ABSTRACT
Tourists, including those visiting a museum, want “the real thing.” As tourists, we typically search for all that is authentic, pristine, and genuine. 1 Natural history and anthropology museums respond to this nostalgia for the authentic by offering visitors exhibits of exotic others, other worlds, worlds long past. This is why Richard Handler calls our museums modern “temples of authenticity” (1986: 4). At the museum, tourists view objects that metonymically stand for the culture of their creators. By viewing these ethnographic fragments, visitors can experience and appropriate authenticity. Moreover, no twentieth-century museum is without a souvenir shop, which allows visitors to purchase a possession—a specimen or trophy of the exotic—of their own. My own experience of feeling lured into souvenir shops before having even visited the exhibits suggests the extent to which shopping has become an important part of the museum experience. 2
