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.

摘要

遗产旅游学者使用表演性和影响力的概念来研究游客积极构建遗产体验并为其赋予意义的方式。然而，在个人遗产旅游的背景下，这些概念仍未得到充分探索。个人遗产旅游反映了体验与个人情感相关的遗产的兴趣，承认对遗产的看法是流动的和主观的。我通过探索使家谱在前往祖先故乡的旅行中变得有意义的表演和情感纠葛，为个人遗产旅游的概念化提供了洞察力。通过对瑞典裔美国祖先游客的定性研究，我提出在祖先旅游中的意义创造过程包括制定家庭、参与日常生活、并与过去的世俗物理元素联系起来。这些表演在祖先故土的历史和当前地点展开。因此，个人遗产旅游通过与过去的情感纠葛，但也通过基于熟悉的现在的社会互动和世俗活动来找到意义。这些情感纠葛发生在不同的地点，并非都与个人过去直接相关。