The afterlife of souvenirs: what survives between culture and commerce?

At a local airport, an artisan carves a plank of wood into the shape of a giraffe. He works with precision, ensuring that he doesn’t miss any spots, cuts, openings, or lines. He has repeated this very design thousands of times over the years, and it has become second nature. 

Souvenirs like these exist in a vast, layered economy that’s both global and deeply local. According to one projection, the souvenir industry, which encompasses everything from keychains that have been mass produced in factories to one-of-a-kind ceramics painted by hand, was valued at over $94 billion in 2022, with projections to reach about $114 billion by 2029. 

While mass-produced souvenirs are typically manufactured at scale by machines, often far from their place of cultural origin, handmade souvenirs are created by local artisans using traditional techniques and materials, each piece carrying traces of human touch and regional identity.

This well-honed craft — the very thing that’s built a thriving global souvenir market — is also what makes its products, even handmade ones, so easy to dismiss as kitsch. There is, after all, a seemingly endless supply of bracelets, baskets, carvings, and painted masks at many a far-flung airport or street stall. 

Maria Lopez, an Australian artisan who has been selling clay birds out of her local airport for years, is familiar with this tension. “People never see the history behind what we make,” she says. “Most only see cheap toys.” 

Lopez’s souvenirs are sentimental because she learned the design from her grandmother. They’re also sustaining: she’s put all her children through college with the money she makes from sales. Her story is not unique. Worldwide, artisans sell souvenirs as a means of livelihood. The carvings, shells, and whistles are tuition fees, food on the table, and rent money. 

Across tourist regions, these artisans often specialize in a single design — a carved elephant, a woven basket, a clay bird — refining it over the years until it becomes both an emblem of place and a source of stability that supports millions and generates tens of billions of dollars. “Arts and crafts is the only creative industry where developing countries have a leading position in the global market,” the World Bank Group wrote in a 2017 report.

The souvenir industry has had a similarly fortifying effect anthropologically. Dating back to the Roman Empire, souvenirs have helped cultures persist and evolve in the face of war and colonization. 

In Kenya, for example, artisans in the 1960s, newly freed from colonial rule, turned traditional beadwork and wood carvings into marketable emblems of identity, selling them to visitors as symbols of postcolonial pride. Similarly, in India, the rise of handicraft cooperatives after independence in 1947 helped sustain regional textile and pottery traditions that had nearly vanished under British industrial imports.

Early tourism in these nations often blurred the line between curiosity and commerce. Colonial-era travelers collected “ethnic curios” as proof of having encountered the “exotic,” a dynamic that both romanticized and commodified local traditions. While this demand helped artisans earn livelihoods, it also brought friction: souvenirs became both vehicles of preservation and instruments of stereotyping.

The souvenir industry, though vital for many local economies, has long been accused of flattening cultural complexity into digestible clichés, transforming sacred objects into décor, and replacing sustainable materials with cheaper alternatives to meet demand. Yet for countless artisans, participation in that market remains a practical act of endurance: a way to keep culture visible in a world that might otherwise forget it.

It means that, today, a tourist can pick up folded hand fans in virtually any souvenir shop in and around Japan. Called sensu, these fans were designed during the country’s Edo period beginning in the 1600s and, though inexpensive and ubiquitous, are embroidered with silk, an enduring symbol of the country’s wealth and heritage. In Indonesia, masks, animal figurines, and furniture, prolific in the tourism market, are based on 43,900-year-old temple carvings of culturally significant deities and mythological scenes. 

The fact that a mask can be both a ritual object for the local artisan who made it and a decorative item for the tourist who bought it says more about resilience than dilution. It reveals how objects can inhabit multiple meanings without losing their essence. What we often call “appropriation” may, in these moments, also be adaptation, a negotiation that allows heritage to stay visible, if altered, in the modern world. 

To understand souvenirs this way is to see them not as hollow tokens but as collaborations: between maker and buyer, local and global, art and economy. When tourists view these pieces as design legacies — works that carry labor, history, and symbolism — the exchange becomes more than commercial. It becomes cultural continuity in motion.

The souvenir market will only continue to evolve. Today, artisans are meeting the growing demand for “authentic” experiences by encouraging tourists to make their own baskets, necklaces, and bracelets from raw materials, and even teaching them how to carve animals. This kind of collaboration creates a deeper kind of cultural endurance that passes through not only commerce but also craft.

And there’s still something to be said about Lopez’s birds and the value of designing a single object infinite times without diminishing its meaning. “There are prototypes that will never die,” anthropologist Nelson Graburn told Via Tourism Review. “The carved elephant, shell necklaces, and gondolas have persisted for decades, even centuries. Design work is a commercial and aesthetic part of culture.”