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Studies in Travel Writing

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SPONTANEOUS
ETHNOGRAPHIES: TOWARDS
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
TRAVELLERS' TALES
Michael Harbsmeier
Published online: 11 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Michael Harbsmeier (1997): SPONTANEOUS ETHNOGRAPHIES:

TOWARDS A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TRAVELLERS' TALES, Studies in Travel Writing, 1:1,
216-238

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.1997.9634868

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 SPONTANEOUS ETHNOGRAPHIES: TOWARDS A SOCIAL HISTORY
OF TRAVELLERS' TALES

Mlchael Harbsmeier

1. introduction

In the well-ordered republic imagined by Plato travels to foreign countries were

considered a dangerous threat. Plato recommended that only the most trustworthy
of men, only men from fifty to sixty years of age should be allowed to go abroad to
learn about foreign rules and customs. On coming home, these travellers
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immediately would have to give a formal report about their experiences before the
Council of the Republic. If the Council should find any of the foreign customs wise
and well-considered, it might discuss introducing similar rules at home. If, however,
the travelling observer should prove to have been "corrupted" by foreign customs
and if he furthermore was likely himself to introduce such innovations, Plato
recommended that he immediately "should be condemned to death" (Laws 951d-
952 d). 1
Plato's deep concern about the effects of travellers' knowledge and stories
about other cultures and societies can stand as a motto for most of what sedentary
scholarship has had to say about the genre of travels ever since. Although Plato
was admittedly most concerned about the possibly corrupting and seducing
potential of foreign customs and habits, concern about the truth of travellers' stories
and descriptions and their trustworthiness has always been the main if not the only
motivation for criticizing and discussing, analysing and interpreting, collecting and
comparing what various travellers have had to tell and have written about their
interactive experience of strange and savage, foreign and barbarian, abhorrent or
admirable habits and customs. Plato was particularly suspicious of travellers
unable to resist the seductive temptations of other, barbarian forms of living. Today
we might be more inclined to be particularly suspicious about travellers not being
able to lift themselves above the interests and prejudices, the imagination and
ideology of the culture and society, class and sex to which they belong. In both
cases the writing traveller is seen first of all by sedentary scholars as potentially
guilty. guilty of not telling the truth, guilty of either too deep or too little respect
towards other cultures and societies, towards the truth. To the modern mind Plato
seems to have suffered from some kind of xenophobia. For Plato our postmodern
times would surely appear as a total surrender to the mysterious forces of

216
 xenophilia as already the nineteenth century did to Friedrich Nietzsche. In spite of
all this disagreement, however, everybody seems to agree in blaming the traveller
for hiding rather than telling the truth about the Other.
Looking at the tremendous growth in contemporary scholarly research in the
fields of travel writing and ethnographic discourse two trends appear to be fighting
each other right through the increasingly international and interdisciplinary turmoil:
'progressive' criticism of travel writing as an act of violence by the observer against
the observed, the traveller against the "travelee" (to use Mary Louise Pratt's
expression), the Orientalist against the 'Oriental', the 'West' against 'the Rest' on the
one hand; and a 'reactionary' hagiography of great writers and discoverers, the
more or less centennial celebration of the founding heroes and adventurers of
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Western and global ('world'-) civilization on the other. Once again, xenophilia
seems to be the only remedy against the dangers of racist, nationalist, imperialist
xenophobia, while on the other hand universal values apparently can only be
defended effectively by fighting the seductive forces of foreign and 'other' habits,
customs, and traditions, by reinforcing the very xenophobia which these universal
values were originally directed against.2
In spite of its essentially interactive and thus reversible nature, the genre of
travel writing continues to be almost exclusively studied from a sedentary point of
view, from various kinds of fixed and territorialized, 'progressive' or 'reactionary',
critical or affirmative positions which alone seem to allow the critic to evaluate and
criticize, to analyse and interpret the texts without herself falling prey to the
travellers' dangerously seductive narrative and rhetorics. The two recent important
mongraphs on the history of the genre for example, Mary Louise Pratt's lrnperial
Eyes and Mary Campbell's The Witness and the Other World, are both deeply
rooted in the tradition, which from Plato onwards has only been able to control a
mimetic desire for telling the truth by systematically interpreting and analysing
travellers' writings as more or less (Campbell more, Pratt less) failed attempts at
exactly the same: telling, describing, seeing the Other correctly, free from any bias,
prejudices, ideology, and particular interest.3
Considering the weight and historical depth of this tradition (which it would be
historically incorrect to call Western or 'logocentrist' because of closely similar
attitudes in most 'other' traditions) it is of course a rather ambitious undertaking to
try to develop an alternative in a symposium paper. Trying nevertheless, I have to
start with an apology. First I have to apologize for referring so much to what I have
written elsewhere. Second, I have to apologize for offering not even a single close
reading (or thick description) of any specimen of the genre under consideration,
presenting instead a birds eyes view of its global development. For this, however,

