On Souvenirs and Metonymy - Narratives of Memory, Metaphor A

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On souvenirs and metonymy: Narratives of memory, metaphor and

materiality
Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard
Tourist Studies 2005; 5; 29
DOI: 10.1177/1468797605062714
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article ts
On souvenirs and metonymy tourist studies
© 2005
sage publications
Narratives of memory, metaphor and London,
Thousand Oaks and
materiality New Delhi
vol 5(1) 29–53
DOI: 10.1177/
1468797605062714
Nigel Morgan www.sagepublications.com
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK
Annette Pritchard
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK
abstract This article scrutinizes souvenirs as highly significant, but underexplored

material objects of contemporary travel and tourism. It adopts a reflexive interpretive
approach to explore the relationship between materiality, tourism and constructions
of self-identity and examines how individuals reflexively use souvenirs as touchstones
of memory, (re)creating polysensual tourism experiences, self-aware of their roles of
‘tourists’. It pays particular attention to the ways in which souvenirs are objects
mediating experiences in time and space and argues for more experiential and
reflexive study of the roles of materiality and memory in the construction of tourist
identities and performances. It concludes by suggesting how further interpretive
studies could offer unique insights into how the absorption of souvenirs into the
realm of the mundane and the domestic transforms the home space, fusing tourism
and contemporary everyday life.
keywords materiality; memory; reflexivity; self-identity; senses; souvenirs
Introduction
Tourism is largely concerned with considerations of being, meanings and iden-
tities and is a key contemporary process by which the complex and variegated
relationships of people to places are recognized, ascribed and scripted. Despite
this, much tourism research continues to lack sophistication in its attempts to
trace the ways in which human meaning is created in tourism exchanges
(Hollinshead, 2004a, 2004b). In this article we draw on cultural studies, materi-
al culture and the sociology of modernity (Wang, 2000) in an auto-
ethnographic examination of souvenirs as highly significant, but underexplored
materializations of contemporary travel and tourism. Here, we want to begin to
inspect the ‘productive/consumptive power of tourism’ (Hollinshead, 2004c: 29

30 tourist studies 5:1
272) not only by furthering examination of the ways in which discourses of
transformation and self-identity frame the tourist experience (Cary, 2004;
McCabe and Stokoe, 2004; Noy, 2004), but also by revealing how the con-
sumption of the material objects of travel confirm Franklin’s (2003) contentions
that tourism ‘is a central component of modern social identity formation and
engagement’, and that it is ‘infused into the everyday’ (p. 2).
A number of researchers (e.g. Jansen-Verbeke, 1998; Wong and Laws, 2003;
Hobson et al., 2004; Westwood, 2004) have begun to investigate the various
interrelationships between tourism and shopping, while others (e.g.
MacCannell, 1976; Gordon, 1986; Graburn, 1989; Stewart, 1993; Lury, 1997;
Goss, 2004) have held up for scrutiny the symbolic role of souvenirs as socially
constructed texts.Yet, even though these scholars have been able to explore the
means through which cultural identities are appropriated, constructed and
traded through and around these material objects of touristic exchange (see
Doorne et al., 2003), in-depth study to interrogate the social and cultural sig-
nificance of an individual’s consumption of souvenirs has been limited. Here,
therefore, we write ourselves into the text, acknowledging the ‘I’ and ‘we’ to
probe how ‘the social life of things’ (Appadurai, 1986) can reveal the subjective
meanings people ascribe to tourism experiences, practices and performances.
Our study is thus located within what Denzin and Lincoln (2005: 20) term the
fifth and sixth moments of qualitative research – a period between 1990 and
2005 characterized by the abandonment of the ‘aloof observer’ and by exper-
imentation with ‘novel forms of expressing lived experience’. Such strategies
of inquiry have gained considerable ground among cultural anthropologists
(and others) who study tourism (see, for example, Bruner, 2005), but have yet
to become truly mainstream in ‘the fledging post-modern field of research’
(Tribe, 2005: 5) that is tourism studies itself. Indeed, such ways of looking,
interpreting, arguing and writing have recently been described as characteris-
tic of the ‘new’ tourism research which is driving tourism’s developing matu-
rity as a field (Tribe, 2004, 2005). The substantive contribution of this article
therefore is to use an interpretive, auto-ethnographic approach to explore the
fine grain of the relationship between tourism, materiality and self-identity
and to examine how consumers reflexively use souvenirs after the original
travel experience to (re)create tourism experiences, self-aware of what it is ‘to
be a tourist’ (Cary, 2004).
Whereas materiality is a relatively ‘new’ topic for tourism researchers, mater-
ial culture and design history are both established fields of study which allow
analyses that follow products beyond their point of sale to explore how they ‘are
appropriated by consumers and transformed … to become the stuff of every-
day life that have a direct involvement with matters, both literally and figura-
tively, of identity’ (Attfield, 2000: 3). In a similar way, in this article we want to
examine how the accumulation and consumption of the physical artefacts of
tourism materialize self-identity and mediate our sense and memory of place.
Since all consumption (including tourism) is social, active and relational rather

Morgan and Pritchard On souvenirs and metonymy 31
than private and passive, there is life beyond the purchase phase, when the object
(in this case a souvenir) moves through what Appadurai (1986: 4) refers to as dif-
ferent ‘regimes of value’ in which it is ascribed different meanings by various
types of human transactions in the course of its existence. However, we recog-
nize that in order to be meaningful, study of the trajectories or biographies of
souvenirs (acquired as they move through different hands, uses and contexts)
necessitates access into the private realm of the home, and demands highly
context-rich and personal narratives. It therefore made sense that, as two indi-
viduals who are both reflexive researchers and reflective tourists, we should pres-
ent here auto-ethnographic commentaries on our own souvenirs, describing the
meanings we ascribe to these material objects of tourism. While approaches
which give prominence to personalized accounts and researchers’ voices still
remain marginalized among scholars located within tourism studies (see
Phillimore and Goodson, 2004) – if not among those who research tourism from
other fields (e.g. Bruner, 2005) – there are now several examples of published
research which foreground the situated and contextualized tourism researcher
(e.g. Markwell, 2001; Ryan and Hall, 2001; Hall, 2004; Westwood et al., forth-
coming) and even more unpublished doctoral studies (e.g. Pritchard, 2000;
Jordan, 2004;Westwood, 2004;Wilson, 2004) which take this approach. Here, in
reflecting on our own consumption of souvenirs, we build on these and other
studies, notably Fullagar’s (2002) contribution on narratives of travel and femi-
nine subjectivity in which she drew on excerpts from her own travel diaries.
We begin the article, however, by briefly reviewing the relationships between
self-identity and material consumption and rehearse the argument that person-
al identity is a dynamic process of becoming which involves notions of self-
discovery and personal growth. We then outline our methodological approach
to the study and discuss the value of auto-ethnography to tourism studies, argu-
ing that there is merit in endeavouring to understand and use our personal, sit-
uated experiences to gain deeper understandings of tourism practices. We
subsequently present our commentaries on a number of our souvenirs, dis-
cussing their purchase, biographies and meanings. These commentaries reveal
how conversation about souvenirs inevitably becomes talk about place and
sense memory and evolves into narratives of self-identity. Finally, we conclude
by suggesting how further such auto-ethnographic study could offer insights
into the ways in which tourism enables individuals to construct and reconstruct
their sense of self and confirm that souvenirs are objects of transition, as touch-
stones of meaning which can evoke powerful memories of experience and
mediate our sense of place, enveloping the past within the present.
Materiality and identity

