‘An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger): Passage to India’ – Exploring genealogy and roots tourism through documentary filmmaking

Abstract

This article presents a documentary film produced and enacted by one of the authors as a way of knowing, constructing and representing a specific form of tourist consumption, namely genealogy tourism. The documentary (https://vimeo.com/825001015?share=copy), entitled ‘An Gorta Mor’ (Gaelic words that translate to ‘The Great Hunger’, the Irish famine that occurred from 1845 to 1852), functions as both a vehicle to produce and present the ethnographic fieldwork conducted by one of the authors to trace back his ancestral roots and the empirical material to be analysed. The documentary unveils two emergent themes. The first is that genealogy tourism involves multiple fluid places and transnational identities that question ‘fixed’ notions of ‘motherland’, ‘home’ and ‘family’. The second refers to roots tourism as a vehicle to propel bonding and bridging social capital. Methodologically, as a form of arts-based research, this work promotes embodied alternative ways of knowing tourist realities and selves.