This was published 8 years ago
How to master the art of collecting travel souvenirs
Souvenirs, like photographs, are intensely personal. As the saying goes: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Illustration: Michael Mucci
The best souvenir I ever collected was an elaborate neck-dress made from a thousand coloured beads and the partially cured hide of an old cow. I was in the Maasai Mara, in Kenya, looking at animals on safari, and my host had asked me if I wanted to visit the "boma" – or fortified village – that many of her workers lived in. Bomas are often on the tourist trail in the Maasai Mara, but this particular one was not. We rattled over the grassy plain in an open-sided jeep and parked at the front gate.
There was a brief conversation, an exchange of money, and then I was taken on a tour of the town, which was a collection of ingenious mud huts surrounded by a ring of thorny scrub to contain the cattle and keep out animals with sharper teeth. At the end of my visit, local women brought out their crafts, and I selected a particularly beautiful piece. I did not haggle for anything, or only half-heartedly. Serious haggling, it has always seems to me, is gauche and uncharitable when the tourist has so much and the hosts have so little.
The worst souvenir I ever collected – the one that disappoints me most – was an elaborate neck-dress made from a thousand coloured beads and the partially cured hide of an old cow. Yes, the same piece. When I arrived back in Sydney, customs took one look at the moist leather and gave me the ultimatum I should have anticipated in advance: surrender the thing to the garbage, or submit it to irradiation to kill any bugs. Grudgingly, I handed over a stack of money and my address; I was not about to let it go without a fight.
Six weeks later, a package arrived in the mail. I tore open the bubble wrap, delighted at the reunion. But my delight quickly turned to horror as beads tumbled through my fingers and scattered across the floor. The radiation treatment had turned the hide to ugly, brittle board; discoloured everything to the hue of a smoker's smile; and broken down the glue that held the masterwork together. The neck-dress was ruined. I was furious with the clumsy customs officials, furious with myself for not predicting the neck-dress would be seized. Then I was ashamed, because I knew I'd helped destroy something exquisite.
The experience made me question why I bother to collect souvenirs. Partly it is cultural habit, of course: You go somewhere and then you bring back a prize. That is what we do. But beyond this knee-jerk ritual of the roaming tourist, what is the actual point?
How do we explain a collective impulse that sustains entire economies and a million airport boutiques around the world?
The word "souvenir" is French, meaning "token of remembrance", and dates back to 1782. Beyond that, pinpointing a precise history of souvenirs is difficult, because so many different things can qualify within the category. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that people have been collecting curios for centuries. Captain Cook, leaving Botany Bay in 1770, ferried off a whole boatload of shields and spears from Indigenous Australians. While his intentions were a little different to the average traveller today, his magpie impulse is a long-running theme. The souvenir spoon, for example, became a fad in the mid 1800s when rich Americans on a grand tour of Europe began buying utensils engraved with the names and landmarks of cities they'd visited.
In our modern times, mementos, railroadiana and "omiyage" – Japanese souvenirs brought back to appease family and co-workers – have become so commonplace as to seem almost banal. We tend to think of souvenirs as T-shirts and mugs, refrigerator magnets, decorative plates, notepads or folk art. Occasionally the souvenir has strayed into more morally murky terrain — pieces of the Pyramids, shrunken heads from the Jivaroan tribes in Ecuador – but most people are content with a memento that proclaims, for instance, their love of New York with a big red heart.
If my mention of an elaborate Maasai neck-dress didn't give it away, I have to confess to being something of a souvenir snob. I have an irrational hatred of tchotchkes and kitsch, anything that says: "My X went to Y and all I got is this lousy T-shirt." I resent hustlers who stand before the Eiffel Tower peddling tiny statues of the Eiffel Tower. I never enter a gift shop unless forced to by the architect. I think sublime sites like Chichen Itza are horribly disfigured by aggressive commercialisation, those rows of "Mayan" masks and ersatz renderings of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. This is the dark side of souvenirs: a cultural debasement in which anything distinctive is broken down and packaged for a mass market full of cheap knock-offs and junk.
In more than a decade of constant travel I have maybe 10 prized souvenirs. There is the dishdasha bought in a small coastal town of Oman, still stained with coffee from a mishap in Nizwa. There is the lynx paw from Alaska, when I drove up the Dalton Highway. There is a bottle of Petite Arvine from the Swiss Canton of Valais, which I am saving for a long-delayed meal of raclette. There is the copy of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a novel by Michael Chabon, which I bought for a lonely bus ride across America when I was 21 years old. These souvenirs are not status objects bought to "one-up" other people – "My souvenir is better than yours." After all, I keep them mostly in a box, off-display, and look at them rarely myself.
Rather, what they are is a particular type of memory prompt. If a souvenir is a "token of remembrance", I don't want to remember aggressive peddlers and tacky gift shops filled with merchandise Made in China. I want to remember a selective, pure version of a place in which I am a sole traveller on a grand adventure without other tourists. What I am trying to say is that souvenirs, as well as being reminders of places you've been, can also be objects of fantasy –incitements to dream. Just as people arrange and filter their photographs for Instagram, making the world into what they wished it really looked like, so I buy souvenirs that feed an idealised experience of travel.
The first souvenir I actively collected came from my mother and father. It was the mid-1990s, and they had just gone on a cruise ship called the TSS Fairstar. My mother felt guilty about leaving her children with her parents, so she returned from Fiji and New Caledonia with a bounty of gifts, most of them from on-board boutiques. All of these objects, across the years, have been lost or thrown away, except for one piece which remains in my possession: a conch shell with a smooth, soft pink interior. Its perfection, lacking engravings and those typical souvenir markers, transports me to white sandy beaches and coral reefs whenever I touch it. The shell is alive in a way that mass-produced coconut shell "paintings" can never be.
Still, those coconut shells and Venetian masks and snow globes showing the Manhattan skyline bring many people joy. Souvenirs, like photographs, are intensely personal. As the saying goes: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And it is hard to be entirely cynical when those objects are an invaluable economic lifeline for many people. The souvenir industry is massive and highly organised – think Disney or P&O – but even small street vendors in India and Kathmandu benefit from the impulse purchases of comparatively "wealthy" visitors. In other words, sometimes buying a souvenir is a direct way of making substantial contributions to the lives of those who need it most. Recognising this, some hotels around the world have started offering selections of locally sourced souvenirs, along with a story of their provenance. Souvenir-buying has become in certain cases a form of respectful charity: You are not simply giving money, but giving money in exchange for something. Your charity does not come at the cost of another person's pride.
As for my Maasai neck-dress, I have kept it in a shoebox like a deconstructed Lego set. Sometimes I look at it, usually with a sigh. It is not particularly beautiful anymore, though maybe in some ways that is beside the point. As a souvenir, it certainly reminds me of the Maasai Mara, that remote village and its inhabitants. Then it reminds me of the long flight home and a heated tangle with customs, when I complained that I had come so far, and that procuring another neck-dress was not really an option. Maybe this is what souvenirs are really for: They remind us how big and weird the world is, and they're modest attempts to capture some of that wonder for later use, like perfume in a bottle.
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