Tourism and remembrance: the journey into the self and its past

Abstract

The research refines the author's earlier conceptualization of ‘personal memory tourism’, a form of travel motivated by memories of one's own past and focused on the revisiting of sites and destinations associated with key moments in a person's life or the retracing of memorable previous journeys. The concept is compared with and differentiated from overlapping and related types of tourism. Based on some scholarly insights into the functioning of human memory, it is argued that travelling can be considered a deliberate and organized extension of the process of remembering, associated with issues of identity and an exploration of the self, especially in relation to significant others. Using an interpretive approach based on in-depth interviews with 20 participants, the research found that the majority have engaged in some form of personal memory tourism, but with great divergences in how such trips were organized and for what reasons. The research concludes that personal memory tourism should not be considered a type, but rather a form of tourism due to the heterogeneous and highly individualized nature of the phenomenon.

Keywords:

• memory
• personal memory tourism
• revisiting
• return travel
• experience
• personal memory site