Of Routes and Roots: Paths for Understanding Diasporic Heritage

Abstract

The scholarly study of heritage and diaspora is relatively recent, but emerges out of earlier theoretical works on the separate domains of heritage/tourism (informed by anthropology, history, geography, museum studies and tourism studies) on the one hand, and diaspora (informed by anthropology, history, geography, political science and area studies) on the other. This chapter provides a review of the literature, focusing on the aspects of heritage and diaspora that have been brought together under these previously distinct domains. Geographer David Lowenthal (1985) reminds us that the quest to value the past and to positively identify with foreign lands is nothing new. Folk models cast heritage as traditional, unchanging cultural practices that have been handed down since time immemorial and nostalgia as the tendency to imagine oneself in a simpler, better time when life was easier, things were cheaper and people had more respect for one another. Deriving ‘from the Greek nosos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief’, nostalgia was identified not only as a mental yearning for the past, but as a physical ailment documented by physicians in the seventeenth century, leading some of its victims to supposedly waste away and die (Lowenthal, 1999 [1985], p. 10). Although the quest for nostalgia may be nothing new, the contemporary fascination with roots-searching as a form of individual expression seems to be at an all-time high. Why is it so important for people to claim a particular homeland in contemporary times, just as globalization is supposed to make us all citizens of the world?