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.