“We have a shared history”: roots travel to Indonesia across Indo-European generations

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This article explores senses of belonging of three Indo-European generations and examines how these are influenced by roots travel to contemporary Indonesia. We use the notion of roots tourism to refer to tourism to ancestral homelands to ‘experience heritage at the personal level’. While the notion of roots tourism has gained scholarly attention, multiple diasporic generations are often studied as a single phenomenon. By analysing life story interviews with Indo-Europeans from the first, second and third generation within twenty-one families, this article examines the motivations, expectations, lived experiences and meanings of their travels. The multigenerational nature of the empirical data enables differentiation across diasporic generations, and highlights generational nuances and interlinkages in Indo-Europeans’ senses of belonging, positions within larger colonial family histories and travel experiences. We argue that ancestries, and personal and collective memories of the colonial Dutch East Indies connect various Indo-European generations to contemporary Indonesia. The accounts reveal both personal and familial transformations, as travels potentially fostered engagements with own or familial traumatic pasts, disrupted familial practices of silences or sparked interests to travel or (re)discover one’s Indonesian heritage.