Susan Stewart, On Longing:  Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection, 1993, Duke University Press, 132-169.
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/tourist/Stewart-longing.pdf

How to Take Great Tourist Photos in New York City.
http://www.nyip.com/ezine/outdoors/new-york.html
Photographing People on Location
http://www.danheller.com/tech-tourism.html
Travel photography
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/category/travel-photography/

Please bring to class a souvenir and/or photograph as a basis for discussing the role of memory in tourism and the memory practices of tourists, your own included! If possible, please upload images to the blog (and for that matter images of your souvenir, if you can).

Recommended

Appadurai, A. ed. (1986) The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Attfield, J. (2000) Wild Things: The material culture of everyday life, Berg: Oxford.

Fullagar, S. (2002) ‘Narratives of travel: desire and the movement of feminine subjectivity’ Leisure Studies 21 (1): 57-74.

Gordan, B. (1986) ‘The souvenir: Message of the extraordinary’, Journal of Popular Culture 20 (3): 135-146.

Goss, J. (2004) ‘The Souvenir: Conceptualising the Object(s) of Tourist Consumption’, pp. 327-336 in A. A. Lew, C. M. Hall and A. M. Williams (eds) A Companion to Tourism, Oxford: Blackwell.

Hobson, P., Timothy, D. J. and Youn-Kyung, K. (2004) Special issue: Tourist shopping, Journal of Vacation Marketing 10(4).

Jansen-Verbeke, M. (1998) ‘The synergy between shopping and tourism’, pp.428-446 in W. Theobald (ed.) Global Tourism, Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.

Lury, C. (1997) ‘The objects of travel’, pp.75-95 in C. Rojek and J. Urry (eds) Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. New York: Routledge.

Kwint, M., Breward, C. and Aynsley, J. (eds.) (1999) Material Memories: Design and Evocation, Berg: Oxford.

MacCabe, S. (2002) ‘The Tourist Experience and Everyday Life’, pp. 61-76 in G. Dann (ed.) The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, CABI, Oxford.

Noy, C. (2004) This Trip Really Changed Me. Backpackers’ narratives of self-identity. Annals of Tourism Research 31 (1): 78-102.

O’Reilly, C. C. (2005) Tourist or Traveller? Narrating Backpacker Identity, in A. Jaworski and A. Pritchard (eds.) Discourse, Communication and Tourism, Clevedon: Channel View.

Rogan, Bjarne. An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication. Cultural Analysis 4 (2005): 1-27.

Shenhav-Keller, Shelley. The Israeli souvenir: Its text and context. Annals of Tourism Research 20, 1 (1993): 182-196.

Wang, N. (2002) The Tourist as Peak Consumer 281-296 in G. Dann (ed.) The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, Oxford: CABI.

This picture is from a recent trip to Chichen Itza in Mexico; I am the one in the photo and my fiance is the photographer.

I have held a similar affect towards my festival badges- some with photo, some with just my name handwritten- which also admitted me to restricted places: quasi-sacrosanct parties, roundtables, screenings and dinners at exclusive venues, or even access through barricades (at a festival in Oaxaca last year that took place in the midst of a teacher’s sit-in). Why do I keep the badges?

This was taken at sunrise, but it was a bit cloudy at the time. Little did I know, later that day I would climb to the summit of the peak I was overlooking.

As this semester is coming to an end, I have been thinking about what ideas I have been attracted to in my classes this year. I realized the through line for me has been the potential temporal and spatial permeability between events. For this reason, I appreciated Stewart’s writing on the souvenir. She writes that one of the souvenir’s functions is to mediate the distance between the present and the original place/event. Through the narrative that surrounds the object, the past is invoked while remaining necessarily distant. “The souvenir generates a narrative which reaches only ‘behind,’ spiraling in a continually inward movement rather than outward toward a future.” (135)

Although the souvenir can produce mnemonic association, the accompanying narrative may override or substitute the memory. Maybe we have all experienced returning home and having everyone ask for our stories from afar. Some stories are a hit and are repeatedly told. The suitcase opens and the distribution of stories and objects begins. The pictures and objects provide additional sensorial references to the story- enabling friends and family to travel back with you. For me, I know that the stories that I have repeatedly told are more accessible to recall than my actual memory of the event. With this in mind, approaching the collection of souvenirs and the taking of pictures, could be considered a compositional choice in the arrangement of what will later become ‘memory.’