217
 there is an excuse: by focussing heavily on travel writing in non-Western traditions
in the second and third part of my paper; by putting much weight on a period in the
history of travel writing which not only starts at the point where Mary Campbell
finishes her book, but also ends where Mary Louise Pratt starts hers, by trying to
show why the seventeenth century, which also more generally seems to be rather
poorly treated in what in German is called 'historische Reiseforschung' focussing
mainly on late medieval pilgrimage and very early modern discoveries on the one
hand and the late Enlightenment and early romanticism on the other; and, finally, by
trying to look at accounts of travels inside Europe as a key to understanding the
social workings of the genre more generally, I hope at least to have come up with
some food for thought and discussion among those better acquainted than me with
much of what I will be talking about.
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In what follows I try to describe the genre of travel writing in much the same way
as so many travellers themselves have described other particular forms of activity:
as a kind of meaningless behaviour,4 a kind of ritual unfolding itself not only in pre-,
post- or colonial, but in any kind of 'contact zones' between different cultures and
societies.

2. Precautions

If one is to believe James G. Frazer, "magical precautions against strangers" have

been a fairly common phenomenon among what he called primitive peoples all
over the world. In some cases rules of ritual purification also apply to travellers
returning home. Thus the Bechuanas are said to "cleanse or purify themselves
after journeys by shaving their heads, etc., lest they should have contracted from
strangers some evil by witchcraft or sorcery". In certain parts of West Africa a man
returning home after a long absence must wash in a particular fluid and receive
from the sorcerer a certain mark on his forehead before he is allowed to visit his
wife. In other cases, small portions of the fat of particular animals are given to
travellers or they are welcomed by water being thrown at them. And the natives of
Savage Islands in the South Pacific reportedly kill not only strangers drifted to their
shores, but also "any of their own people who had gone away in a ship and
returned home".
The most elaborated ceremonies of purification of travellers coming home
belong to the Hindoos however:

Two Hindoo ambassadors, who had been sent to England by a native Prince

218
 and had returned to India, were considered to have so polluted themselves
by contact with strangers that nothing but being born again could restore
them to purity. 'For the purpose of regeneration', it is said in the pages of the
famous Asiatick Researches, 'it is directed to make an image of pure gold of
the female power of nature, in the shape either of a woman or a cow. In this
statue the person to be regenerated is enclosed, and dragged through the
usual channel. As a statue of pure gold and of proper dimensions would be
too expensive, it is sufficient to make an image of the sacred Yoni, through
which the person to be regenerated is to pass'. (Frazer 1890: 157-158).

It is tempting to compare travel accounts to the ceremonies and rituals of

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purification described by the travellers quoted. Returning home after a long

absence can generally be seen as a transition asking for some sort of rite de
passage through which the traveller is reintegrated into the community of those who
stayed at home. Telling about what happened out there is thus tantamount to
reaffirming the traveller's membership of the group with which he again can feel at
home.
As appears from his footnotes, James Frazer, like most anthropologists of his
time, had been a voracious reader of travel accounts. It was in the innumerable
reports of explorers, adventurers and missionaries that he found the material for his
massive panorama of the world's various forms of ritual, myth, folklore and religion.
Like most anthropologists (and historians for that matter), Frazer treated the books
of travel on his shelves (and in his bibliographies) as sources, as mines of
information concerning the peoples visited and described by the authors.
Apparently it never occurred to his own or the mind of his contemporaries that these
sources themselves could also be seen as an outcome of the same kind of ritual
processes as the ones described by these travellers (and analysed by the
anthropologist).
Claiming some kind of activity or behaviour to constitute a 'ritual' means to say
that it has other than merely 'technical' or 'rational' meaning and significance, that it
follows certain rules which cannot be explained in purely practical and instrumental
terms. These rules, moreover, impose themselves on the participants as in some
sense unquestionable 'customs', 'traditions', 'usages', 'values' or 'norms' without
changing much from one generation to the next. Looking at what travellers have to
tell when coming home as a ritual thus implies finding other than the merely
technical, rational, pragmatic reasons they might have for performing it. Before
being able to offer any such other explanations we need to look a little more closely
at what happens in this kind of ritual.

