ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intersection of consumption and tourism , or what might be called the “tourist m ode of consumption,” in which material objects are represented as the em bodim ent of an original essence that is estranged from its historical and geographical origins. The exemplary object of tourist consumption is the souvenir, a thing that refers metonymically to a temporally and spatially distant origin, and metaphorically evokes collective narratives of displacement and personal stories of acquisition. It is, like the fetish and the gift, a peculiar object in that it possesses material traces of human intentions and actions, or the social relations of its ‘production,’ that lend it an (un)certain interiority, which is taken to be its subjectivity.
