Travel beyond place: touring memories and displaced homecoming

ABSTRACT

The article examines how practices of remembering and recurring patterns of mobility to the same place work to consolidate one’s sense of home and belonging. The authors investigate how experiences of at-homeness are reinvented through touring memories and practices of personal memory tourism. Repeated travels to diverse personal memory sites are analysed through the personal, autobiographic memories of residents of Slovenia as (mostly domestic) homecoming tourists. With the method of semi-structured in-depth interviews, the authors gathered 124 personal life-histories of revisiting and experiencing different places. Grasping the tensions inherent in these movements, the article identifies three distinct registers of homecoming tourism, the oscillation between two opposing patterns of appropriating the place (navigating vs. inhabiting the place), the frictions in family rituals and place sacralization which destabilize one’s narrative of the place, and the issue of disenchantment whilst re-embedding and questioning one’s belonging to a place. The findings emphasize that these persistent ambivalences repetitively delay one’s return to (mythical) home, indicating thereby the fragility of reconstructions of (a lost) home. The authors conclude that there is a particular dialectic relationship between the idea of movement and the notion of home as it is articulated in the phenomenon of personal-memory tourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Home
• tourist practices
• personal memory
• nostalgia
• place sacralization
• homecoming tourism

Introduction: belongings in a globalized and deterritorialized world

Not only has mobility become an inevitable and defining feature of contemporary society, it has also become of crucial significance in negotiating the growing complexity of modern living and thus one’s relation to the world. In the circumstances of today’s ‘deterritorialized’ global world, the idea of home has become increasingly elusive and challenging to understand. Against the backdrop of dramatic transformations that include among others substantial increases in mobilities and profound changes in patterns of communications, traditional concepts of social theory have been unsettled in reinvigorating debates (see Savage, Bagnall, & Longhurst, 2005), while at the same time, as argued by Morley (2001, pp. 427–428), ‘the concept of home – the obverse of all this hyper-mobility – often remains uninterrogated’. He goes on to argue that we need a new understanding of the idea of home and belonging in the world of ‘destabilizing flux’ (Morley, 2001, p. 428), recognizing its complexities and contradictions (Morley, 2001, p. 426).

In relation to these questions, we are in this paper particularly interested in how practices of remembering and recurring patterns of physical mobility to the same place, fuelled by distinct autobiographical memories, work to consolidate one’s sense of home, belonging, and identity. These are being considered as routine practices through which sacred spaces of home, or ‘symbolic ideas of Heimat’ (Morley, 2001, p. 425) are sustained and experiences of at-homeness are reinvented. In our study, we want to establish an understanding of repeated travels to personal-memory sites in reference to one’s sense of home and belonging by addressing issues of affect, habit and attachment to locale. In this regard, we would also like to investigate how personal remembering¹ shapes experience of place and constructions of home, and how such autobiographical memories are always taking place ‘in the dynamic transaction between an active individual and his or her changing environment’ (Wang, 2016, p. 295).

We therefore propose the concept of home to be understood here in symbolic terms as the space of belonging, rootedness and identity, and thus as a notion very much related not only to patterns of our dwelling but also travelling. We assert that investigating patterns of repetitive and habitual practices could in turn inform the understandings of home, and analysing specific dynamic of dwelling/travelling could help us comprehend the experiences of at-homeness. We should stress that this does not mean leaving behind issues of place in material terms altogether or, for that matter, arguing for the idea of a placeless existence. This does require, however, greater attention to be paid to the processes of place-making in everyday life through repetitive, habitual practices. Moores’ (2012) arguments, challenging the views that media and transport technologies weaken senses of place and experiences of at-homeness, are pertinent here. Namely, Moores advocates that ‘places are locations made familiar, concrete, and meaningful through practice’ (Moores, 2012, p. 66).

Repeat visits or return travels have been in tourism studies already widely discussed, yet predominantly within the context of destination management and marketing strategies and therefore primarily in relation to tourists’ satisfaction and destination loyalty, operationalized in terms of revisit intention and recommendation. Additionally, the abiding concern in much of the existing travel research so far has been with place, while the aspect of time has been in the discussions of mobility thus left aside. Yet, any account of movement and mobility that does not take time and space into consideration is missing an important facet, as argued by Cresswell (2006, p. 4). We therefore argue that more attention should be paid also to experiences of place in relation to time, practices of remembrance and memory work.

