Joe Louis is incognito
As a child I collected baseball cards – thin, rectangular cardboard cutouts with the picture of an athlete on one side and his career statistics on the other. My friends and I would buy them by the pack and then trade with each other to get all of our favorite players. Our most precious cards were kept separately in protective plastic sleeves in hopes that one day they would appreciate in value to highly lucrative sums.
Collecting related objects is part of human nature and comes in many diverse forms. Philatelists collect stamps. Numismatics collect coins. Phillumenists collect matchboxes. The stereotypical collector is a hobbyist with a catalog of owned treasures and an open eye for new ones he may come across.
Travelers are no different. Gift shops carry items with little practical use but tap into people’s desires to own a series. Things such as snow globes, souvenir coins, and miniature spoons are commonly for sale at tourist locations. They will likely sit on a shelf in someone’s house or occupy a box in the closet, but on the occasional moment they are taken out, they provide a walk through nostalgic times.
Backpackers tend to travel light and minimize frivolous purchases. Still the power of the collector hunger is strong. Oftentimes travelers will cover their backpack with patches identifying the countries they have visited. People buy postcards and mail them back to friends, families, and even themselves in the home country. T-shirts are often cheap and lightweight.
One girl I met told me about her sister who collects masks. She had a large wall in a large room covered in facial masks from around the world. There was no special significance to why she liked masks, no anthropologically curiosity. She just liked them. And so wherever my friend went, if she saw an interesting mask, she would buy it and send it to her sister.
For her it became a global scavenger hunt. It wasn’t the theme of masks in itself that compels her. She doesn’t have a strong interest in the disguises outside of basic aesthetic value. Instead it is the drive to build, to add to a growing bank that shows continuity over time and space. Wherever she goes, whenever it is, there is that familiar thread of seeing a mask and purchasing it that links back to her previous trips and future destinations.