In contemporary postindustrial societies, we are surrounded by material objects
and possessions; they have the ability to provide pleasure, security or escape; they
might be given as ‘self-gifts’ (as rewards or therapeutic mood enhancers); they

can be inherited and bequeathed, appropriated, collected and of course, dis-
posed of and sold (Belk, 1995). A single object may encode a variety of func-
tions and certain objects which acquire a secular sacred character (such as
photographs that encode memories or mark personal histories) are retained and
cherished because of their extraordinary status and their implications for self-
definition. In short, it is well established that objects mediate human relation-
ships and there is a considerable literature on materiality and identity, ranging
across anthropology, consumer behaviour, economics, geography, history, media
studies, psychology and sociology (see Stewart, 1993; Miller, 1995). Many of
these studies have investigated the processes through which personal and social
identities are bound up with objects which are seen to encode individuals’ per-
sonal histories, ideal selves, significant others and self-expression (e.g. Kamptner,
1989). Much of the recent research, however, has shifted the emphasis on own-
ership and possessions away from the notion that possessions are simply crude
and uncontested signs of status, ‘towards an exploration of the way that goods
provide opportunities for self-expression and personal development’ (Lunt,
1995: 249).
Certainly, the concept of self-identity, of how we define ourselves in relation
to others and society has assumed an increasingly central role in today’s world
of profound cultural change (Hall, 1996). The question of self-identity is the
question of who we are, of where we as individuals are located, and where and
how we locate ourselves ‘in the discourses of the social construction of being in
postmodern society … [it] is how we define the self, our self, as opposed to oth-
ers within the possible range of culturally constructed selves’ (Osborne, 2002:
160). Personal identities are now understood to be socially constructed multi-
ple and hyphenated performances as opposed to ‘natural’ or given states
(Valentine, 2001) and seen as products not only of the metanarratives (such as
race and gender) that are our social characteristics but also of a number of gov-
erning narratives by which we all continuously (re)locate ourselves in the
world. Identity is thus a narrative which embeds us within relationships and
stories which shift across space and time (Somers, 1994); it is a dynamic process
of becoming and involves notions of self-discovery, personal growth and lifestyle
choice. Crucially, identity in contemporary society is constituted through image
and style, a highly mutable, transitory and mobile mode of postmodern self,
which (unlike the modern self) accepts and affirms the shifting identities which
constitute ‘a theatrical presentation of the self ’ (Kellner, 2001: 246). Indeed, for
sociologists such as Giddens (1991) the more tradition loses its hold, and the
more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay between the
global and the local, the more lifestyle becomes important in any discussion of
identity.Thus, Chaney (1996: 114) has commented that ‘individuality or identi-
ty can be seen to be buried inside lifestyle choices’ and he goes on to suggest
that ‘if identity is like a continuous story being told, at least in part, through dif-
ferent ways of living, then lifestyles can be thought of as genres – narrative
modes – that collect themes and resources to ground particular stories’ (p. 125).

It emerges that our identities can be expressed through our lifestyles, and
while some of us draw our identities from community and shared bonds, others
seek to define themselves through individuality and difference. Both lifestyle
and individuality have emerged as defining features of contemporary modern
mentality and are intimately bound up with the material culture of everyday life
(Featherstone, 1987; Chaney, 1996; Attfield, 2000).Thus, we develop a sense of
personal identity, both as an individual and as a member of a group, not only
from our gender, race and so forth but also through the process of negotiating
and creating our own material worlds.We gain and express our identity through
the appropriation and consumption of products as the material of symbolic
practices and as mediators of their sense of being in their own time and place
in a social and cultural context (Sobel, 1981; Chaney, 1996).
Identities are thus reflexive projects and each of us is conscious that we can
select from a lifestyle wardrobe, choosing or discarding a style at will (within our
own material constraints) and wear it ‘with some degree of self-irony and self-
satire’ (Bensman and Vidich, 1995: 239). Sociologists, anthropologists and con-
sumer behaviourists have long argued (e.g. Martineau, 1957; Goffman, 1959)
that consumers have a variety of roles which they reflect and affirm in their
consumption choices, that they have a repertoire of self-images from which they
choose to reflect their desired selves, roles which may be hybrid and even jux-
taposed. Today’s consumer is therefore marketing literate, knowledgeable, dis-
criminating and self-aware, free to interpret and manipulate the signs and
symbols of consumption for their own amusement, creating their own materi-
al terrains where consumption defines self. For Barley (1989) this means that
‘we need material objects to confirm our social identity … ours is an “identity
through possessions” model of the world’ (p. 43), while for Slater (1997) we
‘secure social place and identity solely through the commodity-sign rather than
through our position in social structure referents such as class’ (p. 199). Thus,
despite the passage of time, Graburn’s (1979: 2–3) comment that tourists can
gain prestige through the purchase of ‘ethnic’ artefacts since ‘there is a cachet
connected with international travel, exploration, multiculturalism, etc. that these
arts symbolise’ still has value.
Such symbolic consumption has two roles: one inwardly centred which bol-
sters our sense of ideal self – how we see ourselves – and one outwardly cen-
tred social self – how we present and communicate this to others (Barwise et
al., 2000). Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) thus argue that the
symbolic meanings of objects are balanced between two dynamic forces: simi-
larity (whereby objects symbolically expresses the owner’s social and cultural
integration) and differentiation (whereby they serve to emphasize individuali-
ty). At the same time, maintaining and enhancing that individuality in today’s
dynamic, globalized world is becoming increasingly difficult, leading to ‘an
extraordinarily rapid turnover of symbolic content in commodified experiences
of tourism, leisure, sport, entertainment or body maintenance’ (Goss, 1992: 169).
Certainly, consumer goods fulfil the dual function of satisfying socially defined