Since it has been common to conceive tourist practices as driven primarily by aspirations for escape and a quest for out-of-the-ordinary experiences, many more mundane and trivial types of tourist practices, as such also personal memory tourism, have been thus excluded from the hegemonic views in tourism studies. In this research, travelling to locations linked with one’s important life events or life periods is foregrounded and the role of autobiographical/personal memory and remembrance in particular explored. We thus build on studies that have already acknowledged the linkages between (personal) memory, tourism and place, mainly Marschall’s (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016) extensive work on the topic. Nevertheless, we want to extend our approach beyond the mere perspective on how travelling can be considered an extension of the process of remembering, as convincingly argued by Marschall (2016), and elaborate further in more detail all the frictions and ambiguities that accompany forms of experiencing place in relation to remembrances and thereby the disruptions in the processes of evoking a sense of home and belonging when revisiting meaningful places. Or, as suggested by Ahmad and Hertzog (2016, p. 205): ‘We should investigate not only the mainstream frameworks of remembrances but also memories involving possible insurrections of subjugated forms of experiencing in their linkages through tourism practices’. Our paper is based on the case study of personal memory journeys of residents of Slovenia, how they remember different places, touristic, birth, traumatic, etc. We gathered their memories of travel experiences and feelings of different places with the help of semi-structured in-depth interviews to grasp the ‘remembered realms’ since real historical time and places are gone for good (Nora, 1996). The study is culturally and geographically situated and deals with predominantly domestic homecoming tourists, who, nevertheless, because of recent historic events (especially the disintegration of Yugoslavia) at time assume crossing a border when departing to their personal memory destinations. We define personal memory tourism as a broader concept for describing all trips encouraged by personal memories and homecoming tourism as a modality of personal memory tourism, in comparison to home-sick tourism which is used mainly in terms of Heimat or. Homeland tourism (e.g. examples of exiled Poles and visits to former East Germany). Homecoming tourism can also be defined in the sense not only to connecting a certain community or a place (as home-sick tourism does, see Marschall, 2016) but connecting scattered individuals and very diverse places that are personally important to them in understanding their place in the world, their identity, home. Since nostalgia is always a mythical return to ‘home’, in fact it represents a real longing for another time, not a place (Boym, 2007), for what we once were – so homecoming tourism is a way of an ‘intangible encounter’ (feeling of at-homeness) and not ‘tangible encounter ‘ with place as such.

Personal memory and nostalgia: temporalizing space in travel studies

Memory is a significant factor in tourism. The scarcity of scholarly literature on tourism−memory nexus is surprising, argues Marschall (2012, p. 322), given that the two phenomena are closely intertwined in practice and that research in the separate fields of memory studies and tourism studies has actually increased in the last decades.

What Bartoletti (2010) characterizes as ‘memory tourism’ is overlapping, yet distinct from ‘heritage tourism’. While heritage tourism revolves around the personal visit to tangible sites and preserved artefacts, memory tourism can be developed without the presence of such valued cultural objects and authentic remnants. Its resources are embodied memories. In other words, memory tourism does not necessarily need ‘sights worth seeing’, as long as it provides ‘something worth feeling’, claims Bartoletti (2010, p. 41).² In Nora’s (1996, p. 1) terms we can characterize these places worth feeling as ‘sites of memory’ (les lieux de mémoire), as sites that continually create new meanings and new interpretations. These sites of memory may function as the border stones of the past age (Nora, 1996, p. 7).

Following Bartoletti’s argument and in line with the idea of memory as a highly subjective and individualized phenomenon, Marschall (2014) elaborated a concept of personal memory tourism. She has defined the latter as ‘a form of travel motivated by autobiographical memories, focused on the retracing of memorable previous journeys; the revisiting of destinations associated with key moments in a person’s life and the deliberate return to sites associated with one’s own past’ (Marschall, 2014, p. 336). Not only any physical location, but also any intangible experience can be considered a ‘personal memory site’ for an individual and thus a unique and subjective tourist attraction for that person and their significant others. Yet, personal memory tourism is not always focused on recollecting happy memories, it may also involve the return to places associated with traumatic events, such as the site of an accident, the death of a loved one or other forms of personal suffering and loss (Marschall, 2014, pp. 336–337).³

As an extension of the process of remembering, personal memory tourism relies heavily on nostalgia as a significant sentiment. A yearning for what is gone is a desire constantly fed and reinforced by change. As defined by Boym (2007, p. 7), nostalgia is a ‘sentiment of loss and displacement’. It describes a malady brought on by being distant from one’s homeland (see Bonnett, 2016, p. 2). It occurs to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time, Boym (2007, p. 8) argues. It could be considered as the valuing of the past, connected to a present sense of loss. Or as Lowenthal (1985, 1989) simply defines it, nostalgia can be seen as the past in the present.

