Keio University Students' Research Guide

Buried within the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History exists an astonishing group of historical relics from the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present day, many of which have never been on display. Donated to the museum by generations of souvenir collectors, these ordinary objects of extraordinary circumstance all have amazing tales to tell about their roles in American history.Souvenir Nation presents fifty of the museum's most eccentric objects--from a chunk broken off Plymouth Rock to the magnifying glass used to examine the infamous hanging chads of the 2000 presidential election. Smithsonian curator William L. Bird, Jr., regales us with the story of each artifact's origins and the quirks of fate that brought it to the Smithsonian. Strikingly photographed, these curious objects form a uniquely American narrative: a cabinet of curiosities representing our nation's most fascinating individuals, both celebrated and obscure, and the keepsakes they left behind.

In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America's innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Sturken contends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as reenactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see U.S. culture as distant from both history and world politics. A kitsch comfort culture contributes to a "tourist" relationship to history: Americans can feel good about visiting and buying souvenirs at sites of national mourning without having to engage with the economic, social, and political causes of the violent events. While arguing for the importance of remembering tragic losses of life, Sturken is urging attention to a dangerous confluence--of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch--that promulgates fear to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government's repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and military policies abroad.

This book examines a range of art forms produced by Indians in northeastern North America for sale to travelers and tourists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Aboriginal peoples of the Woodlands were the first in North America to experience economic and social marginalization and, in consequence, the first to rely on the production of commodities for the tourist trade. These hybrid art forms combine indigenous materials and techniques such as quillwork, moosehair embroidery, birchbark, and basketry with Euro-American genres and styles. Tourist art of the period is generally of high quality and great aesthetic interest. Yet scholars have largely ignored these objects because of their incorporation of Euro-North American influences. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the production, sale, and consumption of tourist art constituted a system for the circulation of objects within which images of Indianness were negotiated. To produce marketable commodities, Aboriginal people constructed images of themselves that mediated European notions of the savage, the natural, and the primitive. By accepting this imagery, colonizers and settlers naturalized their own identities as the rightful successors to the "Indians." While stereotypes of Indianness were being transported into parlors and bedchambers, the objects made for sale were also influencing things Aboriginal people made for their own use. The beaded purses, pincushions, and shopping baskets carried Euro-American styles and concepts into aboriginal communities, together with associated ideas of gender roles and domestic organization. An innovative combination of fieldwork, art historical analysis, and historical contextualization, this study for the first time rigorously compares a Native souvenir production to a wide range of Euro-American decorative arts and home crafts. It identifies the sources of object types and styles and reveals the innovative differences displayed by Aboriginal trade wares. Images newly uncovered in archives and travel literature--including depictions of Native vendors and makers--illustrate the book, along with never before displayed or published objects from museum collections in Europe and North America.

Hard Bargaining in Sumatra is an artfully written and penetrating examination of interactions between Western travelers and Toba Batak wood carvers in the souvenir marketplaces of Samosir Island, North Sumatra. Toba Batak carvings, ranging from simple human figures of wood to elaborately engraved water buffalo horns, are described in tourist guidebooks and by Toba Batak vendors alike as traditional and antique, despite many recent changes and inventions in form. This pathbreaking work investigates how notions of place and self are constructed by the travelers and the Bataks in the context of ethnic tourism. The author proposes that these interactions be understood in light of Louis Marin's concept of utopics, suggesting that tourist venues such as hotels and marketplaces are neutral spaces where both locals and visitors can act out behaviors that would ordinarily be constrained by their respective cultures. Rich in ethnographic description and employing a lively narrative style, Hard Bargaining in Sumatra is essential reading for students and scholars with interests in anthropology, cultural studies, globalization and tourism research, art history, and identity studies.