Tourism and Souvenirs

Glocal Perspectives from the Margins

Jenny Cave, Lee Jolliffe, Tom Baum, Jenny Cave, Lee Jolliffe, Tom Baum

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781845414085
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Souvenirs are part of global and local travel and tourism in all corners of the world. This book portrays souvenirs as expressions of culture and as triggers of cultural change. The volume provides critique and theorisation of souvenirs of places, people and experiences in the context of lives lived at the margins of society, politics, tourism flows and urbanisation. Case studies in sustainable tourism illustrate dynamic ways that consumers and suppliers use souvenirs to respond to, resist and (re)interpret global and local influences upon cultures across informal, hybrid and formal economies.

1 Theorising Tourism and Souvenirs, Glocal Perspectives on the Margins

Jenny Cave, Tom Baum and Lee Jolliffe

Around the globe, the production of souvenirs (supply) and participation in their acquisition (consumption) play central roles in actively sustaining tourism economies, community relationships and cultural structures, traditions and heritage. This book situates souvenirs as tangible and intangible expressions and triggers of tourism experience that are ‘glocally’ developed on the margins, at tourism peripheries.

Within the Channel View series of volumes concerning tourism’s role in globalisation and cultural change, this book explores the processes and particularities of glocal (combining global and local) construction of souvenirs of place, people and experiences. It examines souvenirs as glocal agents in resisting, responding and interpreting global influences at local levels – preserving and sustaining craft traditions, cultural structures, community relationships and economies located on geographic, cultural, political, societal and economic margins of the globe.

Situated within a theorisation of glocalisation and its impacts, separate but interconnected issues are addressed in this volume. These include: the role of people, traditions and relationships; the role of place and symbolism, authenticity, production and material culture; the management of experiences at and/or near destinations; product marketing; human resource management issues of labour, intermediaries, yield and sales; and community development, cultural entrepreneurship and governmental initiatives. The book models the global spread of the three editors, who bring southern and northern hemispheric perspectives to the volume, as well as personal research interests in areas that include island and peripheral area tourism, mobility, human resources, heritage, entrepreneurship and material culture that span several continents and islands (Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, North America, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe).

Publication of this volume is timely since the only other dedicated volume on this subject, Souvenirs: The Material Culture Of Tourism by M. Hitchcock and K. Teague (2000) was published more than a decade ago. This multidisciplinary volume aims to complement the primarily anthropological work offered by that volume. First we review the literature on souvenirs as a context for extending the research agenda on souvenirs.

Souvenirs – A Brief Review

The souvenir research field has been surveyed by Swanson and Timothy (2012) who include an analysis of the demand and supply of production, consumption and distribution, suggesting a taxonomy of tangible and intangible souvenirs as symbolic reminders and commodities messengers of meaning, souvenirs, tradable commodities and commodification. A small number of volumes deal with related topics, but the focus is more in terms of patterns of consumption through retail shopping (Timothy, 2005) and tourist shopping villages (Murphy et al., 2011), while Lippard (1999) writes on the related subject of domestic tourism and its impacts on local people, art and place, primarily in the United States. Jules-Rosette (1984) analyses tourist art in Africa and Graburn (1976) complied an important global survey of ethnic and tourists arts in the ‘Fourth world’, which focuses on aboriginal or native peoples whose lands fall within the national boundaries and techno-bureaucratic administrations of First, Second and Third World countries. Our volume includes views of souvenirs from politicised peripheries and communities distanced by geographic and social mechanisms.

A handful of research volume chapters have touched upon, but not been wholly devoted to, the topic of souvenirs and their role in tourism (Deitch, 1989; Jolliffe, 2007). Other authors investigate the impacts of tourism on arts and crafts, dynamics of the marketplace and the proactive role of arts and crafts in sustaining traditions, which can then lead to tourism product (Graburn, 1976; Grünewald, 2006; Lury, 1997; Miettinen, 2006; Parris, 1984; Perkins & Morphy, 2006; Rinzin, 2006; Sharpley, 1994).