A cornerstone in studies of nostalgia has been a contrast between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia made by Boym (2007). If restorative nostalgia is ‘an attempt to conquer and spatialize time’ in order to imaginatively rebuild a mythical place called home, the reflective nostalgia can be ‘ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary’ (Boym, 2007, p. 15). Reflective nostalgia is more individual, while restorative is collectivistic. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, Bonnett and Alexander (2013) demonstrate that nostalgias are mobile and interwoven, that restorative and reflective forms can co-exist and, furthermore, that it is not meaningful to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ nostalgias as state-led practices of conservation might be maintained in a complex and mutually sustaining relationship with more personal, less official, visions of the value of the past. Nostalgia for space in specific historical time is embodied and reflected in people’s personal memories or in their ‘mental maps’ (Petrović, 2007). In today’s fragmented societies the very persistent nature of nostalgia inevitably reappears in many contexts. According to Cross (2015, p. 14), nostalgia today ‘binds together not communities or families but scattered individuals around seemingly ephemeral things that are meaningful to them personally’. Unmasking the distinctive character of modern nostalgia, in particular its narratives and uses – also in tourist practices – thus remains essential.

When ‘away’ is finding your mythical home: beyond the ‘home and away’ dichotomy in tourism

The phenomenon of personal memory tourism seems to destabilize some of the basic dichotomies on which the sociological theories of tourism have been unreflectively formed.

Due to its distinguishing nature of revisiting an already familiar place, it appears to profoundly weaken the conventional distinction between what is in tourism studies considered separate domains, that is, the domain of the ordinary and the extraordinary. There is nothing new or extraordinary in a personal memory site; on the contrary, its charm stems from its familiarity and homeliness. In general, the advanced blurring of boundaries between tourist practices and everyday practices has been likewise widely discussed. In this context, Franklin and Crang (2001, p. 10) note ‘the routinization of touristic sensibilities in everyday life’ in a globalizing society where people are becoming more routinely mobile, while Craik (1997, p. 125) in her discussion of the culture of tourism points out the trend towards de-differentiation among all sorts of social and cultural spheres, resulting also in ‘a convergence or blurring between tourist and everyday leisure activities’ (Craik, 1997, p. 125). On the flip-side, ordinary life penetrates travel in a sense that much of our tourism revolves around socializing with family/friends on the top of that our everyday routines growingly inform our tourist performances (Cohen & Cohen, 2012, p. 2182).

What is more, the personal-memory tourism imposes even more confusion onto the tourism’s common-sense binary distinction between home and away, challenging the established model of the tour (conceived as a circular trip ‘home-away-back home’). In insightful discussion of troubles in travel theory, Franklin and Crang (2001, p. 12), for example, stress that there are significant numbers of people for whom the tourist destination has become the home and the everyday, referring in particular to O’Reilly’s study of British residents on the Costa del Sol in which she unravels the varied experiences and relationships to Spain and Britain, where many can be described as truly ‘resident tourists’ while others are sojourners periodically shifting between Spain and Britain (Franklin & Crang, 2001). In a similar manner, Haldrup (2004) focuses on the more mundane type of tourism and analyses vacationing in second homes as a specific practice of tourism in Denmark, exposing in such practice of tourism the various ‘travellings-in-dwelling’ and ‘dwellings-in-travelling’. Categories of home and away have become very obscure and elusive in these cases, as nostalgic trips to personal-memory sites constitute both a tour away and at the same time towards (mythical) home. In Radstone’s (2010) terms we can define these bilateral nostalgic trips to personal-memory sites and back as ‘home-comings and home-departures’. ‘Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an ‘enchanted world’ with clear boundaries and values’, as argued by Boym (2007, p. 12). Sentimental personal-memory travel thus provides a dynamic context of such mythical return by enabling travellers to appropriate places from the past that are meaningful to them personally.

Such dilemmas and their implications for tourism studies have been amply addressed within a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Hannam, 2009; Sheller & Urry, 2006), suggesting also that the paradigm shift signals ‘the end of tourism’.⁴ As suggested by Cohen and Cohen (2012, p. 2181), the progressive blurring of boundaries between different mobilities provoked a de-differentiation of the domain of tourism from other mobilities, such as for example diaspora, commuting, labour or retirement or lifestyle migration, second home visits, volunteering, sporting activities etc. Diverse mobilities are, according to Urry (2000, p. 2) – one of the principal proponents of the new paradigm –, materially reconstructing the ‘social as society’ into the ‘social as mobility’. The ‘mobility turn’ has undeniably proven valuable for destabilizing conventional tourism scholarship by generating constructive insights into the complexities and variations of movement in contemporary societies.

