Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine how the study of certain subcategories contained within Susan Stewart’s well known three-partite classification of collecting lead to a consideration of their mutually interacting functions and meanings in the construction / deconstruction of selfhood. Two of these categories will be examined, both what we call anti-souvenirs, to explore their relation with the notion of ‘souvenir’ expounded within Stewart’s seminal work, On Longing.

Paper long abstract:

Two types of anti-souvenir will be examined. The first will focus on the surrealist's notion of the found object, artifacts, it will be argued that not only open the doors to unexpected universes and provoke a rupture in ordinary consciousness and perception, but which also dissolve histories centred on the existence of a discretely constructed individualism. The second example will be based on religious 'souvenirs' that can be collected during pilgrimages to miraculous sites associated with the Virgin Mary in the Canary Isles. The pilgrimage represents an individual's aspiration to commune with divinity, a denial of the conditions of their physical existence and desire to become part of a universal transcendental body. In both examples individual histories are replaced by transcendental determinants which are marked and remembered through the acquisition of specific types of objects. The study of these sub-cateegories indicate how Stewart's tripartite classification of objects can be extended to open up new ways in understanding the way artifacts work on the articulation of conscious / unconscious aspects of life histories.

Paper short abstract:

Different aspects of the sale of souvenirs in Masai Mara (Kenya) will be addressed from both the buyers' and the sellers' point of view. Particular attention will be given to the discussion of exchange in two contexts: organised sale within a fair trade project and individual sale by local women.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on data collected during fieldwork in the Talek community adjacent to the Masai Mara Reserve, where sale of souvenirs, especially beadwork, represents an important income source for Maasai women.

Tourists' interpretation of different forms of souvenir sale will be analysed. A fair trade project, which claims to promote the maintenance of the handicraft skills and the production of beadwork as souvenirs, represents for the buyers a "positive" aspect of tourism in Masai Mara. Guests are invited to visit the workshop where they can see how the women work. The objects for sale are labelled with the name of the artisan and, consequently, a personal value is added to the commerce of souvenirs, often criticised as mass-produced. In this context, tourists experience buying souvenirs as "helping" the local poor women. In contrast, sale of souvenirs during village visits and outside the reserve's gates is characterised, according to tourists' accounts, by the Maasai women's aggressiveness and tough bargaining. Therefore, the tourists are often left with the feeling of being pushed to buy against their will and are often afraid they have paid "too much". Souvenirs sold in this way are generally of "low quality", according to Western standards, and mass-produced in Nairobi. This commerce is described as a sign of the ongoing erosion of traditional culture.

For the Maasai women, the direct sale to tourists is better than the participation in the project: they earn more, and are not "poor women" gazed upon by foreign visitors.

Paper short abstract:

Animals on Native carvings around Vancouver constitute a prominent part of the urban bestiary. In their souvenir versions these animal bodies, coded Native, suggest access to an unknowable other and articulate anxieties about an uncertain future represented by the fate of animals. They enable the move from logos to pathos.

Paper long abstract:

Animals on totem poles and Native carvings of all kinds, are increasingly prominent in Vancouver's parks and airport, in museums, galleries, and in portable versions in the kind of stores at which tourists, but not only tourists, shop, where they constitute a significant part of the urban bestiary. The current widespread trans-disciplinary interest in animals encourages attention to the neglected role of the image of the animal as a specific component of publicly accessible Native imagery. Attempting to deal with the fact that most of the territory of British Columbia remains un-ceded land, an acrimonious, potentially explosive treaty process is currently underway with political and economic tensions between native and non-Native at an all time high in the province. The paper relates to a larger study of the ways in which the display of Indigenous motifs and imagery in urban British Columbia acts simultaneously, under these circumstances, as evasion and disguise. Less racialized, less essentialized, than Native art as such has become, dispersed animal imagery is relational, active in the contemporary spaces where Native and non-Native are brought into de-territorialized contact. Is it the case that visual and affective interaction with images of animals, when coded Native, provide access to spaces that are typically blocked, obfuscated or reduced in verbal or published explanatory accounts, both popular and specialist? In working to short circuit troublesome politics and the anxieties around the unknown, or unknowable, other, they enable a defining move from logos to pathos.

