Tourism and Memories of Home

Migrants, Displaced People, Exiles and Diasporic Communities

Sabine Marschall, Sabine Marschall

• Verlag: Channel View Publications
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781845416058
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo

This book investigates 'home' and 'homeland' as destinations of touristic journeys and adds to recent scholarly interest in the intersection between tourism and migration. It covers the temporary visits and journeys in search of home and homelands by migrants, displaced people, exiles and diasporic communities in a wide range of different geographical and historical contexts. Personal and collective forms of memory are shown to play a key role in the motivation for, and experience of, such journeys. The volume contributes to the investigation of the tourism–memory nexus as it conceptualizes memory as underpinning touristic mobility, experience and performativity. Based on ethnographic case studies and other types of qualitative empirical research, the chapters of this book foreground individual touristic experiences, emotions, memories, perceptions, the search for identity and a sense of belonging. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, heritage, anthropology, identity studies, memory studies and migration/diaspora studies.

1Tourism and Memories of Home: Introduction

Sabine Marschall

So identity, it seems, is also a question of memory, and memories of ‘home’ in particular.

(Morley & Robins, 1993: 10)

Tourism was once defined as the journey away from home, the ritualized departure from the ‘profane’ realm of work and ordinary, everyday routine, to the extraordinary, ‘sacred’ realm of the touristic experience (Graburn, 1977; MacCannell, 1976). Tourists were believed to travel in search of novelty and authenticity, their ‘tourist gaze’ characterized by difference (Urry, 1990). Many of these conceptions have shifted in recent years, and the simple ‘home and away’ dichotomy is no longer seen as a defining marker of tourism. Today, different forms of travel and mobility intersect with touristic journeys (Cohen & Cohen, 2012; Urry, 2007) and the notion of ‘home’ itself has been problematized in the context of globalization, high mobility, displacement, migration and transnationalism as, increasingly, people have multiple homes, holiday homes, symbolic homes or no fixed abode at all.

The current collection inverts the ‘home and away’ conceptualization by exploring home as a destination; the longing for home and the desire to return as markers of identity; the sense of belonging – based on personal or collective memories – to a real, symbolic or imagined home(land) as travel motivation; the experience of the return visit and the encounter with the memory-laden home environment as stimulant of a unique form of touristic performativity. The types of mobility considered in this book include journeys to former homes and places associated with home by those who have moved away, voluntarily or involuntarily, within their home country or abroad; the return trips of migrants and their immediate descendants to their place of origin; the journeys of refugees and displaced people to the sites of their lost or destroyed homes; the travel to ancestral homelands of diasporic communities and ethnic minorities; the real travel to symbolic homes or symbolic forms of mobility towards the real home.

What characterizes many of these travellers is that they do not regard themselves tourists. Of course, tourists of all kinds and the world over commonly reject being labelled a tourist, preferring instead to see themselves in the ‘more superior’ category of ‘traveller’, as the terms tourism and tourists carry culturally derogative and negative connotations (McCabe, 2005). Most visitors discussed in this volume see themselves as crusaders, as pilgrims on an emotional ‘sacred journey’ to the place of their primordial belonging; as victims on a quest to see their lost home; or simply as individuals on a family visit. Many are even offended by being associated with tourists and consciously distance themselves – physically and ontologically – from touristic spaces and modes of behaviour (see especially Powers in Chapter 7). For those who have forcibly lost their homes and who can now only revisit as tourists, the journey also means psychologically coming to terms with being a tourist (see Wagner in Chapter 4). Migrants on return journeys to their homeland – what Oxfeld and Long (2004) call ‘provisional return’ – tend to distinguish their home visit from touristic visits of attractions undertaken during the same trip, as Bhandari illustrates with reference to Nepali migrants (Chapter 6).

Yet, in the eyes of the host community, most homeward-bound visitors are clearly evident as outsiders or ‘foreigners’, many even indistinguishable from the ‘typical tourist’, on account of their behaviour, dress code, possessions, mode of travel, activities, consumption patterns and perhaps use of hospitality and other touristic services. Oxfeld’s (2004) observation that Chinese overseas migrants on home visits are seen as ‘guests’ as well as family by their relatives probably applies in many other contexts. The tourism industry and international tourism authorities typically capture these travellers as heritage tourists, Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR) tourists and other niche market travellers. The ready presence of guides and interpreters, the entrepreneurial spirit of souvenir vendors and the overt or disguised commercial nature of other transactions with local people, expose the homecoming pilgrims as outsiders and tourists. This is well illustrated in Powers’ chapter (Chapter 7). Extending Cave et al.’s (2013) exploration of souvenirs as expressions of culture and triggers of cultural change, Powers discusses souvenirs as complex, paradoxical artefacts that may rupture the experience of home and render the sense of belonging ambiguous for tourists in search of their roots.

This book argues that the trip ‘home’, be it a genuine return to an actual former home or a first time visit to an ancestral or imagined home(land), is instrumental in negotiating one’s sense of belonging, identity and self-­construal as it entails an exploration of the self, the personal past and one’s relationship to home – both the remembered old home and one’s current place of residence. Journeys inspired by memories and longing for home, journeys to real, ancestral and symbolic homes, associated with personal or collective memories, motivated by longing, homesickness, search for family roots, identification with collective memories and allied group identities, or by curiosity, social commitments, mundane and pragmatic reasons, constitute a considerable international travel phenomenon that deserves more systematic investigation and attention by tourism scholars, policy makers and the industry.