Several journal articles address the role of souvenirs in society and the formation of identity (Cohen, 1985; Cohen, 1988; Gordon, 1986; Haggard & Williams, 1992; Shamir, 1992), authenticity (Littrell & Anderson, 1993; Reisinger & Steiner, 2006) and cultural or self-expression (Asplet & Cooper, 2000; Kim & Littrell, 2001), as well as linkages to different forms of tourism (Littrell et al., 1994). Others examine the role of souvenirs in tourism in peripheral areas (Adams, 1997; Cohen, 1983; Forsyth, 1995), and yet others, their importance to community-initiated development (Fuller & Cummings, 2005; Healy, 1994; Hume, 2009; Kleymeyer, 1994; Tosun, 2000), as well as to island contexts (Holder, 1989; Townsend & Cave, 2004). Some look at the multiplicity of forms (Cohen, 1993b, 2001) and their role in the enterprise development (Cave et al., 2007; Timothy & Wall, 1997) and the purchase experience (Anderson & Littrell, 1995; Fairhurst et al., 2007; Kim & Littrell, 1999; Meethan et al., 2006; Turner & Reisinger, 2001; Yu & Littrell, 2005). Wilkins (2011) investigates the influence of gender purchasing behaviour, as well as the meanings of souvenir purchases to the individual in terms of reasons for purchase and planned uses of the item. Swanson and Timothy (2012) have extended the definition of souvenir to include items not manufactured as tourist mementos, but which nonetheless function as memory holders. They also examine the function of intermediaries and global manufacturers.

A sample of the wider literature of arts and crafts demonstrates how souvenirs, as highly diversified tourist product, have evolved over time from simple crafts (Cohen, 1993b), are influenced in their design by tourist demand (Boynton, 1986) and are significant to local economies. Governments play pivotal roles in stimulating arts and craft production (Hamel, 2001; Healy, 1994), as do external newcomers (Cohen, 1993a). Migrants hybridise art and craft (Hollinshead et al., 2009), but hosts can actively subvert globalisation by creating reactive identities and cultural product (Wherry, 2006) that serve to protect treasures, traditions and religion (Vorlaufer, 1999). Visitor centres can promote and conserve regional identity (Novotny et al., 2008) by being a locus of production to encourage retention of traditional lifestyles and foods (Kumar & Janz, 2010). Perceptions of what is ‘traditional’ affect the negotiations between artisans and retail intermediaries, as well as goods chosen for the tourist consumer (Moreno & Littrell, 2001).

As editors, we are delighted that this book includes contributions by several of the authors who have already contributed to this emerging subject of souvenirs and tourism, including Cave (Cave, Jolliffe & De Coteau, 2012), du Cros (McKercher & du Cros, 2002), Hashimoto and Telfer (2008), Jolliffe (2007), Swanson and Timothy (2012) and Wilkins (2011). These authors have used the opportunity provided by this volume to extend their thinking to encompass new data and wider horizons. Next we will address the theoretical underpinnings of this volume, deconstructing the global–local relationship as a research framework for the volume. How does the souvenir literature fit into the theoretical constructs of glocalisation and peripheralities?

Glocal

The global–local relationship refers to a nexus that ties together economic factors and socio-cultural responses to avoid oversimplifying complex social, cultural and economic processes of interactions of objects with place and movements of people into simple dichotomies. The neologism ‘glocalisation’ was coined simultaneously by sociologist R. Robertson and geographer E. Swyngedouw ‘to capture the interdependent relation between local–global by indicating that all socio-spatial processes may be viewed as simultaneously global and local’ (Haldrup, 2009: 250). Globalisation emphasises universality of worldwide cultural or corporate processes, while glocalisation accentuates particularisation of product, service or theme (Matusitz, 2010), or global heterogeneity, where the interpenetration of the global and the local result in unique outcomes in different geographical areas (Ritzer, 2003). The interactivity and/or separateness of these concepts can be read as different perspectives and processes that are contingent; that is, each derives meaning from the other, within connected networks that are always in motion and never completed (Gibson-Graham, 2002).