Research approach, methods, and material

The presented study is exploratory and designed to pursue a qualitative, interpretivist approach, based upon qualitative interview data of Slovenian respondents who engaged in some form of personal memory tourism. It involves 124 in-depth interviews identified through snowball sampling and conducted individually in person by final year undergraduate students of Media and collective memory course at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana in the study years 2017/2018, 2018/2019, and 2019/2020. Students came from all over Slovenia and their task was to conduct interviews in their home area, so sampling entry points were geographically dispersed.⁵ We trained them and gave them precise instructions how to search for the informant and how to make an in-depth interview. We also prepared them an interview protocol with a list of questions, which helped them lead the interview. Interviewees, predominantly students’ parents, grandparents or other family members, were asked about their travel patterns related to specific personal memory, the meaning of the mentioned personal memory site, their experiences of revisiting such sites – expectations and anxieties of such revisits in particular, as well as the aspect of sharing their memories and visits with other family members. The oral data on which the analysis is based were thus triggered by a semi-structured questionnaire. Interviews were conducted in Slovenian language; they were recorded and later transcribed by the students. The interviews lasted around an hour and in total provided approximately 600 pages of transcripts. Thematic analysis of empirical material was performed in order to identify underlying patterns across dataset. The transcribed responses were coded for analysis, which did not subscribe to any theoretical model but was rather aimed to trace dispersive accounts of phenomenon and, by recognizing recurring patterns across dataset, contribute to understanding of a complex phenomenon of homecoming tourism and in particular its perplexities. Due to the protection of the privacy of all those who have been interviewed in this paper we strictly use only their initials and exclude all personal details.

Memory-evoking practice as a qualitative research fieldwork method (see Hanna, Potter, Modlin, Carter, & Butler, 2015) thus helped us to reconstruct those past periods and sites that are subject of personal-memory trips. This paper is based on personal accounts of ‘homecoming’ tourism in a specific socio-cultural context. Therefore, personal memories include also a historical account of a socio-economic transformation of the Slovenian society as articulated in the personal imagination of this transformation through the remembering of tours to personal memory sites. Our non-random sample consisted of Slovenian residents, was relatively gender balanced, yet most of the interviewees were middle-aged or older. Namely, we build upon premises similar to previous research such as that the older individuals have accumulated more general life experiences as well as more touristic experiences, and would therefore be more likely to reflect on memories of their own past and potentially embark on return journeys (see Marschall, 2014, p. 340). For our interviewees memory tourism experiences have usually been only one of travel choices in an otherwise more or less broad spectrum of tourism practices.

Due to the highly individualized and diverse nature of the phenomenon of personal memory tourism, our research assumed great diversity in mentioned personal memory sites. From the responses we could, nevertheless, recognize two dominant categories of personal memory travel motivated by distinct autobiographical memories. First, there are visits to places associated with one’s childhood or one’s ancestors, most often to the place of origin and (old) natal home and not rarely to another country (mostly to Slovenia’s neighbouring countries like Croatia or other ex-Yugoslav countries). And secondly, there are repeat visits to one’s own holiday homes or former holiday destinations, focused on retracing memorable previous journeys (many times also remarkable for important life events, such as engagement etc.). Among our cases there were very few associated with bad memories (among the recorded are, for instance, living in violence or poverty, bomb explosion during the war) or trauma (childhood accidents, tragic death of a brother, death of parents) and all of these could be as well categorized under the visits to places of one’s childhood. By using interpretive approach we wish to map and unravel common inconsistencies and contradictions in experiencing the personal-memory sites, irrespective of its type, and identify key registers of perplexities in homecoming, as they manifest in diverse respondents’ narratives revolving around revisits.

The registers of perplexity in ‘homecoming’ tourism

The aim of our study is to account for ambivalences of homecoming that characterize the experiences of travelling to one’s significant personal-memory site. In particular, we searched for inconsistencies and disruptions that unsettle understandings of self and place in such practices. In the following section we represent three distinct registers that reveal key contradictions of engaging in homecoming/nostalgic tourism as they were identified in respondents’ narratives about revisiting personal-memory sites.

An oscillation between inhabiting the home and navigating the tour

First register revolves around the inconsistencies regarding the appropriation of and engagement with place. What turned out to characterize personal-memory trips are the ongoing transitions between touring the site on one side and inhabiting the place on the other as two incompatible logics of place appropriation. According to respondents’ anecdotic evidence, however, personal-memory tourism seems to be a complex combination of both mobility patterns, as one’s appropriation of the place seems to be stretching back and forward between inhabiting and navigating the place.