needs and ‘materializing’ cultural distinctions, ‘providing a code that symboli-
cally expresses personal and social differences’ (p. 160). It seems that ‘certain
goods may come to be seen as extensions of the self ’ (Belk, 1995: 72) and that
objects mediate emotions, relationships and identities (Attfield, 2000).
Moreover, an object can be transformed into a personal effect in the practice of
everyday life, so that its original, public and shared meaning is overlaid or even
erased by the personal meaning it acquires in objectifying individuality. In such
ways do those cultural artefacts and souvenirs that tourists accumulate on their
travels and bring back into their homes form part of their constructions of self,
part of their own individual projects of self-creation (Giddens, 1991).What we
are, our accumulated sense of self, is defined and constructed through our for-
mer and contemporary lived experiences, emotions and embodiments. Thus,
explorations of the power of souvenirs to condense meaning and to evoke
memory can not only illuminate their significance as material metaphors of
tourism experience, but also provide unique insights into individual construc-
tions of self-identity.As Stewart (1993) has suggested, the souvenir is a narrative
of its possessor and ‘because of its connections to biography and its place in con-
stituting the notion of the individual life, the memento becomes emblematic of
the worth of that life and of the self ’s capacity to generate worthiness’ (p. 139).
Despite this extensive literature on material cultural, empirical studies of the
meanings people ascribe to the objects they acquire, why they value them and
how much importance they attach to the purchase choices they make are sur-
prisingly scarce.Yet, such choices are governed by a complex matrix of concerns,
including, among many others, peer approval, self-image, social status and senti-
mentality and memory, not to mention identifiers such as age, gender and eth-
nic and racial group. In their study of 80 Chicago households and the
householders’ attitudes towards their household objects, Csikszentmihalyi and
Rochberg-Halton (1981) noted that the majority of the visual art objects and
photographs carried significations which referred to the immediate life histories
of their owners, intimately associated with when and where they were acquired,
who gave them or who was connected to them. Similarly, Painter’s (1986) study
of Newcastle-upon-Tyne householders’ relationships to the objects hanging on
their living room walls found that the objects ‘stood for people; they were points
of reference in the passage of time in the lives of families; they were products of
doing things’ (p. 469, cited in Chaney, 1986). In light of such work, it seemed to
us that it would be insightful to similarly examine the ‘meanings’ of tourism
artefacts, but that, for the reasons outlined in the above discussion, an auto-
ethnographic study would enable us to uniquely navigate the private terrain of
the domestic to examine how souvenirs are displayed, valued and consumed.
Methodology
While a number of scholars have pointed to the central role tourism plays in
individual and collective representations of self, identity and society (e.g.

Selwyn, 1996; Morgan and Pritchard, 1998; Dann, 2002; Franklin, 2003), many
tourism studies have been neither theoretically nor methodologically advanced
in the ways they have tried to understand these relationships (Hollinshead,
2004a). This is particularly the case as the largely positivist perspectives which
still dominate much tourism research cannot adequately explain the depths of
meanings and behaviours which are so critical to industries and research fields
concerned with people (Ateljevic, 2000; Jamal and Hollinshead, 2001).Tourism
and postmodern consumption are both characterized by multiple signs of iden-
tity and value (Goss, 2004), with Ogilvy (1990) suggesting that the post-modern
consumer ‘plays with an eclectic combination of goods and services to experi-
ence a series of tentative inconsistent identities’ (p. 15, cited in Biel, 1993). If this
is so, then experience-based research in tourism studies should, where possible,
attempt to reflect this discourse of transformation and the self-consciousness of
‘the tourist moment’ (Cary, 2004) in the research process. There is also an
opportunity here to use our own lived experience as a resource and to over-
come that sense of artificial opaqueness in much tourism scholarship – since we
can be sure that the same academics who strive to write ‘objectively’ about
travel are, have been and will be tourists, travellers or post-tourist cynics – even
though ‘being a tourist is deprecated by almost everyone’ (Bruner, 2005: 7). At
the same time, in order to be meaningful, any exploration of the trajectories or
biographies of souvenirs must be highly context-rich and based on ‘thick’
description. Thus, as reflexive researchers (who are also self-conscious tourists)
writing about identity–materiality dialectics, we have pursued an auto-
ethnographic approach to this study, presenting our own narrative commen-
taries on our souvenirs.
While many social science fields now recognize the embodied and voiced
researcher, this is a battle which has only recently been joined in tourism stud-
ies, many of whose dominant members and gatekeepers privilege the ‘scientific
realist’ style (Aitchison, 2001; Hall, 2004; Phillimore and Goodson, 2004;Tribe,
2004).This style holds that in order to be authoritative it is necessary to adopt
the passive, third-person voice, which distances the writer physically, psycho-
logically and ideologically from his or her subject, and minimizes the self,‘view-
ing it as a contaminant, transcending it, denying it, protecting its vulnerability’
(Kreiger, 1991: 29). For Hall (2004: 142) this style ‘conveys an impression of
objectivity and scientific rationality which is almost the antithesis of the reali-
sations of reflexive modernity’.Thus, while some tourism scholars such as Ryan
(2000: 266) have been critical of the traditional social sciences approach and rec-
ognize that ‘subjectivity is equally part of the tourism experience and the
research process’ the situated and contextualized researcher is still unusual in
tourism research and those studies which incorporate the researcher into the
text constitute a small (if growing) body of work.
Although it has been neglected by the tourism academy, the notion that in
order to fully reflect the human element (which is so important in qualitative
research), the self-awareness, the perspective and the cultural consciousness of

the researcher must not only be acknowledged but must become an integral
part of the process, has gained ground elsewhere (e.g. see Sparkes, 2000, 2002 in
sports science). The value of autobiographical ethnographic writing has also
been emphasized by feminist and postmodernist research approaches (e.g.
Kreiger, 1991; Reed-Danahay, 1997) and by proponents of naturalistic research
(Richardson, 1994; Riessman, 1994, 2000), who remind us that the researcher is
the key research instrument and the architect of the final research text. These
calls for ‘a place for powerful, personal authorship’ (Holliday, 2002: 128) emanate
from the fracturing of the naturalist, postpositivist tradition and acknowledge
that it is the agency of the researcher as writer that makes the research. Such
researchers recognize writer voice and make use of the first person by ‘placing
the biographical and the narrated self at the heart of the analysis [so it] can be
viewed as a mechanism for establishing authenticity’ (Coffey, 1999: 117).These
approaches range from studies totally dominated by researcher introspection
where the researcher studies her or himself (e.g. Cloke, 1999; Sparkes, 2000,
2002) to others which adopt a reflexive approach which recognizes how
researchers (and our socio-historical contexts) are an integral part of the social
worlds we study (e.g.Westwood, 2004).Yet, however fully they embrace notions
of the situated researcher, these scholars all share a sense of reflexivity based on
self-awareness and self-understanding, resulting in writings that are increasingly
personal, emotional and complex.
Here therefore we foreground our own lived experiences to illuminate the
relationships between souvenirs, place, self-identity and tourism performance,
rendering visible that which is traditionally masked by a supposed aura of objec-
tivity and transforming ‘the reflexivity of research from a problem to a resource’
(Harding, 1991: 164). In contrast to field notes (which are frequently private)
and partial autobiographical accounts (which are often orientated to the
research process), auto-ethnographic writing ‘locates the self as central’ and
‘gives analytical purchase to the autobiographical’ (Coffey, 1999: 125).The nar-
ratives on which the following discussion is based therefore represent multiple
conversations between the two authors, which ranged from 20 to 90 minutes,
which were either taped or recorded in note form.Where tapes were made, the
conversations were transcribed.We each reflected in depth on some of the sou-
venirs we have collected on our various travels and tourism trips, and the top-
ics in the conversations covered our reasons for buying the souvenirs; why we
value them; how we use or display them; and what meanings they hold for us.
The narratives were analysed thematically, with the themes being guided by the
conceptualization of the study, as well as issues which emerged from the narra-
tives themselves.The transcripts and notes were read and reread several times in
their entirety, recurring themes noted and exemplars of these repeating themes
chosen for citation and discussion. As Phillimore and Goodson (2004: 19) have
commented, one of the difficulties in publishing any research is that it has to be
presented in ‘manageable chunks’, which as they note constrains writers from
presenting their findings in ways that do justice to the complexities present in