219
 Travel accounts, whether oral or written, are texts. In these texts the
traveller/author describes what happened from when he (most travellers have in
fact been male) left to when he came home again. From a formal point of view this
narrative is made up of two grammatically different kinds of sequences: the ones
which tell about what happened on the journey on the one hand and the ones
describing how things were like out there on the other. Following the terminology
developed by the Russian formalist Troubetzkoy in his pioneering structural
analysis of an old Russian voyage to India, we can call them dynamic-narrative and
static-descriptive passages respectively. Very often the way out as well as the way
home are described in the dynamic-narrative tense, whereas in-between we have a
concentration of the static-descriptive parts of the text. In other cases either one of
the two tenses might be used so little that it seems almost to be absent: the classical
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ethnographic monograph or the topography of a city, for example, often tell very
little about the fieldworker's and observer's day-to-day activities and the daily
events of the trip, whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, many pilgrims' diaries
have almost nothing to say about the towns and peoples encountered on the way.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of formal analysis at least, travel accounts can be
claimed by definition in one way or the other to contain both kinds of textual
segments.
Seen as a ritual performance travel accounts occur at the point of transition
from a state of being away to a state of being home again. Following van Gennep
and Victor Turner we may thus say that travel accounts, taking place between
'segregation' and 'reaggregation', constitute the liminal phase of the ritual of
'coming home'. In the same way one could argue that the static-descriptive parts of
the texts themselves can be seen as liminal when compared to the segregational
and reaggregational dynamic-narrative passages telling about the way out and the
way home respectively.
These passages are therefore the most interesting and revealing for analysis: it
is here that we find the traveller/author describing whatever he and his audience (or
readers) conceive as being 'other' when compared to what things are like at home.
It is here that we find passages describing how things are different out there from
how they used to be. It is here that other cultures and other societies are set up in
contrast to the traveller's own. It is through looking at these parts of the texts that
one can find the boundaries and distinctions between 'here' and 'there', between
'us' and 'them', which make travel accounts such an excellent source for the study
of conceptions of space, and cultural as well as social identity and diversity.
There is another reason as well. The travellers as well as their audience and
readers tend as a rule to focus on how things are out there, on how the other

220
 peoples visited and described behave differently in relation to each other and to
nature. Looking at various, more or less explicit ways and modes of describing
such differences through comparison and contrast, looking at the specific forms of
the rhdtorique de Mferitd (to use an expression coined by FranCois Hartog in his
study of Herodotus) in play, travel accounts can tell us a lot about otherwise only
rarely articulated assumptions on the side of the traveller and his audience about
their own culture and society, about their own way of relating to each other and to
nature.

In anthropology, rituals have mostly been valued as either giving us the chance to
understand better the symbols, the world view or the cosmology of the culture in
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which they are performed or as having a specific social significance through

reinforcing and reproducing the social relations between those involved in their
performance in various roles. As Maurice Bloch has demonstrated in his historical
analysis of the ritual of circumcision in Madagascar (Bloch 1986),however, despite
apparently prevailing theoretical views in anthropology, these two kinds of analysis
do not exclude each other: on the contrary, when set in motion through historical
analysis, they can be used in a complementary way.
Seen as a social fact, a total social fact perhaps, any travel account involves at
least three parties: the traveller himself, his audience, and the people encountered,
observed and described. The traveller's authority rests on his 'having been there'
as much as it is founded on his proper drawing of the right distinctions between 'at
home' and 'out there' qualifying him for his return. Of course there always will be a
more or less delicate and sometimes precarious balance between the need to rely
on pre-established boundaries and distinctions as necessary conditions for being
comprehensible on the one hand, and the traveller's ambition and capacity on the
basis of his own experience to modify and change exactly these distinctions and
categories on the other. But his influence and authority, the prestige and perhaps
even the power which he sometimes can derive from having been to where those
who stayed at home never have been is an issue constantly renegotiated through
the account itself. An analysis of the traveller's views and descriptions of other
cultures and societies thus always ought to be closely connected to an analysis of
the social relationships involved in the traveller's renegotiation of his social position
when performing the ritual of reaggregation called a travel account, a travelogue, a
rdcit de voyage,a Reisebericht or Reisebeschreibung.