Let us first turn to document responses that are illustrative of the logic of inhabiting the place. This mode of engaging with place is primarily concerned with everything plain and ordinary while at destination, most often with an ordinariness of personal social relations instead of with gazing at and documenting the tour, as in this detailed account of social life at the destination:

At that time we were very connected as a family, we spent all the time together, by or in the lake, wandering around Bled, forests, my parents were free of obligations and they were in a very good mood, my father was literally glowing. (M., female, age 51)

In this respect the majority of activities unfolding at the destination are to be considered as part of the joint project of creating a sense of home. Similarly, socializing also with extended family members with a purpose of reconnecting the family, repeatedly reported on, may count as such activity. Rooted in particular emotional investments and affective attachments that inform the way tourists appropriate the place as their (mythical) home; these feelings seem to be induced spontaneously, as illustrated below:

When we arrive at the port (of Pula) and on the right side I see the arena from Roman times seen so many times, in a way I feel at home again. (S., female, age 46)

In addition to that, some display explicit efforts to symbolically domesticate the holiday and in this manner knowingly transform the place of vacation into a home. In this way, S. (female, age 46) also describes how they have a certain door frame in the apartment in Pula (Croatia), where they are returning every year, on which the height of their children is measured again and again, so that the frame is already running out of space, and how she often takes her daughters for a walk in the park, where her grandmother used to lead her when she was a little girl. These testimonials clearly indicate that within the inhabiting mode of appropriating the place, places are valued, as Haldrup explains (Haldrup, 2004, p. 444), not for their inherent qualities, but for their ability to serve as a safe haven for the family, in which the family can inscribe itself and its social roles.

Domestication of the site is also reflected in the repetitive pattern of ordinary daily routines – routines that would emerge in their everyday life back home as well. Accumulated memories thus seem to inscribe a respondent and co-travellers into the frame of common everyday life.

Every day goes by practically the same. We read the newspapers in the morning, then cook lunch, go to the beach in the afternoon, and take a walk around the city in the evenings. We also celebrate our wedding anniversary there every year and somehow we got used to that my husband is honoring me with lunch at a special restaurant. (J., female, age 83)

Their project of ‘homecoming’ is also evident in how their relations with the locals are presented. Namely, many report to have made new friends among locals or learned their language.

We usually stop at the same places, we know where the good coffee is / … /. For many years there was the same gentleman who baked waffles. (B. P., male, age 53)

I go back there (Greek island of Elafonisos) because of the people. We met a lot of locals on the island, whom we can call friends today. They accepted us and I really feel at home there. / … / Probably, because we don't behave like tourists, instead we really want to get to know people and their life there. (B., female, age 51)

What enables the travellers to get familiar with and domesticate the place of vacationing are also the so-called ‘laid-back mobilities’ (Haldrup, 2004, p. 445). Our respondents in this context report on exploring the surroundings for instance through long morning walks to the same pub for every 15 years ‘with the umbrella and some sweets just to be safe’ (I., female, age 78) or swimming at ‘early hours when one shares the sea with only sea turtles (B., female, age 51), whilst mentioning the benefits of solitude, no crowds and the fresh air.

The described inhabiting mode is, nevertheless, frequently interrupted with the opposing operating logic of appropriating the place, that is the logic of navigating, related to practices of sightseeing and finding one’s way (Haldrup, 2004). This logic of navigating is manifested, among others, in scheduling and organizing ad hoc trips around the surroundings.

Once the weather was bad and we were bored, we decided to go to Switzerland, to Geneva for a coffee. We drove in one direction for four hours. It was 30 degrees there, while it was snowing in Val Thorens. (B. P., male, age 53)

These ad hoc trips around the surroundings thus require a special calculation of time and planning, and most importantly they are transforming the nature of vacations into the nature of a sightseeing trip. A significant facet of navigation is marvelling at the scenery, taking in and capturing the landscape in the form of vistas (also in the form of photographs or souvenirs), as the following testimony illustrates:

(Describing her hours by Lake Bled) ‘Observing the colors in the lake, the reflections of the trees and the sky on the surface / … / observing the fish in the lake, the play of playful dogs, breaking the sun's rays on the water surface … and this indescribable green with blue lake water, which is infinitely soothing’. (M., female, age 51)

To conclude, the above diverse responses clearly demonstrate that trips to personal-memory sites are an unstable balance between the two inconsistent mobility patterns, that of inhabiting and of navigating the place. Therefore, they usually end up being a patchwork of dissimilar orientations towards the very site: to navigate, document the trip and marvel at the scenery (‘gazing’ at the tour) versus to inhabit the place by enjoying its familiarity and ordinariness of personal social relations (and thus its induced feeling of ‘at-homeness’). The transitions between these two modes of appropriating the place seem to be at times analytically demanding to discern, which suggests that for travellers place engagements are in practice commonly ambiguous and complex.

Recollections of intimate ephemeralities: frictions in family rituals and place sacralization

Most recurring explanations for ‘going back’ relate to ideas of one’s memories, sentiment and attachment to the place, while underlining very peculiar and intimate details of a journey. As Marschall (2015, p. 345) claims, ‘memory and meaning are never inherently attached to objects or lodged in spaces; they are inscribed and maintained through communication and performative action’.⁶ Memory in this sense structures not only certain uses of the site in the form of repetitive performances, but also prevailing routines on the very way to the site. A general tendency among respondents to adhere to the familiar is traced also in the steps of planning and preparing for the trip.