everyday life.This is especially the case in narrative and auto-ethnographic writ-

ing, which since it generates large amounts of ‘messy’ data, is not easily present-
ed to conform to established conventions of research reporting (Hall, 2004). In
the study reported here we generated lengthy narratives, which we have neces-
sarily had to selectively ‘write up’, itself an iterative act which as Richardson
(1994) reminds us, is also an important phase in the analysis: ‘although we usu-
ally think about writing as a mode of “telling” about the social world, writing
is not just a mopping-up activity at the end of a research project.Writing is also
a way of “knowing” – a method of discovery and analysis’ (pp. 516–7).
Narratives of memory and materiality

The contextualizing discussions above have reviewed studies of the ways in
which objects of material culture mediate human relations and our senses of
self, providing us with opportunities for self-expression, self-development and
even for challenging our sense of who we are. They can encode our personal
histories and ideal sense of self, symbolize our relationships and act as vehicles
for self-expression and very much form part of our everyday lives.The materi-
al objects of tourism – souvenirs, paintings, photographs, clothes, memorabilia
and so forth are important elements of material culture and also embody emo-
tions, memories and associations derived from personal and interpersonal shared
experience. Artefacts such as a handmade piece of pottery brought home from
a trip to Italy as an objet trouvè, a fridge magnet from Las Vegas given as gift to
a friend with some sense of self-irony or a postcard of a Caribbean beach
pinned to an office notice board inscribed ‘wish you were here’, are all inte-
grated into the social world through the acquisition of social meaning within
specific cultural and historical contexts. These meanings become indelibly
attached and unfolded in stories, rituals and performances and are continually
being woven into the fabric of social life, although the significance we ascribe
to them may vary according to how we value and conceive travel. In this sec-
tion, we present and discuss excerpts from our narratives on our souvenirs under
the three themes of souvenirs as signifiers of self, as touchstones of memory and
as objects of transition and trajectory.
Souvenirs as signifiers of self

In postindustrial societies there has been a recent rise in popular culture focus-
ing on the home as the centre of social life (stimulated especially in countries
like the UK and USA by home, property, gardening and cooking TV shows,
lifestyle magazines and websites). For Scott McCabe (2002), this has trans-
formed the home from a modern back-stage space where formal display rituals
were relaxed (Goffman, 1959) to ‘the most potent symbol of postmodernity, the
most front-stage of places for displaying social identity and cultural worth …
[which] now includes a display of the souvenirs and artefacts collected in travel
experiences’ (McCabe, 2002: 71).Thus, while travel itself may have lost some of

its earlier cultural capital, the display of certain souvenirs and the conscious
transformation of objects of otherness into household goods ‘attests to the con-
tinuity and continuing power of an object to confer status on its owner’
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998: 271). Neither is this the preserve of postmodern
consumers, as Doorne et al. (2003) remind us that domestic Chinese tourists to
the Yunnan Province display marble ornaments purchased there as an implicit
statement about their arrival in the middle class since possession of these prod-
ucts (so characteristic of this tourist destination) marks out their owners as
middle-class leisured travellers.
Certainly, in many homes in postindustrial consumer-oriented societies, you
are likely to find material echoes of the householder’s travel history. Once we
began reflecting on our own collected objects of travel, this became immedi-
ately apparent to us:
When you actually start thinking about it, many of the objects on display at home are
from places I’ve been to either with work or on holiday. There seems to be a split
really between those paintings, photographs and ornaments which remind me of
home and those which remind me of places I’ve been.Where I’m from is important
to me, it’s a big part of who I am and I’ve got lots of things around me which remind
me of that, many of them given to me over the years by family and friends. Family,
friends and places of home – all of those are really important to me … Coming from
an island, I love the sea and the coast around where I was born and grew up and lots
of the paintings in my home are of the local beaches I used to play on as a child.
(Annette’s narrative)
As this excerpt from Annette’s narrative suggests, clues to how we define our
sense of self and develop our personal identities can be discerned in the fine-
grain of our individual, private material terrains. For her, the foundation of that
terrain is firmly rooted in certain community and family bonds of ‘home’, but
it is also balanced by other elements which express individuality and lifestyle,
reflecting her continuous identity narrative and symbolizing significant rela-
tionships and precious moments:
Many of the other paintings and objects – that’s not the right word, but ‘souvenirs’
doesn’t seem quite right either – were bought on trips we’ve been on since we got
married, so they’re about the places we’ve been together, the things we’ve done as a
couple and our memories of the people we’ve met. In the kitchen, we’ve got two wall
sculptures of the Indian god Kokopelli. They really remind me of Arizona, of the
desert and the colours of the rocks, of the spirituality of the people and their special
places like Sedona.They were quite expensive and difficult to bring home because of
their size and as they’re made of metal. Of course they are souvenirs but they seem
more than that, they seem more personal than other things I’ve brought home. I like
them because I’ve always loved mystical things and they remind me of the mysticism
of those desert places where I felt somehow closer to nature and awed by the
grandeur of the place.
For many scholars (e.g. Cary, 2004; McCabe and Stokoe, 2004; Noy, 2004) any
individual’s consumption of tourism plays a significant role in how he or she

