‘What Do I Get?’ Punk Objects as Meaningful and Valuable Souvenirs

Despite social scientists’ increasing interest on souvenirs in tourism, little has been written on the role and meanings of souvenirs within specific subcultures, such as punk subcultures. This chapter focuses on the exploration of punk objects as potential souvenirs in relation to “punk tourism” by investigating the meanings attached to subcultural artefacts as opposed to mass produced products. As part of an ethnographic fieldwork on punk tourism that the two authors have been conducting in Malaysia since 2016, in this chapter we focus on the role and meanings of punk souvenirs within the Malaysian punk scene. As the empirical material presented in this chapter shows, a DIY produced punk product has the advantage of channelling more than one value. While the value of souvenirs lies in their propensity to act as “mnemonic devices” related to a place visited, subcultural products like those produced by punks have the potential to fulfil additional values. In an age where authenticity and claims of appropriation of culture are placed under scrutiny, a punk object holds the potential of being a meaningful and valuable souvenir

Saigon's penalscape: interpreting colonial prisons in Vietnam

This article explores how purpose-built museums interpret the story of colonial imprisonment in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prisons integral to the 100-year French colonial occupation, and the subsequent American War, have been re-purposed, destroyed, or obscured. In response, memorial museums have an important role presenting prison history to international tourists and local visitors alike. Our approach interprets artefacts relating to restraint and torture, the reconstruction of prison cells, and the use of photography in three museums in the city—the War Remnants Museum, the Ton Duc Thang Museum, and the Museum of Southern Vietnamese Women—each featuring recreations of the Tiger Cages from a further notorious prison site, some 200 kilometres southeast of HCMC on the Côn Đảo archipelago. Memoirs, photographs, objects, and plaques from prisons in HCMC and Côn Đảo offer domestic and international tourists narratives stories of Vietnamese resistance to imprisonment. Considering the way former prison sites and museums memorialising prisons can be taken together as a series, we use the concept of the “penalscape” to indicate the contextual links between prison, education, and political struggle in an abolitionist framework

Detailing transnational lives of the middle: British working holiday makers in Australia

In recent years, writings on transnationalism have commendably repopulated a world stripped by globalisation theorists with institutions and capable individuals. But, in doing so, they have tended to focus on either end of the labour market, neglecting the middle, and to operate at altitude, neglecting the everyday intricacies of travelling and dwelling. Australia's working holiday programme enables young citizens of arrangement countries to holiday and work in Australia for up to 12 months. During 2001-02, I spent nine months researching--observing, formally interviewing, participating with--British and other working holiday makers (WHMs) in Sydney and a few secondary sites. I found that detailing transnational lives of the middle provides flesh for the bones thrown by James Clifford when he wrote rather speculatively on practices of travelling-in-dwelling and dwelling-in-travelling. WHMs travel-in-dwelling passively through the Internet, television, radio, and portable objects; and interactively through phone calls, e-mails, gifts and face-to-face conversation with other WHMs. And WHMs dwell-in-travelling through backpacker and local communities, drawing on objects and technologies, sites, and events and rhythms. I also found that detailing transnational lives of the middle gives us some new bones: the metaphor of uneven mobility as a means of differentiating middling transnationalisms. Some WHMs embrace corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobility more than others, as do some more permanent residents of Sydney.<br/

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Free independent travellers? British working holiday makers in Australia

There is a renewed interest among geographers in tourism and how tourism makes the world and its people modern. In this paper, I engage with this renewed interest byway of a case study: British working holiday makers in Australia. Drawing on two modes of research practice, ethnography and political economy, I argue that, while working holidays may be structured in numerous ways, they also involve challenges,active individuals, heterogeneous spaces, and slow time (for reflection and inscription), which together, in a sense, make their makers modern. I frame this engagement, this argument, with a debate familiar to geographers: the problem of FreeIndependent Traveller