Affect and performance in ancestral tourism: stories of everyday life, personal heritage, and the family

Abstract

ABSTRACT Heritage tourism scholars have used notions of performativity and affect to study the ways tourists actively construct and assign meaning to their experience of heritage. However, these concepts remain under-explored in the context of personal heritage tourism. Personal heritage tourism reflects an interest to experience a heritage of personal affective relevance, acknowledging that perceptions of heritage are fluid and subjective. I contribute insight into the conceptualization of personal heritage tourism by exploring the performances and affective entanglements that make genealogy meaningful in the present during travels to an ancestral homeland. Through a qualitative study of Swedish-American ancestral tourists, I propose that processes of meaning making in ancestral tourism include enacting the family, partaking in everyday life, and connecting with mundane physical elements of the past. These performances unfold at sites historical and current in the ancestral homeland. Personal heritage tourism thus finds meaning though affective entanglements with the past, but also through social interactions and mundane activities based in a familiar present. These affective entanglements occur at different locations, not all directly connected to the personal past.