From what I have said so far you probably will have got the impression that the
ritual I have been trying to describe has occurred since time immemorial all over the

22 I
 world, that accounting for one's travels in other words should be as widespread as
travelling or the physical movement of people itself. Judging on the basis of oral
performances this might or might not be true: we never will know. Judging on the
basis of written ethnographic descriptions, however, it can easily be shown that
only very few of the societies called civilizations because they made use of writing
in their dealings with other (that is to say, what they have called savage, barbarian,
or primitive) cultures and societies have actually made any use of this ethnographic
genre, relying instead on a variety of other forms whenever they had a need for
ethnographic knowledge and expertise for military, political, economic, strategic or
other reasons.
What I am going to argue in what follows is that most civilizations in fact have
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made very little or no use of travel accounts and the ritual of reaggregation in
procuring and displaying ethnographic information or misinformation, while only
early modern Europe has discovered, used and systematically exploited the
strategically, culturally and socially important potential of this form of ritual
behaviour for improving the level of knowledge and power over the rest of the
world, including those civilizations which have preferred to rely on more 'rational'
means of cognitive and cosmological control over their social and cultural
environment. Trying to substantiate these claims I will proceed in three steps: first I
will try to demonstrate -- very superficially only -- that the genre of travel accounts in
a strict sense actually was first invented and then regularly performed in Europe
from the late fifteenth century onwards, that Columbus and his contemporaries in
other words rather than discovering new continents in fact invented a new genre.
Secondly I will try to show, on the basis of the German corpus of texts which I
happen to be most familiar with, how seeing and understanding those texts as ritual
performances might improve our understanding of the specificity of the performing
culture in question; and thirdly I will try to show why the genre, in spite of surviving
and apparently, with ups and downs of course, thriving to this very day, from the
early nineteenth century onwards, has lost that acceptance among audience and
readers which has been a necessary condition of its validity as a ritual recognition
of shared values and cosmology confronting the challenge of 'otherness', of
ethnographic experience and description.

3. Prehistory

As a rule oral performances of the reaggregational ritual of telling the story of one's
travels have only been reported or described in more than a passing way by very

222
 few outside ethnographic observers. The only exception proving this rule in fact
appears to be the shamanistic, imaginary journeys such as, for example, that of the
Eskimo or Inuit shaman or angakoq to the bottom of the sea described for the first
time by the great Danish Moravian missionary Hans Egede in the middle of the
eighteenth century, and even more thoroughly again in the beginning of our century
by the great Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen. The angakoq reported his
vision and ecstatic experience through imitating sounds, gestures and words about
his visit to the Goddess TakanakapsBluk who, ruling over the sea and its animal
inhabitants, was also responsible for providing food for the Inuit, at the very moment
of the journey itself.
Even though this performance can immediately be recognized as a kind of ritual
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intended to save the participants from starving to death and, according to Knud
Rasmussen at least, culminating in a general confession of sins and transgressions
by the audience at the end of the session, it proves on closer inspection to have
little in common with the kind of ritual we are here concerned with. On the one
hand the angakoq's journey to the bottom of the sea is obviously told and reported
about by the traveller himself. On the other hand, however, it is, at least if we are to
believe Knud Rasmussen, the audience and not the traveller who has the word at
the moment of return. The angakoq certainly delivers an account of his voyage.
However, since he does so while in fact still not having come home again, it is up to
the audience to take action at the end of the seance.5
Having a rather poor knowledge of shamanism in other parts of the world, I am
unable to say whether the same pattern also applies to similar imaginary journeys
elsewhere. It is my impression, however, that in general it seems to hold true that
when the voyage is described by the traveller this happens simultaneously with the
voyage, while on the other hand descriptions delivered after the journey, at the
moment of coming home, are very often performed not by the traveller, but by
somebody else. In the case of the angakoq, both Knud Rasmussen and Hans
Egede had both to admit that, not having taken part in such a session themselves,
they had to rely on what their informants told them about the deeds of famous, but
deceased virtuosi in the art of shamanistic ecstasy.

