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March 5, 2010 | Now comes genealogical tourism! Going to one's grandparents' parents' place | Washington: Genealogical tourism is redefining leisure travel market, says a University of Illinois travel expert. U of I recreation, sport and tourism professor Carla Santos explains: "Genealogical tourism provides an irreplaceable dimension of
material reality that's missing from our post-modern society." According to co-author
and U of I graduate student Grace Yan, going back to the old church where one's
great grandparents used to worship in rural Ireland, or buying a loaf of bread
from a grocery store in a Greek village where one's grandmother lived, create
a significant space to imagine and feel life as a form of continuation. The research
also says genealogical tourism is popular because we live in a world where mediated,
inauthentic experiences have become such inseparable part of our everyday lives
that we're almost unaware of it. Santos says: "Genealogical tourism capitalizes
on this by allowing individuals to experience the sensuous charms of antiquity,
and provides a way of experiencing something eternal and authentic that transcends
the present." In academic analyses of the 1980s and early 1990s, tourism was seen
an escape from the reality of the workaday world. Today, scholars approach travel
and tourism in a much more complex and nuanced fashion, the authors point out.
Santos says: "We believe that movement is due partly to the increasing sociological
awareness of the post-industrial society that we currently live in. "With tourism
studies developing a more sophisticated interpretative paradigm, more meanings
of tourism have been discussed in academia, including the hunt for exoticism and
experiencing nostalgia." "According to our research, the baby boomer generation
now constitutes the primary profile of genealogical travelers," Yan says. "Aging
plays an important role in defining a person's choice of tourism, and genealogical
travel is contemporary society's way of attaining a more coherent and continuous,
albeit imagined, view of ourselves in connection with the past." According to
Santos: "Diaspora definitely plays an important role in popularizing genealogical
tourism," Santos said. "Individual cultural and ethnic identities exist in fragmented
and discontinuous forms in the U.S. Traveling to identify with an unknown past
seems to give existence to meanings and values that the individual then carries
forward on into their present." Since diaspora is a ubiquitous condition in our
multicultural country, "our ancestors' past seems less retrievable and almost
mythical," Yan says. Santos adds: "A lot of us may feel that there's a tension
between the need to feel connected and the need to be individualistic. "Genealogical
travel gives us a practical way to explore those feelings and move toward a deeper
understanding of our identities." "Not only does it help to mitigate the desires
and anxieties about our age, genealogical tourism also encourages us to take a
more humanistic approach toward issues of belonging, home, heritage and identity,"
she said. The study has appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Travel Research. |
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