual and organised "trips of remembrance". The built-up areas and natural surroundings, the beaches and dunes, and the churches and cemeteries all provide a sensual environment with the power to trigger memories and images as well as emotions and secrets, which can be (re-)experienced and shared with the family or other roots tourists. Thus the present-day Lithuanian place is temporarily remembered, performed and embodied through the narratives and practices of German roots tourists in relation to the past. This leads me to analyse the various intersecting temporalities and spatialities at stake in this tourist place.

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Paper long abstract:

This paper contemplates the movements of people in the Western Indian Ocean, focussing on those who have mixed Swahili and Hadrami ancestry. For centuries Hadramis have travelled on the monsoon winds between Hadramawt and East Africa. Many of these sailors, traders and labourers settled in East Africa, marrying locally but retaining a collective sense of identity as a community bound by culture, social practice and the idea of a homeland which they transmitted to their children. Some never returned to Hadramawt, others returned to visit, still others to retire, others again sent children back. Subsequent generations, born in East Africa, also visit the land of their ancestors, either as tourists, labourers, or to return "home". These various movements are prompted by economic, political or affective considerations: booms in the Yemeni oil industry, anti-Arab sentiment in East Africa, a longing to visit ancestral homes. This paper asks how the idea of home is developed and how it frames such journeys, both towards Hadramawt and, subsequently, back towards East Africa. It suggests that individual conceptions of home shift during the course of these trajectories, adapting to experience, and it suggests that if the idea of "home" is essential to being a tourist (if tourism occurs away from home), then as individuals' perceptions of home shift, so, too, do their identities as "tourist". These shifts can of course work in both directions: homecomers may find that they are tourists, just as tourists may suddenly realise that they have come home.

Paper long abstract:

Roots destinations, as cultural heritage constructs, can be loci of both 'restoring' memory and commodifying history/the past; both 'recovered' homelands and niche tourism products. What happens when such imagined homelands (hence also tourist destinations) are associated with historical trauma? This presentation is concerned with the emergence of a place in a contemporary European locale, which, among its other roles, also functions as a 'roots' destination because of its Jewish identity. The event of the recent restoration and re-opening of the Synagogue of Chania, in Crete, Greece, a place of Jewish 'absence' since WWII, constitutes a site for multiple readings: cultural heritage is being re-'discovered', Jewish identity is made visible within a Christian Greek dominated cultural context, a new place-of-return emerges for visitors with a special interest, and a new sense of rooted-ness is in the making.

Considering the element of Jewish absence about this place in the recent decades, either physically (as natives of Crete) or discursively in the public sphere, I shall discuss how such heritage-making processes can both make 'history' available for public display and consumption, and, at the same time, be politically significant and politically 'correct' events. To address this issue, I shall use the above case study in order to place the emergence of such historically marked loci within social changes and new political and economic agendas in the broader Europe during the last couple of decades. In this process, such 'tourist' destinations function as interfaces of affect, life history, and lived experience, on the one hand, and socio-political conjunctures and prerequisites, on the other.

Paper short abstract:

Paper long abstract:

At a time when genealogy has become more than a very popular phenomenon but a kind of social obligation for everyone to dig up his past, some states developed the idea they could use people interest for ancestors and identity as a means to develop the market of tourism. This is especially true from countries, like Ireland, which had experienced important waves of migrations in the past. This paper relies on empirical data that I collected in Ireland. It explores first, the way Irish politics have transformed roots-tourism into a massive heritage industry since the late 1980s and how they have instrumentalized Irish Diaspora needs for identity in order both to perform their local economy and to claim Ireland post-modernity. The second part of this paper critically describes activities that people of Irish decent do when periodically returning to their ancestral home (as searching biographical data into parish or civil registers, visiting close or distant relatives, or taking part in clan gatherings). After questioning these practices' social impacts, I will turn to my final point. My argument is that Roots-tourism does not only favour interconnectedness between past and present, between people of Irish descent and so-called "Irish people at home". It also challenges people identity (that is to say the identity of Irish natives and tourists) as well as social representations of genealogy in Ireland.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed

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