Turning now to those cases where a journey or voyage has been described in
writing not by some outside observer, an anthropologist or a missionary for
example, it becomes even more obvious that the act of accounting for a journey at
the point of return, which to us seems so perfectly natural and a matter of course at
least in oral terms, in fact seems to have taken place very rarely indeed before the
last decades of the fifteenth century in Europe.

223
 From the first collections of travel accounts in the early sixteenth century
onwards, and particularly in the nineteenth century, many Western collecters,
bibliographers, orientalists, historians of geography, ethnography and
historiography and other scholars have been working hard to make themselves and
others believe that coming home from a faraway trip almost everywhere has been
followed up by a report or account by the travelling hero about adventures and
experiences undertaken or met with. Shelves of Chinese, Japanese, Arab,
Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Latin texts have in fact been edited and translated --
and we ought of course to be grateful for that -- as if they belonged to the same
genre as those many texts of the kind by means of which European nations from the
end of the middle ages onwards have discovered and cognitively conquered the
rest of the world and, in the end, also their own.
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In the course of a conference paper it is of course impossible to substantiate the

claim that by far the majority of these so-called travel accounts in fact have very little
in common with what has characterized that genre since its institutionalization in
the early sixteenth century -- let alone to do interpretive justice to any of them. But
let me try further to provoke discussion by running through a few examples taken
from various traditional or pre-modern literate civilizations.
Discussions of the history of the concept of rnleccha, a functional equivalent of
what elsewhere has been called 'barbarian', and, more generally, the xenology
(from xenos, stranger) of traditonal Hinduist India, never mention any travel account
as their source, instead referring to an abundant normative literature about magical
precautions against strangers and rites of purification due to their impurity. To my
admittedly amateur knowledge at least, the princess Sarasvatibai Pathvardhan,
who, with a following of more than 500 people from all different castes, on 8th
October 1783 left Miraj for a pilgrimage to Benares more than three thousand
kilometres away, committed what amounts to a break with Hindu traditions when
she ordered several of her Brahmin secretaries to send daily reports about the
events of her home express by dromedary messengers. The noble widow's order,
the outcome of which can reportedly still be studied in the archives of Poun6,
resulted presumably in one of the earliest Hindu travel accounts. It shares,
however, with innumerable other texts that are claimed to represent the genre a
fundamental deficit: that it has not been written by the traveller herself, but by
appointed scribes or secretaries.
Most of the premodern Chinese texts edited and translated as travel accounts
likewise have been written by somebody else, by the historiographer for example,
who in some of the final chapters of his off ical history of a given dynasty devoted to
what we might call foreign relations presents a summary of the reports delivered by

224
 ambassadors or tributary emissaries to barbarian tribes and kingdoms north, south,
east and west of the Middle Kingdom. But apart from often not having been written
in the first person by the traveller himself, the very rich Chinese tradition of travel
writing, differs from the later European tradition in another important respect.
One of the oldest Chinese texts in question, the enigmatic travels of the mythical
Emperor Mu from the tenth century BC -- as described in a manuscript from the
fourth century BC -- has been translated and interpreted many times by European
sinologists precisely because in this text the Son of Heaven not only, like so many
later Chinese travellers, is reported to have visited a long series of tributary tribes
and kingdoms to receive gifts and submission as a sign of their recognition of his
power and authority, but is also said to have visited a number of Holy Mountains
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and Gods, among them a God of the Rivers and, finally, a Mother Queen of the
West. Instead of receiving tributary gifts the Son of Heaven in the end engages in
an exchange of poems with these immortal beings before returning home.
In the travels of Emperor Mu, the otherwise strictly separated two strings of the
long Chinese tradition of travel writing, the official reports of tributary and diplomatic
missions to barbarian tribes and kingdoms in all the four corners of the world on the
one hand, and the tradition of utopian, visionary and imaginary journeys to the
Gods and to Heaven on the other, have for once come together as if through this
lonely exception to prove that the search for immortality and worlds beyond had
always to be kept separate from economic, political and military interaction with
barbarian and therefore tributary tribes and kingdoms, as if forever to exclude holy
mountains, heaven and the Gods and Goddesses from the map of concentric
quadrangles characteristic of the Middle Kingdom's powerful cosmological vision.
After leaving a considerable number of famous accounts of their expeditions, the
Buddhist pilgrims to India of the time of the T'ang dynasty apparently moved
beyond this pattern. Again, as a rule being written not by the pilgrim himself but by
his biographer or hagiographer, their endless enumerations of the tribes and
kingdoms encountered on their way and of the shrines, temples and monasteries
they visited closely followed the pattern of the official historiography of Chinese
relations to tributary nations in the extreme meagreness of their ethnographic
descriptions. Rather than describing their voyage as a sequence of events
culminating with the arrival at the journey's destination, the itineraries of these
pilgrims only give thorough inventories of geographical information about the route
that has been followed and an assessment of the success they have had in
obtaining the holy scriptures. This can be seen as the functional equivalent of the
tributary gifts meticulously listed and enumerated by so many other Chinese
travellers, such as for example the great overseas expeditions from the early

