Last week I dedicated an entry to the topic of Ground Zero -the place where the Twin Towers of New York used to be- and how this place, deserted now, could be touristified in the usual ways. That is, tragedy could be represented using the usual dispositives of the touristic field: t-shirts, souvenirs, keyrings, and any type of memorabilia.

My question today is around one thing: What makes us buy souvenirs? Some explanations are simple: it’s about the confirmation of our ‘been there’ fact. In this sense, the souvenir has a similar status of the picture: to prove our presence in a relevant location that deserves to be visited.

But, at the same time, it would be too limited to believe that it is all about a confirmation. What makes us buy souvenirs that we know clearly do not represent anything but an stereotyped vision of the place we visit? Why do we buy so many bottle opener Tumis, good luck charms, and things none of us would take seriously? Here’s some usual explanations on the academic side: the famous posturist, able to take distance from himself, make fun of his role and admit that what natives try to sell him is nothing but a show, a stage set that pretends to be authentic, but the more attractive it tries to be, the silliest it really is. I still have my doubts with this image of the tourist. The same way I never accepted the other image, the despective one, I’m not too convinced that the tourist is an disenchanted ethnograph having fun in his cynic view and who can collect souvenirs in the same way he would collect cereal box prizes or Happy Meal’s fun toys.

It’s shocking that even pain and tragedy can gain an aesthetic status in the most conventional ways. Where there was once blood and pain, now there can be mass produced souvenirs. In the case of Ground Zero, even the presence of street vendors can call for conflictive explanations, although all based on common sense: from those who condemn their presence as “the representation of the most predatory capitalism” to those who justify their presence as “enterpreneurs”, in theory representatives of the american lifestyle.

And we’ve seen other tragic locations become quite trivial representations of the conflicts that once took place there. It’s the case of the so called Che Tourism, which we commented in this and this entry. Or the touristification of Zapatism, something we made reference to in a previous post. And I suppose you, readers, have a few more examples of the touristification of a particular tragedy.