“Moroccan” (Tourist) Things
Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Representation, Souvenirs, Tourism • Tags: Morocco, Orientalism, souvenir, tourism, tourist experience, travel
gallery Archives
Mystery Object #3: Snow Globes
I have a small collection of souvenirs collected on a shelf in my office. I they are not personal souvenirs, but a teaching collection that I use in a class I teach on the anthropology of travel: Pilgrims, Travelers, and Tourists. For this reason, I have tended to collect the most kitschy souvenirs I can find—souvenirs that scream, “I am a souvenir!” In other words, I have been collecting meta-souvenirs which reference their souvenir-ness more than the site where they were […]
Categories: Made in China, Mystery Objects, Tourism • Tags: Casablanca, China, Morocco, Paris, Rome, snow globe, souvenir, Susan Stewart, travel, vacation
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
This summer I have spent a good amount of time reading widely, and even somewhat randomly, books that examine the sociocultural in a poetic or literary way. I have been searching for an ethnographic approach to rethink and rewrite my research on social memory and nostalgia in a way that addresses the contingent, contradictory, emergent and affective nature of memories both individual and collective. I began by revisiting some books from my grad school days by Michael Taussig, José Limón and […]
Categories: Books, Photo Essays • Tags: fieldwork, Paris, Perec, Place, Representation, travel
MUSEUM FATIGUE 