225
 fifteenth century so often compared to the European voyages of discovery a few
decades later.
In classical Arab literature geography seems in many ways to have played a
similar role in relation to travel literature as historiography has done in China. From
the abundant geographical literature from especially the classical period until the
end of the tenth century, analysed exhaustively by Andre Miquel, we know indirectly
of an almost overwhelmingly large number of often anonymous travellers, on
whose first hand reports the learned geographers have relied extensively. Though
most of their accounts have only survived in extracts and quotations, there is also in
this geographical literature a corpus of texts, some of which by the late eighteenth
century have already been translated as travelogues by European orientalists.
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Thus, one of the earliest accounts of India and China from the early ninth century
has long been appreciated as the eye-witness account of a merchant called
Suleiman, while on closer inspection the text turns out to be yet another compilation
probably taken from many different oral accounts which have never been written
down in the shape in which they were originally performed. Only when interrogated
by learned geographers, when -- as for example the famous Ibn Fadlan, who
around the year 920 visited the Northern Rus or Vikings and described their royal
funerary ritual -- obliged ex officio to turn up with a report of their diplomatic or
missionary expeditions, or when trying to make their seafaring expertise accessible
to other merchants in manuals, have the innumerable Arab travellers left any written
traces of their voyages.
In addition the accounts of such pilgrims to Mecca as Ibn Jubayr from the twelfth
and -- even more so -- Ibn Battuta from the fourteenth century definitely seem to
disprove the hypothesis according to which the genre of travel accounts should be
a late medieval or early modern European invention. Unlike late medieval
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, however, the hadjdj as an annual event and strictly
regulated ritual does not seem -- apart from a few guidebooks -- to have led to any
regular output of written accounts by its presumably many times more numerous
practitioners.
Both Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta came from some of the more remote Muslim
territories in Spain and northern Africa, seen from its Islamic centre. Again in
marked contrast to contemporary and later Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, they
both paid most attention to the learned men and institutions and the cities of the
Muslim world, while only occasionally mentioning their encounters with heathen
unbelievers.
The comprehensive accounts they and a few others have given of their travels,
as well as the terminological recognition of the genre by the term rihla as against

226
 the diplomatic reports called risala, do in fact prove that a genre established itself.
This genre called rihla still differs, however, from its later European counterpart by
dealing as a rule with journeys and travels inside of Dar a/-Islam, the House of
Islam, while only accidentally --as was the case with, for example, Ibn Jubayr or Ibn
Battuta -- also including the Dar a/-Harb, the House of War inhabited by heathens
and unbelievers. Only the later European pilgrims' and discoverers' accounts had
other worlds as the main target of their ethnographic descriptions.
From classical Greece both Europe and the Muslim tradition had inherited a
most important and fundamental notion: the division of humanity into two principally
interchangeable and logically symmetrical categories of 'Hellene' and 'barbarian',
'us' and 'them', which, unlike the corresponding categories of traditional Hindu
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India or premodern China, did at least open up the idea that the world might have
more than one centre depending on the point of view, the language, or to use an
outrageously anachronistic term, the nationality of the observer.
In classical antiquity, in Greece as well as in the Roman empire, the subversive
potential of this distinction was widely exploited in all sorts of ways, in for example
admiration for ancient Egyptian wisdom or various kinds of primitivism. In terms of
the genre of travel accounts in a strict sense of the term, however, it seems to have
been of surprisingly little consequence. The themes of voyage and journey and
encounters with barbarian others have of course been ubiquitous from Homerian
epic and historiography since at least Herodotus. Looking for accounts of a journey
written in the first person, disregarding, that is, historiography, descriptive
geography and the numerous periploi or coast descriptions for the use of seafaring
merchants, we seem in the end to be left with something like Lucian's True Stories,
a parody of a genre which still didn't exist at his time (the second century AD).
Lacking the institution of long distance pilgrimage, classical Greece and Rome
seem to have had few chances to develop a genre which both their Muslim and
their Christian inheritors were later to make flourish.
In the Christian West -- and from this point onwards we can largely follow Mary
B Campbell's The Witness and the Other World -- pilgrimage to the Holy Land,
starting from around the fourth century onwards, seems for many centuries to have
produced no more pilgrimage accounts than its Muslim counterpart. From the
eleventh century onwards, however, the guides and topographies and travel letters
dealing with the Holy Land began to be replaced by texts coming increasingly close
to what three centuries later was to be recognized as a proper travel or pilgrimage
account written in the first person by the pilgrim himself, both describing in detail the
Holy places visited and relating the sequence of events and the personal joys and
sufferings of the journey. The historical chronicles of the crusades, as well as the