In terms of perspective, the global may be local if it refers to processes that impact on only some parts of the globe. However, the local may also be global as concretely specific locations embedded in specialised networks of social relations that have global reach. Further, places contain processes that can be globalised and replicated in neighbourhoods across the world (Gibson-Graham, 2002). In this book, we see souvenirs as part of glocal tourism transactions. On the global–local continuum, souvenirs of place and identity thus refer to both the universality and contextuality of tourism transactions.

There is a fear that what appears to be an exchange of ideas or phenomena can be unequal, with local lives and livelihoods transformed, politicised and overtaken (Dirlik, 1999). Also it is perceived that the forces of commodification conveyed by globalisation will produce increasing levels of cultural homogenisation and social standardisation in media icons, social styles and consumption values. And these forces may, in turn, erase cultural differences both within and across societies. But to the contrary, there is evidence that societies appropriate technologies, download media idiosyncratically and that local entrepreneurs and customers subvert standardisation to produce brand differentiation (Appadurai, 2001). An example is the subversion of the uniformity of products in each cultural setting of East Asia of the global chain of McDonald’s restaurants where the inherent capitalistic sensitivity to local markets meant that the planners were drawn into the local mosaic of social patterns and cultural orientations, which inevitably produced culturally distinct versions, but not in any predictable way (Watson, 1997).

The globalised heterogeneity versus homogeneity debate cannot be seen as a simple dichotomy of global producer equals uniformity; or local consumer equals difference. Increasingly we see complexities played out in global commodities that are locally interpreted by producers as well as consumers, and that cultural differentiation outpaces homogenisation (Appadurai, 2001). Globalising agents are knowledge-carrying individuals (Lowe et al., 2012), cross-cultural trades, religions, multinational companies and transnational networks of global mobility (Pieterse, 1994). Yet technologies, corporate governance and macro-economic policies are also globalising forces that have a complex, interactive and ‘multi-nested’ relationship with the national, regional and local economic development of tourism (Milne & Ateljevic, 2001).

Impacts of glocalisation

Globalised contemporary life has been observed as having the consequences of homogenisation of different cultures that brings out the commonality of all cultures owing to the heightened contact between them, but it also generates a renewed emphasis on ethnicity and community control, with the consequence of tourism as a community response (Ezarik, 2003) and localised concerns with cultural identity, historical memory and collective belonging (Doorne et al., 2003). Glocalisation thus is a reflexive and resistant way that people at local levels interpret global processes or phenomena to suit their specific cultural contexts; a relational interplay driven by international lifestyle migration that inevitably impacts on social practices and organisation (Torkington, 2012).

Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) identify four types of glocalisation that relate to cultural institutions, practices and meanings. First, relativisation, in which prior cultural practices are retained within a new environment, differentiated from the new culture, and second, accommodation, which is the pragmatic absorption of practices of other societies but maintaining the prior culture. Third, hybridisation, where people synthesise local and other cultural phenomena to produce distinctive, hybrid forms, and lastly, transformation, where fresh ideas from other cultures are favoured and local culture may be abandoned in favour of alternative and/or hegemonic forms. These types can be influenced by cultural receptivity, socio-spatial characteristics, such as favoured meeting places and social connectivity (technologies), rituals and habitus (values), as well as internal patterns of association (structures and hierarchies).

The concept of glocalisation has been used to explain the dynamics of tourism imaginaries (Salazar, 2012), acculturation (Weedon, 2012), the development of new cultural forms (Pack et al., 2012), lifestyle migrants (Torkington, 2012), product placement (Prakash & Singh, 2011) and branding ‘Brand Hong Kong’ (Chu, 2011). As well as export development (Lim, 2005), spatial appeal and urban regeneration (Russo & Sans, 2009), the success of theme park attractions (Matusitz, 2010) and local development responses to the global tourism industry (Milne & Ateljevic, 2001).

In the context of shopping and souvenirs, Park and Reisinger (2009) highlight cultural differences as glocal manifestations of shopping for luxury travel goods. Also, the changes that local artisans make to accommodate tourist preferences produce contemporary interpretations of traditional forms (Jena, 2010). Wilkins (2011) found differences between male and female preferences to purchase local, regional speciality and non-regional arts and crafts, and that some regional arts and crafts and local specialty pro...