From Maps to Mummy-Curses: Rethinking Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology

Abstract

This volume explores the ways in which distinctive representational modes—in textual, visual and artefactual media—work as contact zones for cultural encounters. The case studies, whose subjects range chronologically from classical antiquity to the present day, historicize the objects, subjects, media and epistemologies of ethnography. The contributors explore gender and cultural hybridity in Herodotus' History, mapping and pre-modern discourses on wonders in the East, the trope of the cannibal in the Renaissance, early modern Jesuit responses to castration, the early twentieth-century British Museum mummy curse, and the ethics of the continuing use of anthropology as a military weapon. As a group, the essays offer interventions on notions of encounter, ethnography and ethnology, on the contexts and mentalities that prompt and structure modes of othering and, consequently, self-inscription. The volume engages with questions of cognition, epistemology, realpolitik and the relationship between experience and mental frameworks.

Keywords:

• Ethnography
• Ethnology
• Encounters
• Experience
• Knowledge

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding the two-day workshop, “Rethinking Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology: Continuity and Ruptures”, and for the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London, for supporting the event. The articles in this special issue were presented there; the authors are grateful to the participants for their contributions to the discussions.

Notes

For photography, see the vol. 21, no. 4 special issue of History and Anthropology 2010, entitled Anthropology, Photography and the Archive, and Baird (2011).

This does not, however, mean that all ethnographic writing is nothing more than a map of power relations (pace Said 1978). For an important corrective to Edward Said's Orientalism, in the case of pre-modern encounters, see Rubiés (2000).

A forthcoming book-length treatment is Surekha Davies, America's Inhabitants on European Maps and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge, 1500--1650.

In the modern era, an influential mode of icon-production is, of course, advertising; for an innovative study of its impact on conceptions of race and empire, see Ciarlo (2011).

The articulation of this concept in Spanish America added transatlantic dimensions to the problem; see Frederick (2002) and Martínez (2004).

For the impact of travel writing on the European concept of Oriental despotism, for example, see Rubiés (2005).

On objectivity, see Daston and Galison (2007).