F1316 Traveling Cultures: The Ethnographic Gaze in the Eighteenth Century and Now, Elizabeth Wallace
Wallace Elizabeth
The title of this course comes from an influential essay published in 1992 by the anthropologist James Clifford. Clifford urged his readers to analyze and question the binary oppositions that have traditionally structured the ways travelers (especially from Europe and North America) have met with the "other"—native peoples of Asia, Africa, the Americas. (Think Robinson Crusoe and Friday or Gulliver and the Lilliputians.) Those oppositions include: traveler/native; civilized/primitive; knowledgeable/ignorant; and powerful/powerless. The goal of this class is to unsettle not only these, but also other binaries that have structured globalized learning experiences. How did travelers in history explore with an "ethnographic eye" that established terms that still persist today? How are we as modern global citizens implicated in this history and what do we stand to learn by reconsidering it?
To answer these questions, our readings come from what is arguably the first great age of global expansion--the eighteenth century. As commentaries on North America, the Ottoman Empire, the Caribbean, India, and the west coast of Africa, our readings challenge us to compare what was being said then with what we have come to understand now. We read eighteenth-century fictional and non-fictional works as well as secondary historical and critical works that introduce relevant contemporary perspectives. Readings assigned for class include: Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1789), and Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips. In addition, we read a number of travel writings, including letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from the Ottoman Empire (1717), diaries by Janet Schaw (from the Caribbean, 1774-76), Eliza Fay (from India, 1779), and Anna Falconbridge (from an abolitionist colony in Sierra Leone, 1788). We will frequently consider visual representations that provide yet another cultural perspective—the paintings Agostino Brunias (1730-96) depicting life in the West Indies, for example, or vibrant representations of colonial India by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810). Lastly, as a class we will watch modern films that depict "traveling cultures" and that comment on the theme of ethnographic understanding in contemporary settings. These include Castaway (2000), Life and Debt (2001), and Darjeeling Express (2007).
The written work for the class consists of three, short (four to five page) essays, written in response to prompts distributed in class OR two, longer, seven to ten page essays, written on a topic of your choice, after meeting with the instructor. Further instructions for these options will be distributed in class. There will also be a final examination
Evaluation
Readings