Social-cultural sustainability of roots tourism in Calabria, Italy: A tourist perspective

Roots tourists are members of diaspora communities who visit their motherland during holidays searching for their roots and identity. This research aims to explore how roots tourism can contribute to a more sustainable development of destinations by focusing on its socio-cultural impact. It involves qualitative research, analysing roots tourism from the tourists’ point of view. 45 roots tourists who visited the Calabria region in Italy were interviewed. The findings of the research show that roots tourism can be seen as socio-culturally sustainable. This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature on the effects of the development of roots tourism on the local socio-cultural fabric to evaluate them in terms of sustainability.

Old World Homecomings: Campaigns of Ancestral Tourism and Cultural Diplomacy, 1945–66

This article examines the history of ancestral tourism and its development as a form of cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1966. The phenomenon often referred to as ‘roots tourism’ has during the last decades increased in popularity, especially in Old World countries that historically have sent large numbers of people to North America. While previous scholarship has focused on its existential dimensions and its relation to the twenty-first century tourism and heritage economies, this article looks at how ancestral tourism grew out of European attempts at expanding the tourism industry after 1945. It studies the international spread of ‘person-to-person’ programs that sought to turn travelers into ‘ambassadors’, and the subsequent transformation of such initiatives into ‘homecoming’ campaigns through notions of co-descent, targeting Americans of European descent. By exploring the case of the 1966 Homecoming Year campaign in Sweden, the article shows that the attraction of ancestral tourism was grounded in its ability to combine economic and political incentives articulated in the Marshall Plan. It developed out of a liberal-democratic ideology that vested individual travelers with diplomatic agency. In the process, European tourist agencies calcified the notion that ancestral tourism served not only individual experiences, but also national economies and international relations.