My mother always baked ‘potica’ (the traditional cake of Slovenia) … she always worked extremely hard for that ‘potica’ / … /. My father had an interesting habit of always thoroughly cleaning our orange ‘stoenka’ (Zastava 101 – a typical car of Yugoslav socialist car industry); just before the holidays, even in the heaviest snow, a car was polished to make it glow. (T. M., female, age 47)

What has been clearly articulated through all of the respondents’ testimonials is that in every revisit personal memory evokes already established modes/patterns of interaction with objects, people and sites.

Traditionally, we first stopped at Murska Sobota, where we visited one of my sisters. Everyone remembers her for having a parrot as a pet, cursing just like her. Later we stopped at two brothers where we had a small feast and a meeting with other family members. In addition, we also went to the grave of our parents and other deceased siblings together. After that, we went together to the birth house, which was maintained by one of the sisters, and hung out there until evening. Sometimes we chatted too long into the night and therefore slept there as well. The next day we said goodbye to everyone and went back to Ljubljana in time for lunch. However, every time we stopped in Murska Sobota in one of the restaurants that my granddaughter adored. She always wanted a Viennese steak and coloring books, which they offered as entertainment for the children. After we all painted and ate, we returned to Ljubljana half asleep. (J. F., female, age 77)

Experience of the place is by our respondents in this sense articulated primarily through description of ritualized forms of interaction with people, objects, and sites. And it is exactly the cultural work of these fixed and regularly performed rituals that makes the place sacred for personal-memory travellers (see Rothenbuhler, 1998). Every revisit of our respondents could be thus seen as a node of reiterated performative acts of remembering and confronting one’s personal memories by reliving earlier experiences by means of recollecting ephemeralities. These seem to offer a comforting familiarization, making the intangible aspects perceptible and therewith providing a script for individual longing and reimagining the past. It occurs then appropriate to consider a personal-memory site as a narrative, that is as a set of meanings, rather than a mere tourist product with a set of attributes (see Lichrou, O’Malley, & Patterson, 2008).

Engagements with numerous everyday and seemingly ephemeral things, as signs of the past, make the site familiar to tourists, continually reminding them of earlier experiences and the reasons for revisiting. They engage them on a sentimental level and allow them to relive their own narrative of place. In such a manner they appropriate the place and reconstruct a sense of a lost ‘home’. It is a process by which knowledge of places precedes and informs experience of a place. Narrative of a place is not fixed but rather implied within a complex network of performances, which are grounded in one’s memories and thus related with practices of remembrance. In these performances, the narrative of place is made concrete and meaningful. In a narrative, specific acts/performances of tourists make sense only in light of/in relation to each other. It occurs, however, that place may be subject to many different levels of narrative operating simultaneously, as well as to the possibility that what one assumes to be a shared impression of the place may not be so.

In the context of sharing the conception of place, many scholars (Duval, 2003; Marschall, 2014) have so far stressed the role of travelling in intergenerational transfer of autobiographical memories. Likewise, our respondents’ accounts are filled with remarks suggesting revisiting a particular site for many years is deeply embedded in the cultural narrative of family and thus often undertaken precisely for the purpose of sharing memories of one’s own past with children or significant others. Revisits seem to be principally projects of bonding with one’s family through memories and maintaining good spirits appears to be of crucial importance. This might also explain why testimonies are full of observations on children’s behaviour and their well-being, as well as anxiety that disengaged or disappointed children might spoil the pleasure of the trip. Accounts of emotional distress of keeping everyone happy and connected while travelling (and thereby in the process of sharing memories) were thus not uncommon.

My daughter spent many vacations in this place as a child. Although I remember that she always complained that she had no real company there and that she was bored. (J. F., female, age 77)

We now prefer to take our grandchildren with us, before that we took our children. Later they lost interest, and grandchildren still had a desire … they are the only ones who still know how to rejoice over something like this. (A. B., female, age 76)

Our discussion here resonates with the classical MacCannell’s (1976/1999, p. 42) understanding of the essence of tourist experience, dependent upon site sacralisation that is met with corresponding rituals of tourists. Nonetheless, the difference in relation to other forms of tourism is that personal memory tourism is an ongoing process – it is a series, not an episode. Each visit fits within the enduring narrative of the place and in principle reinforces the same narrative in return. However, as we have shown, when it comes to revisiting a place related to one’s autobiographical memory, the one’s narrative of the place is not rarely, even if only temporarily, destabilized by ruptures in (place) sacralisation and frictions in (family) rituals.

