ABSTRACT
For one reason or another, anthropologists carefully select and send postcards when away from home. Similarly, anthropologists just like anyone else also send postcards when they are at ‘home’ to those who are not with them. For many these picture postcards represent the combination of self and other, traversing between various locations, and a visual possibility of searching for identities lost or questioned. As consumers most individuals are little concerned with actual finances and benefits to the local economy and society; we tend to buy and send postcards feeling satisfied that these miniature images, and the few hastily written words, reconnect us through the, often highly stylised, forms of visual and textual narratives. Undoubtedly, postcards may provide a sense of reality about where we are, how far we have travelled and the changing social contexts that our life is anchored to at the moment. Local postcards, those produced by the locals themselves termed as such here for the lack of better term, are a special category combining locality and historicity with visuality. They are special because they amalgamate geography and territory with cultural identity often with the use of miniature maps drawn directly on the postcard. Viewed this way postcards more often than not are connected to a specific group, territory and identity. Framed by both time and space, they are definitely novel forms of representations of late modernity closely resembling what Michel Foucault has called heterotropias, a variety of parallel worlds that live side-byside with us in the midst. ‘The space,’ writes Foucault, ‘in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us’ (Foucault 1986:23). Thus one of the primordial functions of postcards is to draw both the producer and the consumer into the visualised history as memory, a notion fitting well with Augé’s suggestion that ‘our relation to reality is mediatized’ (1999:65). Since their invention, postcards certainly have assisted in the popular mediatisation of our lives with the use of heterotropias.