Paper short abstract:

I will take two different settings in touristic contexts to approach «books on culture» as a type of souvenirs: 1) airport and other crossroad bookstores in touristic sites (as those located close to the medina in North African cities) and 2) the ancient libraries of the desert in Mauritania.

Paper long abstract:

Bookstores and libraries some times raise in cultural carrefours. Usually tourists with cultural interests purchase travel guides and «cultural shock books» before going some place and «books on culture» when they came back to its «own place». Bookstores in airports, and other located in touristic places, sell «books on culture» which help tourists to interpret or re-interpret their lively experiences and remembrance of different places.

The ancient libraries of the Desert in Mauritania, once born as a result of trade routes and pilgrimage pathways, became nowadays touristic attractions, pretending to epitomyse cultural tolerance and understanding. Althought the old books of these libraries can not be read or understood by foreigners, they become a clue for cultural indulgence and respect in the performances that their guardians enact for tourist audiences.

Paper short abstract:

Scholarly discussions of collecting have tended to focus on three archetypal figures - ethnographers, art connoisseurs, tourists – and their ‘corresponding’ categories of objects - artefacts, fine art, tourist art. Here, the notion of “souvenir” will be used as an avenue for a more transversal analysis of travellers and their objects.

Paper long abstract:

Scholarly discussions of collecting practices have tended to focus on three archetypal figures of Western travellers: the colonial ethnographer, the Primitive Art connoisseur, and the exoticizing tourist. Similarly, the debate surrounding non-Western material culture has resulted in the crystallisation of such categories as "ethnographic artefact," "fine art," and "tourist art." A simplified Bourdieusian approach would contend a strict correspondence between type of traveller, collecting habitus, and taste for particular objects. In this paper, however, the notion of "souvenir" will be used as an avenue for a more transversal analysis of these reified categories of people, objects and value.

"Souvenirs" are usually cast as cheap and kitsch embodiments of uninformed tourists' superficial experiences of foreign locations. In this perspective, "souvenirs" and "tourist art" are often used as synonyms, an equation that can be criticized on several grounds. First, souvenirs can be understood more broadly as "tokens of a shared lived experience," in which case they do not necessarily espouse the canon traditionally assigned to tourist art. Second, tourist art is increasingly valued and acquired by individuals that do not fit the stereotype of the unsophisticated traveller. Third, tourist art can be invested by their makers and owners with other values than those usually assigned to souvenirs. This paper examines three examples in support of this double-recasting of travellers and their objects: Primitive Art collectors' investment of 'masterpieces' with souvenir value, anthropologists' investment of tourist art with ethnographic value, and Indigenous communities' investment of mass-produced objects with artistic and ceremonial value.

Paper short abstract:

Analysing materials from the Canary Islands we argue that the artifacts and specimens collected in the expeditions and the tourists souvenirs acquired by the tourists share narratives of exotization and cultural appropriation. They are in a same continuum of travel objects as souvenirs and, thus, a collection of souvenirs is, more appropriately, a collection of tourists.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most usual travellers classifications is the one to establish a clear dicotomy between which travel by scientific reasons and those which travel by leisure. From this opposition the scientific travellers always are seen as interesting and worthy people to study, whereas tourists appears like anodyne beings and no interesting to investigate their motivations nor behaviors. In that sense, the objects carried by the scientific travellers and the tourists, the artifacts and specimens collected in the expeditions and the souvenirs acquired by the tourists, are considered like two classes of radically different things.

Analysing materials from the Canary Islands, where historically have been both many scientific expeditions destination and an important international tourist area, we argue the impossibility to settle down that radical difference between scientific objects and souvenirs.

On the contrary, the two types of objects share similar narratives of exotization and cultural appropriation. Thus, the objects collected in the scientific expeditions also can be considered as souvenirs of trip, whereas, behind their apparent triviality, souvenirs reveals scientific, political and ideological categories about the tourist culture. These two types of objects do not reflect the places and the people those who supposedly represent but, rather, the culture from which they collected them or acquired them. Then, the scientific specimens and the tourist objects are in a same continuum of travel objects. We concluded that a collection of souvenirs would be, more appropriately, a collection of tourists, their conceptions of the exotic and their aesthetic and moral values.