Genealogical Tourism: A Phenomenological Examination

Abstract

Seeking to contribute to ongoing investigations of diverse contexts of tourism consumption, the current investigation explores the meanings genealogical tourists attribute to their lived experiences and contextualizes those findings within larger social approaches to the human dynamics that drive contemporary tourism. Taking an interpretive turn, it proposes genealogical tourism as reflecting contemporary tourists’ call for diversity of leisure interests and opportunities as well as their desire for a full range of varying intimacies, intensities, and complexities in their tourism lived experiences. In particular, it reveals tourism as a reflexive response to a sense of loss that underpins modern society, assisting in reaffirming both a generational sense of the self and a self-recognition that one has one’s own perspective on the world.