constructs and communicates their identities, taste and social position (Bayley,
1991; Britton, 1991) and the above excerpt reflects this complex interweaving
of being, meaning and identity, and relationships of people to places. For Breezer
(1993) tourism is an essential element in the construction and consumption of
new identities, while for O’Reilly (2005) and Davidson (2005) travelling itself
is a lifestyle or a state of mind, offering opportunities to transform travellers’
sense of selves and their world views. In such ways do backpacker tourists, for
example, affirm and reiterate their self-awareness as global citizens, travelling
beyond the boundaries of mainstream tourism, while simultaneously acquiring
perceived status from the consumption of ‘authentic’ hill tribe crafts and arte-
facts. For western backpackers their acquisition and display of material goods
(clothes, bags, embroidered materials and jewellery) evokes associations of ‘exot-
ic frontiers’ and geopolitical peripheries. Moreover, these objects clearly acquire
a hierarchy of ‘authenticity’ (and therefore perceived status and value) which is
dependent not only on the intricacy and fine quality of the craftwork but also
on the spatial remoteness of the ethnic group which made them (Doorne et al.,
2003). In such ways can souvenirs become important symbols of the acquired
cultural capital of travel experience and many tourists engage in the collection
and display of souvenirs to preserve, extend or to exhibit their tourism experi-
ences. All these aspects of souvenirs are reflected in this next excerpt from
Annette’s narrative:
On one level we know that where you’ve been and stayed can be an obvious mark-
er of status, although not always in the ways you’d think – all that snobbery of
whether you’re a tourist or a traveller. Thinking about souvenirs and status is tricky
and uncomfortable in a way … I suppose they can mark status … I remember when
I was young my mother and her sisters met up in New York and stayed in the Plaza
hotel for my grandmother’s 80th birthday. She brought me back these fantastic
toiletries in boxes shaped like the hotel itself, designer soaps and shampoos – my
friends thought they were fabulous and I loved them. I’ve always kept unusual hotel
toiletries … the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas had great ones in pyramid-shaped boxes and
I remember one really nice hotel in Aruba used to leave you bottles of locally pro-
duced aloe vera body lotion – I brought lots of those home.
I’ve also got several bottles of Hermés shampoo in the bathroom from a recent trip
to Rome – those bottles sum up travel and status I suppose. For one reason and
another I was upgraded to the diamond card executive floor – talk about how the
other half live. In the lounge there was a lovely all day buffet with complementary
drinks – anything you wanted from cocktails to champagne. I’ve stayed on a few exec-
utive floors before but the style, the scale and the quality of this was unbelievable –
all overlooking St Peter’s [Square]. It really was like staying in a hotel within a hotel,
which you’d never even know about unless you had access to it – you had your own
executive lift and twice a day housekeeping would leave you these lovely toiletries, as
well as fresh flowers each morning and chocolates in the evening. Now people who
say that tourism has become classless should stay there – I know I’m unlikely to be
upgraded like that again in a hurry, but it really was fun being so indulgent and liv-
ing like one of the rich and famous for a few days.

In this narrative excerpt we can see how access to this exclusive space with its
luxurious service marked Annette, however temporarily, as a privileged traveller.
Moreover, through the retention of the expensive toiletries after the trip, she
preserves an echo of the privileged identity she briefly assumed. In the narra-
tive, it is clear how talking about the objects soon became a commentary on the
experience itself, which rapidly turned to reflections on self-identity, as Annette
reflected on how she enjoyed assuming the role of ‘peak’ tourism consumer
when she entered the utopian or fantasy world ‘where the dream comes true’
(Wang, 2002: 286). For McCabe (2002: 72) contemporary tourists are reflexive
members of society, able to access ‘a stock of knowledge that allows them to
define and construct ideas about touristic behaviour and experience’ and while
this may be evident in the playful and even self-ironic display of hotel toiletries
on a bathroom shelf, it strongly emerges when individuals seek out souvenirs
just because they are ‘tacky’ and ‘garish’.As Urry (2002) has suggested,‘the post-
modern tourist knows that he or she is a tourist and that tourism is a series of
games with multiple texts and no single, authentic tourist experience’ (p. 92).
Identities are reflexive projects and some of us use the project of travel to attest
different versions of our identity narratives. While the postmodern tourist is
conscious that he or she is a tourist, he or she has no single tourist identity but
performs a variety of roles with multiple texts and meanings. Annette later said
this about fridge magnets, which she sees as visual metaphors of the destinations
she visits:
I really like them – they’re fun, they usually sum up holiday places in a bright, colour-
ful way; they’re cheap and cheerful and when they’re stuck on my fridge they cheer
me up and remind me of holidays.They’re so clichéd that it’s a laugh to pick out the
best ones to buy; there’s always a lot to choose from – maybe that says more about
the places I like going to! Although there are so many you’ve got to pick the right
one because some are really too tacky. I remember one trip to Las Vegas when I went
into two or three shops that only sold fridge magnets – imagine how long it took me
to find the one I bought.They’re probably the cheapest things you can buy but when
I get home I put them in a really prominent place on the fridge where in an idle
moment you can move them around and rearrange them. Sometimes they blend in
and just seem like a collage of all the places you’ve been but sometimes you’ll focus
on something specific; they’re small and insignificant yet remind me of some great fun
times … I don’t know what exactly, not specific events, more a general memory or a
sense of a place.
Here, Annette’s fridge magnets are perfect examples of Stewart’s (1993) sou-
venirs which reduce ‘the public, the monumental and the three dimensional
into the miniature … which can be appropriated within the privatized view of
the individual subject’ (pp. 137–8). In this process, however, they also serve to
authenticate the tourist’s experience, internalizing experiences and memories
and transforming events and sense memories into tangible objects of longing
and desire.

Touchstones of memory
It appears then that souvenirs are rhetorical, socially incarnated signs, register-
ing a complexity of acquisition and signalling complex social messages.What is
consumed in touristscapes may be a largely intangible constellation of signs,
images and places which can only be preserved in photographs, souvenirs and
memories. Yet, travel to experience an array of localities (where one can see,
touch, smell, eat and buy ‘authentic’ and ‘different’ things), constitutes an ele-
ment of personal cultural capital and is a means of self-distinction and self-def-
inition, which can be materially manifested in souvenirs. Souvenirs are also,
however, touchstones of memory, evoking memories of places and relationships.
The following excerpt demonstrates how they can be mediators of meanings:
I like bringing back things from different places because they are out of the ordi-
nary and you can’t buy them here. I brought this really unusual Christmas table-
cloth back from New Orleans – I really like it and I’ve never seen one as nice here.
I didn’t buy it consciously as a souvenir and looking at it you wouldn’t know where
it was from. But it is true that because it’s so unusual and because we use it at
Christmas that people inevitably talk about it, and I say I bought it in New Orleans
and then usually make a bit of a joke and say ‘who else would go to New Orleans
and come home with a tablecloth?’ It does remind me of a great time I had there
– it was late November and there were Christmas decorations and Christmas music
in all the shops. I’d always had this image of New Orleans based on jazz and gumbo
and I wasn’t disappointed – the food and the music were fantastic. I brought home
a CD called Aaron Neville’s Soulful Christmas and whenever I play it, I think of that
trip. (Nigel’s narrative)
These touchstones have the effect of bringing the past into the present and
making past experience live. Hence, these artefacts have the power not merely
to act as symbols of our past experiences but to evoke and animate memories
which inform our present self. For some of us, certain tourism places are sacred
places, charged with personal and social significance and thus work in impor-
tant ways to shape the images we have of ourselves. Our sense of place is a way
of imaginatively engaging with our surroundings and finding them significant,
a personal appropriation of the world.
There is no perception of place and landscape without memory, and sou-
venirs are totems that evoke certain memories and past experiences of tourism
places.When we consider landscape we generally conceptualize it in terms of a
visual construct (Casey, 2000), but as Tilley (2000: 180) argues, perception ‘at the
primary level of the lived body is synaesthetic, an affair of the whole body mov-
ing and sensing’, so the multisensory nature of experience means that places are
heard, felt and smelt as well as seen. Landscapes are not merely visionscapes, but
touchscapes, soundscapes and smellscapes (Porteous, 1990; Basso and Feld, 1996)
and tourism research faces the challenge of ‘incorporating other senses into
studies of the tourist’ (Dann and Jacobsen, 2002: 12).Yet, this is not without its
difficulties, for example smells are elusive, episodic and thus difficult to describe
and communicate (Dann and Jacobsen, 2003). Thus, while aromas, perfumes,