On disenchantment: the unease of re-embedding

The third register deals with disillusionment when faced with one’s personal-memory site, otherwise a sacred place for the individual. Respondents’ testimonials outline three distinct discomforts when re-entering the same locale: first is the feeling of obligation that, aside a strong affective attachment, bonds the traveller to a site, second is the profound sentiment of loss whilst acknowledging things have changed, and third an impression of ‘not-fitting in’ any longer due to one’s divided habitus.

Not only emotional attachment to the places but many times also the persisting feeling of responsibility to a particular locale is what seems to be significant for personal-memory travellers. In addition to going on leisure trips to visit the places of their childhood and their loved ones who might still live there in search of home-coming feelings, many feel obliged to visit. Some report they regularly visit to help out with chores around the homestead (the broader family used to gather and harvest hay every year for example). Such revisits then feel more like a necessity for them and not so much a choice. What we label here as a felt necessity is ultimately affect-based too, yet surfaces especially when our respondents speak about these travels as something that is expected of them rather than longed for. Visits to an old hometown, for example, have in this sense become ‘a routine’, ‘only for the Remembrance of the Dead day and even then very quick and superficial’, as T. M. (female, age 47) reports. So both obligation and affect seem to bond our travellers to personal memory sites.

Furthermore, the social transformations and infrastructural progress frequently turned the homecoming of our respondents into a rather perplexed experience.

Otherwise, I was surprised by the growth of the city, when I left Teslić there was only one hotel, and now there are more than five. However, many buildings have already been demolished, only our primary school is still standing. Although I think the building is empty now. / … / Also relations are different. When we met an acquaintance on the road, we went to the inn together, we all collected money and had a drink together. Now that pensions are low, and also relationships are alienated, acquaintances on the streets turn away when they see you. Our generation from Teslić is almost non-existent. Many have already died, and most have emigrated to different parts of the world. So I don't even know the people who live in Teslić now anymore. (J., male, age 68)

Such encounters with place seem to be manifestations of reflective nostalgia, as defined by Boym (2007), that is, as a contemplative nostalgia that helps personal-memory travellers to think about ambiguities of change. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not necessarily opposed to one another in a way in which affective remembering is not necessarily isolated from critical reflection. The reflective form of nostalgia, as argued by Boym (2007, p. 13), thrives on the longing itself and thus delays the homecoming. However, in attempts to nevertheless reconstruct a lost home, universal values, and tradition transhistorically, such personal memory work also contributes to a collective/restorative nostalgic narrative. Namely, nostalgias are interwoven and co-exist in one’s imaginative mapping of a lost homeland, in protecting it and doubting it at the same time. For the individual every revisit is subsequently characterized by the restoring rhetoric of universal values and reflective negotiations between past and present. As demonstrated in the case above, in a response to the breakdown of past forms of social solidarity and cohesion, new forms of relationships have formed and new communities flourished to which they find they no longer belong. These tensions between site and relationships as remembered and new topographical and social reality induce rupturing of the sacralisation of the place that further provokes a growing disenchantment among respondents.

This affirms that otherwise profound and life-long familiarity with the place is not enough to prevent one to feel as an outsider at times. Others might also find it challenging to re-embed due to their own habitus transformation arising from their life trajectory. Such experience of unease when entering the same locale after so many years of revisiting has also been reported on. They seem to be primarily linked to the difficulty in maintaining a sense of continuity in the midst of changes of one’s habitus that can be explained in one part by accumulated life experiences, which are to some extent transforming one’s cultural dispositions. Many have in the years of revisiting the place come into contact with a variety of different cultural registers, as they were confronted by a different socializing sphere (professional, educational) and new life experiences in response to which their habitus inevitably changed. Still, newly acquired (cultural) capital does not completely rewrite the former dispositions, so it seems in such cases more fitting to speak of a disrupted or divided habitus, which is internally contradictory and fragmented (see Reay, 2010). Because of the divided habitus, people might experience a dissonance and the feeling of being ‘out of tune’ when faced with the personal-memory site. Divided habitus in this way enhances the possibilities that each revisit becomes a situation of disjuncture, resulting in strivings and struggles to come to terms with one’s belonging to the place.

At that time, Portorož seemed huge to me, but now it feels a bit smaller. Also that warmth is missing that I felt when I was little, as there are too many people in the city and I no longer have the feeling that this is ‘my city’. (S. Š., female, age 46)

I believe I would be in a bad mood. Mainly because of decaying houses and the people who once lived there and are no more there today. In addition, today we are only acquaintances or even strangers with people we used to be good friends with, which is also quite sad. (M. D., female, age 44)

In view of the above described discomforts many revisits might be therefore apprehended in a sense of confrontation. They seem to evoke either (1) dilemmas regarding an obligation vs. a desire to visit, (2) negotiations between the site and relationships as remembered and new topographical and social reality or, finally, (3) experiences of cultural gap, as travellers with renewed cultural dispositions are immersed in what is for them an old cultural context. All these confrontations are then primarily illustrative of increasingly complex interplay between belonging to the place and detachment from it.