227
 inevitable confrontation of the pilgrims not only with bad weather and the threat of
shipwrecking, but in particular with the presence of what were seen as the
Mahometan infidels and unbelievers, representatives of a powerful rival civilization,
have to be taken into account in any attempt to explain the emergence of the travel
account as a personal testimony of the sufferings and adventures of the self-chosen
journey.
Medieval Europe also had emissaries, ambassadors and missionaries sent out
to faraway places in order to give a report to the authorities responsible for their
missions, the Venetian regular relationes from their ambassadors being only one of
the best known examples. Like their Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arab or Persian
counterparts, these travellers also wrote what in modern eyes seem to amount to
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travel accounts, like those of William of Rubruk and others who in the thirteenth
century had been sent to the Mongolian court in the hope of finding an ally in the
Christians' perennial struggle with their Muslim adversaries. Only the fact that it has
been part of their job to report about the mission precludes these texts from being
considered travel accounts in the strict sense of the term.
Medieval Europe also had its merchants travelling widely all over the world.
Some of them might have been instrumental in producing guides and maps for the
use of other merchants, but one of them was later almost canonized as author of the
archetype of a travel account. Looking more closely at the Venetian Marco Polo's
Devisament du monde, however, it not only becomes clear that once again
somebody other than the traveller has actually written the text and that, more
importantly, the original text at least -- which has a very complicated
iiberlieferungsgeschichte -- can in no way be seen as the outcome of an attempt to
follow Marco Polo on his travels, but on the contrary, as the original title suggests,
was meant as a description of the the world at large, triggered off somehow by this
merchant, who had himself only seen parts of what his ghostwriter had so much
success in describing. As Jacques Heers has recently shown in an important
article, it was during the course of the fifteenth century that Marco Polo's description
gradually became reinterpreted into a specimen of the genre of travel accounts
which was emerging at that time. The enormous energy spent by modern
scholarship on reconstructing the exact sequence and itinerary of Marco Polo has
to a large extent been based on the assumption that his text, in spite of
appearances, is a real travel account. The result, we could say, in the end has been
to prove exactly the contrary.
Enough, I think, has been said by now to make at least plausible the idea that
the ritual of reaggregation I talked about at the beginning of this essay was first
regularly performed in writing in Europe from the late fifteenth century onwards.

228
 The countless pilgrims to Palestine, who left as testimony handwritten and printed
descriptions of their journeys, as well as the generalization of the habit of writing,
publishing, translating and circulating the itineraries, chronicles, diaries, journals
and logbooks of the great voyages of discovery in the second half the fifteenth
century, have together made most later generations believe that it is perfectly
natural to tell about what one has seen and done out there when returning home
from a journey.
Columbus reportedly threw a copy of his logbook enclosed in a bottle into the
sea at a critical moment on one of his voyages, hoping thereby to achieve eternity
in spite of eventual shipwreck and death. From the age of Columbus onwards
innumerable other travellers have performed the reaggregational ritual with similar
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sincerity.6

