Draft Abstract for RC-50 Interim Meeting

 

Rethinking Heritage Tourism:

Reflections on “Heritage,” Embodied Experience, and the Self

 

Naomi Leite

Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Anthropology

University of California, Berkeley

 

This paper proposes a more rigorous, actor-oriented approach to the study of “heritage tourism”, meaning any travel related to the past. Although industry-oriented studies claim that this is among the most rapidly growing areas of leisure travel (McCain and Ray 2003), we know relatively little about how such tourists experience and are affected by their journeys.

A handful of recent studies have suggested that “heritage sites” will have different meanings and provoke different emotional responses depending on the tourist’s background, interests, and assumptions (e.g., Bruner 1996, 2005; Cheung 1999; Poria et al. 2003; cf. Timothy 1997). However, we lack a systematic approach to heritage tourism that takes this insight into account. Nor do we have a body of literature that explores the implications of this more nuanced understanding of heritage tourism for our broader assumptions about international tourism as a social practice.

This paper seeks to develop a coherent theoretical approach to this type of travel, drawing upon the literature on heritage tourism, pilgrimage, and embodiment. First, I clarify the concepts under discussion by offering a typology of modes of heritage tourism, based on the traveler’s subjective relationship to the site and its history. Drawing on case studies, including materials from my own field research, I demonstrate that different tourists will seek and connect with different aspects of the past reflected in the destination; accordingly, the emotional tenor of the experience will also vary widely. Here I engage Erik Cohen’s (1979) typology of tourist experiences, and literature on the relationship between tourism and pilgrimage more generally, to underscore what is at stake.

As a particularly illuminating example, the main section of the paper focuses on what I call diasporic tourism, i.e., a subset of heritage tourism that is motivated by a desire to experience and connect with one’s ancestral homeland and/or other sites that are significant in the history of one’s ethnic group. Here, travelers do not simply visit a generic “past”; their destination is their own collective, geographically-distant past and, more specifically, the experiences and life-world of their ancestors, lost through the fundamental rupture of displacement and dispersal that defines diasporic populations.

I explore the nature of this experience through a close reading of travelers’ first-person narratives, quoted in several recent ethnographic case studies. These include African American travelers to sites linked to slavery in Africa (Bruner 1996, Ebron 2000), American and Israeli Jewish tourists to Holocaust sites in Poland (Feldman 1995, 2001; Kugelmass 1992, 1994), and trips made to the Scottish Highlands by people of Scottish descent worldwide (Basu 2001). Although they were not written in dialogue with one another, when taken in comparative perspective these ethnographic accounts, and the first-person quotations they contain, reveal that sensory engagement—that is, the tourist’s fully-present body, rather than mere vision—is a key component in the diasporic tourist’s experience of the ancestral past. This operates on three levels: (1) a subjective focus on the bodily sensations of “being there”; (2) an engagement in “remembering” ancestral experience, often somatically as well as intellectually; and (3) in some cases, if only momentarily, an experiential merging of past and present, in which the journey becomes a “return,” generational distinctions collapse, and participants experience the emotions of their forebears as their own.

The analysis presented here suggests that we must reconsider our fundamental assumptions about international tourism being motivated by a search for “otherness”. Indeed, attention to these tourists’ subjective experiences reveals that diasporic tourism, and perhaps heritage tourism more broadly, is not about alterity at all. On the contrary, it is oriented toward finding and connecting with a lost piece of the traveler’s own history, engaged with all the bodily senses. Thus while international tourism may at times be based in a desire to encounter radical difference, it must be understood equally as a potential mode of achieving profound connection—bridging, for diasporic tourists, the gap between past and present, homeland and exile, ancestors and selves.

 

References

Basu, Paul. (2001). Hunting Down Home: Reflections on Homeland and the Search for Identity in the Scottish Diaspora. In: Bender, Barbara, and Winer, Margot. (Eds). Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place. Oxford, Berg, pp. 333-348.

Bruner, Edward. (1996). Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora. In: American Anthropologist, vol 98, pp. 290-304.

Bruner, Edward. (2005). Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.Cheung, Sidney. (1999). The Meanings of a Heritage Trail in Hong Kong. In: Annals of Tourism Research, vol 26, pp. 570-588.

Cohen, Erik. (1979). A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences. In: Sociology, vol 13, pp. 179-201.

Ebron, Paulla. (2000). Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics. In: American Ethnologist, vol 26, pp. 910-932.

Feldman, Jackie. (1995). “It is my brothers whom I am seeking”: Israeli Youths’ Pilgrimages to Poland of the Shoah. In: Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, vol 17, pp. 33-37.

Feldman, Jackie. (2001). “Roots in Destruction”: The Jewish Past as Portrayed in Israeli Youth Voyages to Poland. In: Goldberg, Harvey. (Ed). The Life of Judaism. Berkeley, University of California Press, pp. 156-171.

Kugelmass, Jack. (1992). The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland. In: Karp, Ivan, et al. (Eds). Museums and Communities. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, pp. 382–427.

Kugelmass, Jack. (1994). Why We Go to Poland: Holocaust Tourism as Secular Ritual. In: Young, James. (Ed). The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History. Munich and New York, Prestel, pp. 175-183.

McCain, Gary, and Ray, Nina. (2003). Legacy Tourism: The Search for Personal Meaning in Heritage Travel. In: Tourism Management, vol 24, pp. 713-717.

Poria, Yaniv, et al. (2003). The Core of Heritage Tourism. In: Annals of Tourism Research, vol 30, pp. 238-254.

Timothy, Dallen J. (1997). Tourism and the Personal Heritage Experience. In: Annals of Tourism Research, vol 24, pp. 751-754.