Arthur Asa Berger
Travelers as Collectors, Collectors
as Travelers
Recently
I read a message on Facebook from someone who said he has now been to ninety
countries and was hoping to reach one hundred countries in the near
future. I can also recall conversations
I’ve had on my travel with travelers who told me they had been to six
continents and were going to visit a seventh soon. Their goal was to have been to all seven
continents.
These conversations made
me think about travel in a new way. We
know that there are many reasons why people travel—such as to have new experiences,
to see interesting and beautiful places, and to get away from their routines
and the crush of everyday life. So tourism marketers have designed their
advertising campaigns to resonate with these aspects of travel. But what about trying to appeal to the
collector mentality in people? That
seems to me to be a neglected area.
What, we may ask, are
the components of what we might call the collector personality? What motivates people to become collectors of
whatever they collect: Tibetan scrolls,
seashells, erasers, comic books, sexual partners, classic automobiles, or
cities, beautiful places, or countries that they have visited.
There more certainly is
an element of pleasure in obtaining examples of whatever collectors are
collecting. One of my grandsons is a
collector and he told me, recently, of how much pleasure he got from a box of
seashells we sent him. He went over
every shell carefully and sent us an email saying he has almost all the shells
he’s looking for.
One thing collectors want
is completeness…to have as many, if not all, of good if not the best specimens
of whatever it is they are collecting. Some
people derive pleasure from collecting, realizing they can never will get all
of whatever it is they collect.
Collecting for them is a quest that, in curious ways, gives some purpose
to their lives. Some people collect
things because they think they can eventually make money from their
collections. Children who collected
comic books when they were young and during their adolescence may have
collections worth a great deal of money.
That’s because
collectors are willing to spend money for things they want.
So
some collectors, we may say, make money from other collectors. Collecting may be a way of fighting off the
strictures of the superego in the service of id functions—a desire for things,
or in the case of travelers, experiences.
People who are collectors want to have many things, but by being, a
collector disguises their lust for acquisitions by papering it over with a coating
of fastidiousness and expertise. If you
collect thimbles (which, I discovered, are a very popular collector’s item) it
won’t cost you very much, but if you collect classic automobiles, it can be
very expensive. Some people incur great
debts to obtain items they feel they need to complete their collections. Sometimes marriages fail because of the zeal
of a collector. Some collectors, as the
result of the number of divorces in many countries, collect new wives and
husbands, one after the other.
Freudians would suggest
that the collector mentality stems from infancy when, at certain times, infants
desire to hold onto their feces. It
then manifests itself in the momentous battle in western countries between
children and their parents known as toilet training. Most children eventually
overcome this fixation, but this residue from infancy, what Freud called the
“anal retentive” stage, lodged in the unconscious, may be at work on collectors
of all ages who never resolved their anal-retentive desires. For some, in curios ways, their sense of loss
of what went into the toilet and was flushed away, leads them to try to make up
for their losses as infants and children.
Freud, himself, it turns out, was a collector of oriental rugs.
If many travelers are
motivated, unconsciously of course, by the collector mentality, advertisers
should find ways to appeal to this dimension of their personalities. They must find some way, subtly, of touching
this “I’m a collector” responsive chord in travelers. The product advertisers are selling is not
only places but places that enhance the feelings of a collector that this place
is a valuable “part” of the collection—going to Antarctica or Tibet or Bali or
wherever--is important and will enhance the collector’s desire for completeness.
What travel marketers
have missed, I would suggest, is recognizing what many traveler collectors feel
they are missing—the right place to complete the collection of important places
to visit, that will enhance their feeling of wellbeing and their status as a
collector of the best places. Matthew
Arnold talked about knowing “the best that has been thought and said.” We can add to this, the best places to have
visited.
For some traveler
collectors, numbers count. And if a
traveler collector has been to one hundred countries, that is quite an
accomplishment. For other traveler
collectors, going to the right places is crucial, so one’s collection of places
visited is as important as the number of places visited. In the course of my travels, I had occasion
to lecture on some cruise ships where I met people who told me, proudly, that
they have been on seventy cruises. I
could describe this as an example travel collector connoisseurship, with the
emphasis here on ships.
Mary Douglas, an English
social anthropologist, developed a theory she described as grid-group
theory. It argues that everyone in
modern societies belongs to groups with either few or many rules, which she
called grid, and weak or strong boundaries, which she called group. So we can have strong boundaries and many
rules, strong boundaries and few rules, weak boundaries and many rules, or weak
boundaries and few rules. This leads,
then, to four social groups or lifestyles in all societies, which we can
describe as elitists, individualists, egalitarians and fatalists.
Group
Boundaries
Weak Strong
Rules Many Fatalists Elitists
Few Individualists Egalitarians
Four Lifestyles
Everyone, Douglas
argues, belongs to one of these four groups, even though they may not recognize
the fact. Her point is that it is
membership in these lifestyles that shapes our behavior. In her article “In Defence of Shopping” in Pasic
Falk and Colin Campbell’s The Shopping Experience
(London: Sage) she writes (1999:17):
We have to make a radical shift from thinking about
consumption as a manifestation of individual choice. Culture itself is the
result of myriads of individual choices, not primarily between commodities but
between kinds of relationships. The
basic choice that a rational individual has to make is the choice of what kind
of society to live in. According to that
choice, the rest follows. Artefacts are selected to demonstrate
the choice. Food is eaten, clothes are
worn, cinema, books, music, holidays,
all the rest are choices that conform with the initial choice for a form of
society.
(My italics)
What
is crucial, she argues, is the lifestyle with which we identify, even though we
are not conscious of being a member of a given lifestyle.
Her theory is important,
for our purposes, because it helps us understand why people collect certain
things. Collecting, if Douglas is
correct, is also not a manifestation of individual choice. People who are elitists collect different
things from people who are egalitarians.
And elitist travelers, out to collect experiences of the right places,
tend to visit places where they hope they won’t encounter egalitarians,
individualists, and fatalists, who are collecting different kinds of places and
experiences that are congruent with their values and beliefs. And income.
All four groups are in conflict with one another but need one another to
survive.
All collectors, if the
Freudians are correct, are ultimately motivated by their childhood experiences
and the psychic trauma of their infancies, when so much of their precious poop
was dumped into the toilet. They spend
their lives as collectors making up for their tragic losses and, when they are
travelers, searching for reparational experiences. The child is not only the father of the man,
but also of the traveler.
Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and
Electronic Communication Arts at San
Francisco State University. He has published
more than one hundred and thirty articles and more than seventy books on media,
popular culture, humor and tourism.
