ABSTRACT
The commodification of national identity and ethnicity has been one of the most distinctive features of tourism development in the last decade. One motivation for this commodification process has been the increased interest among communities and individuals in uncovering more about their collective pasts and identities by discovering family roots and by improving their awareness of past historical events and places. This rapid growth in heritage-related travel has also seen an increase in travel by people belonging to diasporic communities. As such, diaspora-related tourism has grown into a significant market in recent years and many destinations now design and market tourism products to such ‘hyphenated’ communities around the globe. For example, one of the results of these new levels of interest in people’s familial past is the growth of genealogy-related travel wherein people travel in search of their roots and the communities of their ancestors, whether to genealogical libraries or to monuments or buildings that symbolize individual and collective pasts (Timothy 1997; see also Ch. 9).