fragrances, tastes and sounds (particularly music) are intimately tied to mem-
ories, there needs to be a stimulus which has the power to evoke such nostal-
gia. It seems that the material artefacts of souvenirs have the power to evoke
memories of all those senses when they act as channels for recollection of
tourism experiences, provoking selective memories of past tourism experi-
ences, temporarily transporting an individual across time and space, as Nigel
describes here:
On the same trip to New Orleans I bought several CDs of jazz and Cajun music and
I was lucky enough to get tickets to see one of my favourite singers – Diana Krall –
in concert on my last day there. I bought a copy of her live in-concert CD after the
performance and whenever it’s on it takes me back to that evening in a wonderful
theatre. I really like to play it on those odd Sunday mornings when I get a chance to
relax and read the newspapers.
While most of the material objects discussed here have visual appeal they also
have the capacity to evoke polysensual memories, reminding us of particular
times and places:
I remember the day we bought this bottle of olive oil which we brought home with
us. It was warm and sunny and we’d travelled to an island off Auckland and ended up
going on a wine tour. Each vineyard had its own microclimate and there were rows
and rows of vines, rustling in the wind. Each row began with a rosebush … lovely big
blooms … I stuck my nose in to smell them, some rows had lavender bushes too – I
love lavender and I brushed them with my hands to smell the scent … All the time
you could hear the birds and the bees, and the wine tasted good too … It’s only a
small bottle of olive oil sat next to my cooker, but if you’re in the right mood, it
reminds you of so much. (Annette’s narrative)
The smellscape articulated here is ‘fragmentary in space and episodic in time’

(Porteus, 1990: 359) and as Dann and Jacobsen (2003) point out it is supported
and framed by reference to other sensory experiences.While food souvenirs are
primarily related to taste and smell, other objects are more tactile, such as
ceramics:
I really like the colours and the stylised artwork of the ceramic tile of Ravello … it’s
also got a lot of memories of a lovely holiday in Italy. It particularly reminds me of
the day we bought it – we’d set out to find these two villas overlooking the bay.We
got the bus up into the hills and when we got to the village of Ravello it was desert-
ed, probably something to do with the fact that it was lunch time on a hot midsum-
mer day. We had some problems finding the first villa, but once we got there, the
views from the terrace were superb. Every time I touch or look at the tile, I imagine
myself back there – looking down the hillside covered with lemon groves, feeling the
heat of the midday sun and seeing the dazzling blue of the sea – fantastic place.
(Nigel’s narrative)
This excerpt clearly reveals that souvenirs have the power to evoke strong sense
memories but these are not always comfortable ones and objects can evoke
involuntary memories of ‘otherness’ which challenge rather than affirm our

identities. Some objects bring to mind the unpleasant smells of heat and dirt,
littered and polluted environments and a range of disturbing senses and embod-
ied memories which refuse to be domesticated into an artefact of self. In the
following excerpt, Nigel reflects on a photograph of the Sphinx which he took
on a trip to Egypt some years ago and which he has framed on the wall of his
study at home:
I enjoy taking photographs and I have a few of my favourite ones in my study – I’ve
framed photographs of the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building and quite a few
from Egypt: the Pyramids, the Nile at sunset, the Sphinx – that sort of thing.They all
remind me of the times I took them and experiences I had, but probably if I’m hon-
est the most powerful are the memories I have of that particular trip to Egypt 10 or
11 years ago. Paris and New York are great cities and we’ve had fun in them both but
Cairo is one of those evocative places I’d always longed to visit.We’d spent a week or
so in Luxor and Aswan and had a great time – the people there were very friendly,
especially when we tried to learn a few basic Arabic phrases. But then we went to
Cairo for a few days and it was such a different experience. It was awe-inspiring to
see the Pyramids and the Sphinx but I can’t say I really enjoyed it. At the time we
were at the end of our trip and we were quite short of cash and we were harassed and
bombarded with demands for money at every turn, from the hawkers and camel driv-
ers to the tourist police themselves. As a western tourist I was acutely conscious of
my wealth among the poverty there and yet I actually had very little cash left. At one
point one of the tourist police demanded that I hand over my watch as a bribe.
Everything was so confrontational, I was glad to leave that day and while that’s a great
photograph of the sunrise over the pyramids, it’s also a reminder of the acute dis-
comfort I felt that day in Cairo when I was so overwhelmed, hot and bothered.
Material transformations and trajectories

If the making and remaking of self-identities is to be investigated through the
metamorphic power of objects and their meanings, the power of those mediat-
ing objects must be tracked across the threshold from the public to private
domains – from the places where they were bought to the places where they
become appropriated into personal constellations of meaning. Objects acquire
meaning through their associations with other objects and it is interesting to
explore the ways and the contexts by which holiday souvenirs become house-
hold objects. For example, it is instructive to examine whether they are placed
in the public or the private places of the home, in living areas and kitchens or
in bedrooms – those most private places of the house still conventionally char-
acterized as a woman’s realm. In terms of the souvenirs we chose to discuss in
our narratives, it is interesting that they are largely displayed in the public areas
of the house – mostly in the kitchen. Here, Nigel describes the display of the
same ceramic tile brought home from a trip to Italy which he discussed earlier:
I put it in the kitchen because we’ve painted it a kind of Mediterranean red and all
the ceramics we’ve bought back from Italy are in the kitchen … the colours go real-
ly well.That whole Mediterranean feel is so relaxing … Italian is my favourite food
and we often bring back olive oil from places we’ve been – maybe where you’ve seen