Conclusion

The paper dealt with the precarious notion of home and the elusiveness of feelings of at-homeness from the perspective of ‘metaphysics of fixity and flow’ (Cresswell, 2006). It approached place as a narrative of one’s memory and a site of return on one side, and mobility through the lens of attachment to the place and belonging on the other. As such, it explored the uncertain balance between one’s sedentary and nomadic sentiments and, most importantly, spoke of a particular dialectic relationship between the idea of movement and the notion of home as it is articulated in the phenomenon of personal-memory tourism. Moreover, in this paper we tried to combine memory and tourism/travel studies, to approach and investigate the personal-memory sites, how they are narrativized in people’s memorial accounts of historical times and spaces. To paraphrase Benjamin (2015, p. 93), we tried to understand how people value these sites and this helped us to ‘capitalize on the perceptions associated with certain landscapes thus illuminating how memories, history / … / shape how people create space’.

This study has been an attempt to move beyond the uncritically assumed tendency in travel studies to foreground space per se. Instead it has put the focus on temporalization of space, memory and remembrance. We identified three distinct registers that reveal important inconsistencies and contradictions of engaging in homecoming tourism: (1) oscillation between two opposing patterns of appropriating the place, that is, of navigating vs. inhabiting the place, (2) frictions in family rituals and place sacralization, which provisionally destabilize one’s narrative of the place, (3) the issue of disenchantment and the unease of re-embedding whilst questioning one’s belonging to a place.

Limitations of study include its hindered replicability in terms of procedures and findings, and the related non-random nature of our sample of interviewees who, being mostly middle-age and older, also share some critical demographic attributes. Despite the mentioned replicability issues, and sample biased by age, we believe the findings of our culturally and geographically situated study nevertheless reveal some valuable insights and observations that can further inform research within travel and memory studies. Ultimately, as we have shown, different modes of yearning and attachment to the place on one side interact and intersect with described perplexities that unravel the inconsistencies and confusion of the lived experiences of personal-memory travellers. Travellers ‘interpret and make sense of their experiences at the site, selecting the sites and or ideas that are most powerful, meaningful, or significant to them’ and this helped us to gain insight not only into how travellers make sense of personal memoryscapes, but contribute also to social memory of places (Nelson, 2015, p. 17). In conclusion, this contributes to a more nuanced understanding of our mobile lives in a deterritorialized world that emphasizes the experiential tensions between feelings of being home and away. Therefore, by stressing the inadequacy of static categories in much of foregrounding tourism research so far, our research suggests avenues for further research agenda of contemporary mobilities to be necessarily sensitive to its spatial and temporal aspects while problematizing the implicit dichotomies (such as being at home and being away). In the end, it calls for closer attention to be paid to the unsettling dynamics of homecoming in relation to diverse mobilities, and in these practices to the (enduring) processes of (essentially precarious) phenomena-in-the-making (identity, home, memory, etc.).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency [grant numbers P6-0400 and J6-2576].

Notes

1 We borrow from Assman (2004), who talks about four formats of memory for analytical purposes; she divides between individual (or personal or autobiographical) and collective (political, cultural and social) constructions of the past.

2 Example of memory tourism is ‘Ostalgia tourism’ (see Boyer, 2006 for the concept of Ostalgie). According to Bartoletti (2010), Ostalgia tourism is motivated by nostalgia for the familiar everyday life led in the former East Germany before reunification, thus by ‘a sense of loss of a material culture that was relevant in constructing cultural meanings and personal identities’ (Bartoletti, 2010, p. 38; see also Meinhof & Galasinski, 2000). However, as argued by Marschall (2015, pp. 332, 335) the phenomenon of ‘homesick tourism’, well known in the German context, is a far broader trend, which includes also survivors and their descendants travelling to places from which they were once forcibly removed due to either political forces or natural/human-made disasters.

3 Marschall (2014) stresses that personal memory tourism should not be considered a type, but rather a form of tourism because of its heterogeneous and highly individualized nature of the phenomenon. It comprises great divergences in how such trips are organized and for what reason.

4 For a cutting polemic directed against the largely unchallenged incorporation of mobilities within tourism studies see Doering and Duncan (2016). They advocate that a nuanced rereading of the philosophical stakes of mobilities ultimately signals a return to tourism studies rather than moving beyond it.

5 There were no non-resident students in the course to be included in the fieldwork in one way or the other.

6 In the same sense Wertsch (2008) talks about the narrative organization of memory, how collective and individual memory are always narratively structured and performed in communication.