Tokens of renewal: The picture postcard as a secular relic of re-creation and recreation

Abstract

There are many parallels between holy-day and holiday journeys to places of renewal and in the rituals of sacred and secular ‘pilgrims’ in those spaces. These include the purchase of souvenirs. This paper considers the unique qualities of a specific tourist souvenir – the picture postcard. It compares and contrasts the behaviours and the agencies of this ‘travelling landscape-object’ (della Dora, V. 2007. “Putting the World into a Box: A Geography of Nineteenth Century Travelling Landscapes.” Geografiska Annaler 89B, 4: 287–306) with those of the sacred relic, focusing on the ways in which it disseminates materialised experience, marking presences and absences, and creating and strengthening interpersonal relationships. The paper ends by describing the ways in which these remnants authenticate the journey, whether sacred or secular, and asks if, for our times of retreat and recreation to be meaningful, we must validate them to ourselves and to others.

Keywords:

• postcards
• sacred and secular pilgrimage
• relics
• souvenirs
• gifting

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Veronica della Dora for her invaluable guidance throughout the production of this paper, and also Avril Maddrell and two anonymous referees for their very helpful insights.

Notes

1. See http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/iconographySupplementalImages/crucifixion/sanctaSanctorum.html

2. On the question of authenticity, see MacCannell (1973) and also his later suggestion that ‘in earlier times tourists may have gone in search of the authentic, but postmodern (post-) tourists know better and delight in the inauthentic’ (MacCannell 2001, 24).

3. Throughout this piece, I refer to my fieldwork notes. These relate to two projects carried out in 2012: the postcard users focus group discussions (participants in the two sessions identified in the course of an earlier project) and the circulation of a written questionnaire to access current attitudes towards postcards, and to the buying, sending and keeping of these souvenir objects. The questionnaire was snowballed from my original contacts to 180 respondents from the UK and beyond.

4. Some holidaymakers take home souvenirs as gifts for those left at home, but I suggest that, unless the recipient is known to collect a particular genre of memento, be it fridge magnets or snow globes, such tokens of place are likely to take the form of a ‘local’ food or drink, usually sweets, fudge, seaside rock or toffees, liqueurs or other alcoholic drinks. These non-ordinary comestibles (in terms of most people's daily diet) are consumed by the recipients as second-hand markers of the senders’ consumption of the out of the ordinary holiday space, but they are seldom put on display, nor do they endure as do postcards.