it being made. I know lots of people come into the kitchen, but the ceramics aren’t
so much of a talking point anymore as we’ve had them for years now, it’s just that I
get a lot of pleasure from them. I love their feel and their colours – the yellows of the
lemons, the deep blues of the sea and the red and white of the houses. I see them
everyday – you spend a lot of time in your kitchen don’t you – well, I do anyway as
I love to cook.
We can learn much about how people materialize their travel experiences by
following products beyond their point of sale to explore how consumers appro-
priate and transform them into a personal effect in the practice of everyday life.
A material object acquires a cultural biography as it moves through different
hands and objects are transformed by their contexts and owners. Here Nigel
describes how a decorative object was transformed into a functional household
good:‘we bought home one ceramic tile from a trip to Italy which is supposed
to go on a wall I think, but I stuck some green baize on the bottom and now
it makes a great wine coaster’. Here the tile’s original, public and shared mean-
ing has been overlaid by the personal meaning it has acquired in the expression
of Nigel’s individuality.
Material objects also accumulate biographies as they move through different
hands, for example when a souvenir is given to others as a gift – typically in a
‘spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and spontaneity’ (Appadurai, 1986: 11). Consider
this example of a small marble elephant Annette brought home from a trip to
Thailand some years ago. The souvenir was first made somewhere in Thailand
and then sold in a Bangkok bazaar, before being brought to a western home and
given as a gift to close friends. Its biography has taken it through a number of
contexts and hands and it now sits on a kitchen shelf, where it has become a
household object for its recipients and a source of fascination for a friend’s child:
We always try to bring something small back from holidays for our family and our
close friends. On one trip to Thailand we brought some friends back a small carving
of an elephant because it’s a Thai symbol of good luck.The funny thing is, they have
probably forgotten that it has those associations, but I remember and when I’m in
their kitchen – where they have it – I think of my holiday in Thailand and the shop
where I bartered for it – something I’m not very good at and hated doing!
Objects can thus be invested with ‘new’ meanings.They are props which aid in
the theatrical presentation of self (Kellner, 2001) and the telling of our individ-
ual narratives of identity, stories which embed us in relationships which shift
across time and space:
I’ve got an Eiffel Tower-shaped pencil rubber on my computer which a colleague
brought me back from Paris years ago. I’ve always liked Paris and I’ve kept it for years
– long after I left that job and now I can’t even remember the name of the person
who gave it to me. It’s funny, I’ve never used it but just kept it on my desk because I
like it – it’s such a cheap thing and you think, ‘why have I kept a rubber which says
I love Paris in French on it, even moving it because I’ve had three computers since
I’ve been in this office?’ But now, since we went to Paris last year and had such a great

time, I look at it differently and think of that trip – even though I had it long before
we went there as a couple together. (Nigel’s narrative)
Conclusion
Several writers have considered the connection between travel and evolving
personal identities, suggesting that the anticipation of, and narratives about jour-
neys on return are tied into imagined ‘performances’ of the self (Desforges,
2000) and even that their narratives about their travels can be seen as statements
about evolving identities (Elsrud, 2001). In this article we have attempted to fur-
ther such analyses of tourism that see it ‘as a system of presencing and per-
formance’ (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 17), premising that tourism experience
and its material manifestations contribute to our narratives and performances of
self.We have explored how the material objects of travel reflect and contribute
to the construction of our social identities, serving as symbolic markers both for
ourselves and others. Such lifestyle markers are integrated into the narratives
which we develop to help define our personal and social identities. These
objects are very much part of our everyday lives, they may serve decorative,
practical or symbolic functions but they have social lives and meanings which
transcend the initial tourism encounter which framed their purchase.‘The sou-
venir distinguishes experiences … [it] speaks to a context of longing, for it is
not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the
necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia’ (Stewart, 1993: 135). Tourism sou-
venirs pass through various value regimes and trajectories (Appadurai, 1996) and
have a complex and changing social life of their own, but through studies such
as this we can see how such symbolic markers can be used to theme and
resource our narratives of identity and material terrains, both for ourselves and
others (Chaney, 1996).
While our study has focused on souvenirs as transitional objects, the connec-
tions between the experiences and memories they evoke and the constant
(re)formulation of our identities emerged in the remarks of our conversations.
Yet, if souvenirs are metaphors for travel experiences, words are poor substitutes
for the mental images and associations a colourful ceramic pot or an intricate
wood carving may express. One of the benefits of our autoethnographic
approach is that it has allowed us to explore our polysensual tourism experi-
ences through the use of souvenirs as touchstones and objects of projection.This
is particularly important given Dann and Jacobsen’s (2002) contention that
these experiences are very difficult to uncover using conventional research
methods and instruments.Yet it is vital that the tourism research academy finds
a means of tackling the polysensual tourism experience, since without progress
here we will always struggle to adequately conceptualise the embodied tourist.
Memories can often be much more powerfully conveyed through the colours,
textures, shapes and the smells of things than through words (Miller, 1994). But
the paradox here could be that since ‘words domesticate and partially destroy

the metaphorical powers of things’ (Tilley, 2000: 263), to analyse souvenirs as
material metaphors may actually be to detract from their cultural efficacy – such
is their power of suggestiveness. So the very process of analysis unpicks their
condensation of meanings, which is itself a bundle of very-hard-to-articulate
personal journeys. Nonetheless, souvenirs should be seen as objects of transition,
of in between-ness, which mediate the past and the present and the domestic
and public. Once transformed into household objects by their owners, they are
simultaneously emblematic of both the self and the other and retain the power
to temporarily detach an individual from the present through memory and
metaphor. Souvenirs therefore emerge as objects of thresholds, set apart from
the everyday through the meanings attributed to them by their owners as prisms
of remembrance.
The auto-ethnographic approach we have adopted in this article has the
potential to develop a fine-grained understanding of these roles of souvenirs –
to explore their multiple meanings and their household uses, locations and con-
texts. In our auto-ethnographic journey we have explored how meanings are
created in tourism exchanges, engagements which constitute part of our every-
day lives and which mediate our human relationships. Such explorations pose a
number of research challenges as they require access to material and symbolic
private spaces, demand deep, personal narratives and necessitate some degree of
commitment from the participants.Auto-ethnography offers one potential solu-
tion to such challenges, and in our reflections on our accumulated objects of
travel we have developed stories or narratives about ourselves: it has been a
reflexive and an emotional engagement, particularly in those instances where
souvenirs evoke involuntary memories of otherness that are uncomfortable.
Moreover, in the course of articulating these narratives it has occurred to us that
when we travel, we see the other as a world we are travelling through, but as
Wearing argues (2002), at some stage, that other has become a part of ourselves
and by transforming the materiality of our travels into household artefacts, we
have absorbed what was once ‘other’ into the mundane. At the same time,
arguably, such objects represent distance appropriated and are symptomatic of
tourism’s cultural imperialism; they are marked as ‘foreign’ and arise directly out
of the immediate lived experience of their possessors, transforming and collaps-
ing ‘distance into proximity to, or approximation with, the self. The souvenir
therefore contracts the world in order to expand the personal’ (Stewart, 1993:
xii). There is also a clear sense of time and trajectory in our consumption of
these material objects, and we recognize that items whose public meanings we
have overwritten by our personal transformations are now personal effects,
inscribed with our memories of relationships, occasions and rites of passage
(Kwint et al., 1999). In such ways souvenirs help us to create a continuous and
personal narrative of our past and herein also lies any souvenir’s ‘tragedy’ since
it is ultimately destined to be forgotten in the death of memory, in the end of
any individual’s (auto)biography (Stewart, 1993).