Home and homeland play a central role in diaspora consciousness, even if it exists only in memory, and the notion of return – permanent or temporary, desirable, feasible, or imaginary – is an integral aspect of transnationalism and the migration experience (Knott & McLoughlin, 2010; Long & Oxfeld, 2004). For the sake of convenience, the term ‘migrant’ is often used as an umbrella term, but strictly speaking the travellers referred to in this volume may be refugees; exiles; transnationals; immigrants; guest workers; expatriates; émigrés; members of diasporas; foreign residential tourists or members of expatriate retirement communities; sojourners; long-term travellers; expellees; second-generation migrants; members of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; internal migrants and internally displaced people; or simply those who have chosen to move within their home country. The systematic exploration of the entire range is salient in defining the analytical focus on home as a destination and longing for home as travel motivation. It contributes to and expands the tourism mobility spectrum explored by the emergent literature around the tourism-migration nexus, which has attracted increasing attention following the pioneering collection of Coles and Timothy (2004).

In addition, this book contributes to the tourism-memory nexus as it conceptualizes memory as underpinning touristic mobility, experience and performativity. The relationship between tourism and memory has been neglected both within Tourism Studies and the emergent field of Memory Studies, apart from investigations in the field of Heritage Tourism, where the focus is largely on collective or cultural memory embodied in sites and attractions. Personal or individual forms of memory may be mentioned, implied or tangentially touched upon in tourism research, but are rarely subject of more systematic investigation (among the exceptions are, e.g. Braasch, 2008; Braun-LaTour et al., 2006; Shaw et al., 2008). Memory is the basis of nostalgia and longing; emotion and affect; attachment and revulsion. Autobiographical and episodic memories, shared social memory and identification with collective memories are significant determinants in touristic motivation and experience, as well as in individuals’ relationship to home and homeland.

Home

‘Home’, ‘feeling at home’ and the meaning of home have become important themes, dominating public discourse in the wider political and societal arena internationally and spawning a proliferating body of literature from multiple disciplinary perspectives (e.g. Blunt & Varley, 2004; Mallett, 2004; Sarup, 1994). Many societies in the Western World, having experienced cultural shifts on account of globalization, transnationalism and an influx of migrants and refugees, are increasingly obsessed with nostalgia, national identity, cultural belonging and notions of ‘home’ (Duyvendak, 2011; Morley & Robins, 1993). For the immigrants themselves, home is both here and there or neither here nor there, as they negotiate their emotional attachment to places, social relations and multifarious other spaces of belonging. As the identity of diasporic migrants, always simultaneously local and global (Brah 1996: 196), becomes reconfigured over time and increasingly defined by heterogeneity, hybridity, ‘in-betweeness’ or a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994), they re-evaluate their relationship with the homeland and its significance for their identity, some of them by travelling there (Tie et al., 2015). The role of tourism in hybridity and identity formation among diasporic communities has been identified as a neglected area of research (Coles & Timothy, 2004).

For any individual, traditional understandings of home, connection to places and even nations, are challenged by the present era’s high mobility in search of employment and opportunities for life-style improvements (Coles & Timothy, 2004; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011). Home can mean the place that is so familiar (i.e. deeply rooted in memory) that it feels ‘natural’. Home can also refer to a private place associated with safety, security, shelter and comfort (‘home as Haven’), or a public, material or symbolic place where one can feel independent and freely express oneself (‘home as Heaven’) (Duyvendak, 2011: 4/5). The notion of home entails a sense of possibility or hope, ‘an existential launching pad for the self’ (Hage, 2010: 419). Home is widely understood as a multidimensional concept that can comprise a place, space, feelings, activities, a state of mind or a state of being (Mallett, 2004).

In the current collection, home as a destination for travel inevitably entails a geographical location, a spatial realm or a ‘localizable idea’ (Douglas, 1991), be it a person’s place of birth, upbringing and kinship ties (the dwelling, the town, the region or country); a site associated with emotionally intense, formative events and periods of life; or an imagined terrain, a distant, experientially unknown place infused with deep feelings of cultural belonging. Memories, nostalgia and identification with shared histories are central themes in return journeys home. In the extensive literature on heritage tourism, nostalgia is commonly understood as longing to return to the past, envisaged as a better place (Boym, 2001), but in this book nostalgia refers to the literal meaning of the term, ‘longing for home’. For some, the yearning for the old home is simultaneously an expression of the desire to return to one’s own past (see Wagner, Chapter 4). However, home is not always where one longs to be. Home is invested with meanings and emotions, but not necessarily remembered fondly; it can be an ambiguous place, ‘a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear’ (Blunt & Varley, 2004: 3).

Home is, in many ways, about family or kinship, universal human experiences of mating, birth and nurturing. The desire to foster social relations, to be with loved ones and members of the family is the driving force behind VFR tourism, whereas the need to find home by reconnecting with deceased relations and even distant ancestors engenders legacy, genealogical and various forms of roots tourism. The search for archival records, sites and material traces is often less about objective family history research than about subjective emotional identification with kin, whose life one imagines through the encountered traces and spaces, whose presence one feels in one’s own identity and whose memory one appropriates for one’s own sense of belonging and search for home. Moreover, as Powers shows in Chapter 7, kinship metaphors make homeland encounters meaningful in Chinese adoption tours to mainland China, both for American parents and their adoptive children who have no personal memories of home and biological kin. African American homecoming and roots tourists, whose kinship ties rely on genetic heritage, creatively modify kinship, turning strangers into distant relatives. Locals all too readily present themselves as ‘instant kin’ to these homecoming tourists, conveying a sense of home and welcoming, but also responsibility and obligation (Ebron, 1999).

Many scholars emphasize the social relationship aspect of home (Mallett, 2004) and indeed the notion of ‘home is where the family is’ motivates many of the journeys discussed in this volume. But the old saying ‘home is where the heart is’ posits home as the place one loves most and where one longs to be, which may not necessarily be the place where one’s loved-ones are....