Genetic Tourism: Key to Multicultural Understanding and Peacebuilding?

Abstract

This chapter introduces the birth of a new tourism modality, genetic tourism, by comparing it with genealogical tourism. Once this comparison was carried out, it was possible to determine the characteristics of genetic tourism and to study its possible positive effects concerning cultural sensitivity and transculturality, related to multicultural understanding and peacebuilding. The exploratory study was done by analysing travel blogs and online news related to genetic tourism, which results were used to identify a series of topics related to cultural sensitivity and transculturality. Among these topics, the author highlights the predisposition of the studied subjects to define themselves as citizens of the world, enabling people-to-people interactions and the belief of a positive relationship between genetic tourism, tolerance, cultural ethnorelativism, and reductions of negative stereotypes.