Insights into these experiences require both interpretive qualitative research

approaches (such as auto-ethnography) and a willingness to recognize methods
valued in other research fields (such as design and art history). There is enor-
mous scope for further ethnographic study of the trajectories and biographies
of tourist souvenirs and for new understandings of individuals’ post-travel nar-
ratives, utilizing souvenirs as points of entry or as projective tools. Tourism
researchers could usefully emulate Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton
(1981) and Painter (1986) and ask tourists to discuss the meanings they ascribe
to the souvenirs they display in their homes to explore why they value them
and how much importance they attach to them. As Edward Bruner (2005) has
commented, such post-tour settings provide new sites of cultural production
and locations for limitless narratives, since ‘with each retelling the circumstances
… and the situation of the narrator change, providing the opportunity for novel
understandings and new narratives to arise’ (p. 27).
Certainly we have become much more aware of the need for dialogue
between tourism scholars and those who research material culture and design
studies in the course of writing this article. Tourism is as much a material ter-
rain as it is a symbolic practice and experiential performance and tourism
researchers could learn much from approaches developed in these research
fields. Here, our auto-ethnographic approach has allowed us to present an inves-
tigation which is both rich and reflexive but such an approach demands a con-
siderable degree of researcher self-awareness since you are forced to reflect on
your own lived experiences, stripped of the comfort which depersonalized and
disinterested research allows. It is also important to note that reflexive research
also has its limitations in that one can never fully know oneself or the other.Yet,
through foregrounding our own lived experiences, we have sought to provide
further insights into the practices and performances of tourism exchanges.To be
truly reflexive, we should also reflect on how, as a result of this study, we have
further developed as researchers, engaging with the complexities of attempting
to publish fifth- and sixth-moment qualitative tourism research (Denzin and
Lincoln, 2005) and grappling with the discomfort of auto-biographical writing.
Auto-ethnography challenges the traditional power dynamics which charac-
terize the relationship between researcher and researched, making what was
once authoritative, remote and comfortable now questionable, immediate and
vulnerable.The approach demands a high degree of sensitivity and articulation
from the researcher, not only forcing him or her to reflect on what it means to
be a tourist but also to confront what it means to be a tourist and a researcher.
This is by no means an easy or unproblematic task since it raises the issue of
where the research process begins and where (if at all) it ends. The procedures
and processes which govern such an unconventional approach are not clearly
demarcated and it is perhaps the most muddy of Hollinshead’s (2004a: 63)
‘messy’ interpretive means of investigating being, meaning and identity.
Conversation, introspection, analysis of domestic spaces and objects, theoretical
conceptualization and writing cannot be categorized in a linear research

process. Neither is such research easily presented for publication, and ‘blind’
reviewing makes a fully auto-ethnographic narrative difficult to achieve, while
there remains a high degree of risk of rejection in view of the continued scien-
tific realist dominance of the tourism academy (see Phillimore and Goodson,
2004). In fact, just as scholars within tourism studies are beginning to seriously
engage with qualitative methods within the critical, interpretive framework, so
researchers in other fields are already confronting ‘a racialized, masculinist back-
lash to the proliferation of qualitative inquiry methods over the past two
decades’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005: 9).
The challenges to qualitative tourism research thus remain many, especially
as Yvonne Lincoln and Norman Denzin (2005) contend that the struggles
between liberal and neoconservative world views are currently erasing the
recent positive developments in qualitative inquiry as some researchers seek ‘to
reestablish the supremacy of “one method/one truth”, the “gold standard” of
research strategies’ (p. 1122).We have argued here that fifth- and sixth-moment
qualitative research has the potential to offer a variety of research approaches
to explore the uses, forms and trajectories of the material objects of tourism.
At the same time it challenges the tourism academy to confront and explore
issues of researcher voice and reflexivity in a much more sustained and critical
way than hitherto. Qualitative researchers in tourism must resist attempts to
discredit qualitative inquiry methods just at the time when the field is coming
of age methodologically and theoretically.We would suggest that further study
which is participatory and situated and which uses novel forms of expressing
lived experience (including auto-biographical, multi-voiced and visual repre-
sentations) can only help us in our attempts to ‘to get inside the heads and
hearts of the tourists [and] to ask them questions which are of the utmost
importance in moving tourism to a more person-centred phenomenon’
(Wearing, 2002: 255).
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nige l morgan is Reader in Tourism Studies at the Welsh Centre for Tourism
Research at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. His research interests embrace the
socio-cultural dimensions of tourism and destination marketing and critical tourism
studies, and his latest book is the second edition of Destination Branding (Elsevier-
Butterworth, 2004). Address: The Welsh Centre for Tourism Research, Welsh School of
Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure Management, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff,
Colchester Avenue Campus, Cardiff CF23 9XR, UK. [email: nmorgan@uwic.ac.uk]
annet te p ri tc hard is Reader in Tourism Studies and Director of the Welsh

Centre for Tourism Research at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Her research
interests focus on the relationships between tourism, representation and social

structures, experiences and identities and her latest book is Discourse, Communication and
Tourism (Channel View, 2005). Address: The Welsh Centre for Tourism Research, Welsh
School of Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure Management, University of Wales Institute,
Cardiff, Colchester Avenue Campus, Cardiff CF23 9XR, UK. [email:
apritchard@uwic.ac.uk]


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Tourist Studies http://tou.sagepub.

On souvenirs and metonymy: Narratives of memory, metaphor and

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Citations (this article cites 13 articles hosted on the

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University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK

abstract This article scrutinizes souvenirs as highly significant, but underexplored

keywords materiality; memory; reflexivity; self-identity; senses; souvenirs

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Materiality and identity

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everyday life.This is especially the case in narrative and auto-ethnographic writ-

Narratives of memory and materiality

Souvenirs as signifiers of self

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The smellscape articulated here is ‘fragmentary in space and episodic in time’

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Material transformations and trajectories

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Insights into these experiences require both interpretive qualitative research

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Bensman, J. and A. J.Vidich (1995) ‘Changes in the Lifestyles of American Classes’, in

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Lunt, P. (1995) ‘Psychological Approaches to Consumption’, pp. 238–63 in D. Miller

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annet te p ri tc hard is Reader in Tourism Studies and Director of the Welsh

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