Collecting the souvenir is consuming the experience of the place, “the exotic object represents distance appropriated.” (147) When I was in Bali several years ago, I was the videographer for this festival for international performance artist. I remember feeling this moment of great turmoil when videoing this woman dancing. It became clear to me that something multidimensional was happening. Even though I had been asked to tape the whole event, my position as an outsider became intensified to the point of feeling paranoid about recording this dynamic situation. I turned off the camera and just watched. Later I got some grief from another American who was invested in me capturing that moment. It seemed too special. When filming something as documentation there is the recognition that it will be valued later, often in a different place. Stewart writes about the necessary distance and displacement for the souvenir (or documentation) to be a link to the past: “The souvenir must be removed from its context in order to serve as a trace of it.” (150) I realize that this impulse to shut off the camera was my discomfort with participating in the commodification of that event.

A photo and the story…
I took this picture in San Pedro, Guatemala (near Lake Atitilan). This man is the artist who made the small sculptures that are hanging behind him. I like this photo because it brings me back to the event. For many of these objects he enthusiastically described their cultural significance, mostly Mayan references. He also said that he sculpts things that he sees on TV, like a bust of Osama Bin Laden and a woman having an abortion!

The three combined collectively suggest, reminders of personal memories. It is less about the task of the buying of the object or the materialistic aspect of it, but more about the emotional response that overtakes us upon looking at it, holding it, and perhaps even smelling it. There is nothing more valuable in life then the ability to recapture, to cherish once again, and attempt to relive what we consider the most precious moments of our lives. This is the significance of the souvenir. Unfortunately the word itself tends to bring to mind tacky key chains and spoon collections, but again the importance seems to reach well beyond the object itself and much more to what the object triggers. It’s often said that we spend our lives creating memories, and so we need the means to have at our deposal at anytime, the capability to reach into our drawer of consciousness and pull out anyone of these past experiences when they are most needed. They inspire us, they validate our identity, they encourage us to understand where we’ve been in order to help determine where we’re going, and they are simply there to make us remember once again, because we so desperately want to. “Souvenir” is a word so easily dismissed, until we really sit down and realize how relevant it is, in all of it’s’ forms, to each one of our lives.
The taking of photographs is probably the most personal form of souvenir we collect. We strive to take that “perfect” picture that enables us to go home and recreate the story for our friends; with the perfection of the photo helping them relive and understand with us the significance of the experience. We long to capture that ultimate candid, the one that just spills emotion and whose lure is immediately identifiable for anyone. What can be ironic at times regarding photographic or film souvenirs are two things. The first being the high state of technology available to the photographer to enhance the picture in dozens of ways: speed, texture, black & white, etc. You would think that all of this technology and “work” would cut into the truly spontaneous aspect of capturing a moment. It often does. The other being a video camera. The discrepancy regarding video cameras is that they’re not able to portray entire experiences, nor are they able to capture the most distinct moments. They document a fragment of time; 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, mainly to insure we don’t miss something. More often then not, most of the images recorded become insignificant to us and what we actually end up doing is editing our own memories. Watching a video requires much greater involvement and patience for finding the moment or memory you are searching for. It has not the immediacy or simplicity that souvenir objects have. I have to admit; there is nothing more annoying then the people who spend their vacation experiencing it through a viewfinder. A sense of freedom and a sense of personal connection are lost when something is put in between. More time is spent recreating the memory then actually experiencing the creation of it.