Note: I recently came upon an alternate use of the term “heritage tourism” that I briefly contrast with the application of the phrase during my working days.
Some readers know I worked as an archaeologist for the largest U.S. federal land-managing agency, the Bureau of Land Management or the “BLM,” which currently administers roughly 245 million acres. I spent the bulk of my career in the headquarters office in Washington, D.C. working in an administrative position rather than as a field archaeologist. Among my responsibilities was developing the annual budget for submission to Congress for what was dubbed the “cultural resource management program,” which has broad authority over prehistoric and historic archaeological resources; paleontological resources; museum collections; Native American tribal coordination; heritage education; and more.
Road signs usually inform travelers they have crossed onto or entered BLM lands. Unlike one of BLM’s sister agencies, the National Park Service, rarely are tourists required to go through a gated park entrance and pay an entrance fee to access BLM’s so-called public lands.
Unfettered access to most of the agency’s lands has clear advantages. An obvious one is that visitors are not usually required to pay to use the BLM lands. Another benefit is they can enjoy a dispersed recreational opportunity in a natural outdoor setting surrounded by fewer tourists. Many of the agency’s cultural and fossil resources are in wilderness areas where motorized vehicles are prohibited; these areas are largely devoid of modern human development and untrammeled by people. This enables outdoor enthusiasts to view these resources in their original setting and imagine the world in which they were created.
From BLM’s standpoint, however, there are also some serious drawbacks from unrestricted access to their lands. Many of the agency’s remote cultural and paleontological resources have been targeted by looters, vandals, and so-called “pothunters.” Archaeological and fossil sites that might have informed scientists and tourists about the recent and distant past have been irreparably damaged. Many of these places are no longer suitable for study and public interpretation. The economic, recreational, and scientific benefits the public might have derived from them is no longer attainable.
Because public lands offer dispersed recreation with few entry points to count visitors, BLM is often unable to estimate their number and quantify the economic impact of tourists. Absent this information it is sometimes difficult to convince Congressional representatives how their constituents benefit from the multiple uses and users of the public lands. Consequently, in the case of cultural resources, it is challenging to make a compelling case for additional funding that could be used to enhance the visitor experience and “harden” archaeological and historic sites so they can be interpreted and better withstand a constant stream of tourists. Supplemental funding could also be used to hire more law enforcement rangers to better protect cultural and paleontological resources from illegal appropriation. Suffice it to say, the BLM’s cultural resource management program is underfunded despite having world-class archaeological and fossil resources that require active rather than passive management.
Public land visitation focused on touring archaeological, historical, and fossil sites, including viewing museum collections derived from scientific study of these resources, is commonly referred to as “heritage tourism.” This is the context that I’m familiar with the phrase.
Recently, I came upon an alternate meaning of heritage tourism, one that coincidentally provided the impetus for this family history blog.
Earlier in my blog, I explained to readers that my father Dr. Otto Bruck (1907-1994) left me with seven photo albums of pictures covering the mid-1910s to the late 1940s. While my father was reasonably good at captioning his pictures and naming people, there were some people he failed to put a name to. In some cases, my father identified them only by their forenames or nicknames. Fortunately, in 2010, at the time I started trying to learn more about my father’s life through his photos, a few of his contemporaries were still alive who were able to fill in some holes. All have since died.
A furious letter-writing campaign in the early 2010s to presumed descendants of people my father had once known led to additional identifications.
Finally, hoping to learn more and connect to some of the places where my father and his family had lived, in 2014 my wife and I went on a thirteen-week driving vacation to Europe that took us everywhere from northeast Poland, near the existing Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, to southern Spain. On this and subsequent vacations, I obtained records, vital documents, letters, photos, maps, etc. from various city halls and archives, as well as private individuals, in Poland, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain; most have not been digitized and are therefore inaccessible to ancestral researchers. This resulted in yet more family identifications and finding cousins I might never have found absent these trips to Europe.
In any case, the vacations and trips my wife and I took to Europe following my family’s diaspora would be considered a different type of “heritage tourism.” A January 2024 article “The Fantasy of Heritage Tourism” in The Atlantic by Gisela Salim-Peyer drew my attention to this type of travel. The author also made me aware of a sociologist named Marcus Lee Hansen who Wikipedia describes as “an important historian of American immigration.” Further quoting what Wikipedia says:
“In a 1938 essay, ‘The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant,’ he first presented what he called ‘the principle of third generation interest’: ‘What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.’ This hypothesis suggests that ethnicity is preserved among immigrants, weakens among their children, and returns with their grandchildren. Children of immigrants tend to reject the foreign ways of their parents, including their religion, and want to join the American mainstream, but the next generation wants to retain the values of their ancestors. The religion of the first-generation immigrant, which the second-generation rejects, may be reaffirmed by the third generation.”
According to Ms. Salim-Peyer, fourth, fifth and sixth generation immigrants visiting places where their ancestors came from has resulted in heritage tourism having grown into its own travel category; people traveling to “trace their roots” and reestablish ancestral connections has apparently increased by 500 percent since 2014. As someone who has engaged in this type of travel, albeit at a much lower cost than packaged tours offered by companies such as Ancestry in collaboration with travel agencies, I can attest to an experience that Ms. Salim-Peyer characterizes as ”. . .much more ‘personal’ and ‘deep’. . .”
An earlier effort, following WWII, to promote this form of heritage tourism as a major component of diplomacy to unite European countries against the Soviet Union, was an abject failure. According to Ms. Salim-Peyer, part of the problem was the exorbitant cost of plane travel at the time. Another factor is that many people in the aftermath of WWII were not then interested in connecting to their homelands. And, yet another element Ms. Salim-Peyer cites is that for a long time, genealogy was considered elitist by people in the United States: “Most European settlers, the historian Russell Bidlack wrote, ‘had escaped from a society where the traditions of inheritance and caste had denied them opportunity for a better life.’ Genealogy was for people obsessed with nobility, or for WASPs living off borrowed glory.”
According to Ms. Salim-Peyer what changed to make genealogy “cool” was the publication of Alex Haley’s 1976 “Roots” novel about a seven-generation lineage that started with a man sold into slavery in Gambia. For readers who recall this book, it topped the New York Times best-seller list for more than five months and inspired TV adaptations and current tracing-your-roots reality shows.
I have several hand-drawn and detailed ancestral trees from various branches of my extended family attesting to the hard work that was once entailed in developing ancestral charts before searchable online genealogical databases became widely available. In combination with DNA testing which became mainstream in the 2010s, tracking down one’s origins and visiting places associated with one’s ancestors has become much easier and more commonplace. This, in turn, has given rise to a different brand of heritage tourism than I was aware of during my working days.
In closing, personally speaking, I would simply say the two types of heritage tourism have played varying roles in my life. It’s not so much that I retired from being an archaeologist as I transitioned to using some of the same skills, particularly those I learned as a field archaeologist, to doing forensic genealogy to track down my own family’s origins and visit some of these places. Thus, I continue to be engaged in heritage tourism, albeit in a different form.
REFERENCES
“Marcus Lee Hansen.” Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, 22 September 2023. Marcus Lee Hansen – Wikipedia
Salim-Peyer, G. (2024, January 20). The fantasy of heritage tourism. The Atlantic. Why So Many Americans Are Traveling Back to Their Roots – The Atlantic