Affective entanglements with travelling mittens

Abstract

Researchers have, most commonly, been studying souvenirs from two different streams: one that discusses the impact of souvenirs on the producers and another that focuses more on tourists as consumers of the souvenirs. Recently, the studies have also concentrated on the stories given with souvenirs, connectiveness to places and on the effectiveness of their memorability. However, research about the embodied experiences of and, most importantly, with souvenirs has been overlooked even in craft tourism, which can be seen fundamentally different way of experiencing tourism destinations as it invites people to involve the body in the actions, touch and move together. Therefore, in order to grasp the embodied encounters with souvenirs, we use an autoethnographic narrative of self-knitted green and white mittens to gain understanding about our experiences with the non-human actors, to research how emotions and affect are produced through craft tourism and the souvenirs, and how care as an affect is present in different situations and. By drawing inspiration from previous discussions on relational ethics, non-representational theory and affect in Tourism Studies, the narrative of the mittens explores the intensive entanglements in meanings and matter between handicrafts, places and humans. There, the ability to care is not limited to the social lives of humans. The self-made souvenirs emerge in unpredictable ways around everyday actions and create multiple affects, with movement, vitality and encounters on their own, becoming part of a lifelong journey filled with memories of certain moments. Furthermore, our findings encourage future tourism research to go beyond representation when exploring the intensive entanglements between people, souvenirs and places.

(Staying with) the trouble with tourism and travel theory?

“…A telling example of such a way to re-affect tourism is exemplified by Kugapi and Höckert (2020) where a story of mittens as souvenir tells of the intensive entanglements of people, souvenirs and places. Similarly, Valtonen et al (2020) offer a post-anthropocentric narrative of multispecies encounters in tourism.…”