4. The Golden Age

Once installed through what we could call the internalisation of rules of behaviour
which earlier had to be enforced by external authorities requesting the traveller to
write a report or systematically interrogating the homecomer, the genre of travel
accounts, due perhaps also to the advent of the printing press, soon became a
familiar phenomenon in most European countries. As a kind of double book-
keeping and surely not unrelated to other symptoms of the spread of often rather
catholic forms of ethics, not only pilgrimages to the Holy Land, but also many other
kinds of voyages and journeys were increasingly described in writing by an
increasing number of travellers. Having spent too much of my time already on the
prehistory of what I originally intended to say most about, I can here give only a
rather vague idea about the early modern historical evolution of the genre on the
basis of the German sources, which I happen to be most familiar with.
Once invented and installed, the genre from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century only gradually conquered the world in terms of the destinations it was able
to cover. To begin with, around the year 1500, pilgrims to Jerusalem, numerically
presumably fewer than those who went to Santiago de Compostela or to local
centers, were still about the only travellers to put down their accounts in writing in
German At the end of the golden age of the genre, in the last decades of the
eighteenth century, by far the largest number of accounts related to European
destinations, to France, Switzerland, Italy, England, and the Netherlands, which
taken together amounted to roughly the same share of the total as travels inside
what can anachronistically be referred to as Germany The Holy Land, the

229
 Ottoman, Persian and Moghul Empires, the new world, East India and Africa as well
as, even though still enjoying the interest of a number of important naturalists,
Russia had by the end of the eighteenth century lost the privileged status which
they had enjoyed during the preceding centuries.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, a handful of German participants in
Spanish and Portuguese expeditions, among them Hans Staden, captive of war for
almost a year among the Tupi cannibals in coastal Brazil, and together with a
certain Johannes Dryander author of one of the most remarkable ethnographic
descriptions ever to be written in German, were among the first to write about a
journey which did not have the lands described in the Bible as their goal. The
earliest travellers to India still reflect the heritage of pilgrimage accounts by
including numerous biblical references in their descriptions, while the later ones,
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mostly written by protestant authors, contented themselves with reference to psalm

117, reinterpreting their accounts as prayers to the Almighty for the grace he has
shown by letting them endure and survive the hardships and dangers of the
journey.
Gods inscrutable grace also played a most important role in providing the next
generation of German writing travellers with a framework in which to interpret their
sufferings and experiences. More numerous than those who went to the New
World, the captives of war, ambassadors and merchants, who from the second half
of the sixteenth into the middle of the seventeenth century published their journeys
to Constantinople and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, but also to Moscow,
invariably interpreted their experience as testimonies to God's will through the Turk
(or the Czar) and his despotic and tyrannical, but militarily successful regime as a
medium to punish the Christans for their sins in general, and more particularly for
their lack of unanimity in the face of what should have been a common enemy.
Instead of following God's and God's son's traces on earth in the Holy Land, these
travellers interpreted whatever they saw and suffered from in the Orient, the tyranny
and despotism, destructiveness and violence of the ruler and the poverty and
sensual sinfulness of the ruled, the total absence of private property and thus of civil
order, as signs of the actual presence of God and his will; traces, that is to say,
which the travelling eyewitness had a special calling to relate and describe as
precisely and as meticulously as possible.7
With the Braudelian shift from Mediterranean to Atlantic economic dominance
around the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the rise of the Dutch East
and West Indian Companies, which was of enormous importance for the
development of the genre of travel accounts in Germany, this despotic and
tyrannical, threatening and awe-inspiring, fascinating other world gradually gave
 way to apparently more relaxed descriptions of the manners and habits of savage
and barbarian peoples and nations throughout most of the non-European world.
Even though ethnographic standards did suffer severely from this transition, the
genre of travel accounts appears to have been strengthened by the fact that
unemployed German-speaking men of all sorts of training and profession were
given not only jobs by the Dutch East-Indian Company through most of the
seventeenth and the early eighteenth century (which many of them, to be sure,
didn't survive), but also the chance to earn some fame through the publication of
accounts of their overseas adventures.
Rather than getting involved like their predecessors as merchants, ambassadors
or even captives of war in a most threatening and powerful world rivalling their own,
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most of the German East and West Indian travellers of the seventeenth and early
eighteenth century, protected as they were by the organization employing them,
looked at the variety of manners and customs out there from a certain distance.
The Hottentots, for example, to whom they all devoted substantial ethnographic
energy as the first or the last nation of their journeys deemed worth a more detailed
description, are invariably portrayed as the most abhorrent and disgusting people
under the sun, devoid of all signs of civility, propriety and humanity, lacking human
language, cooking, housing, religion and political institutions. Because of this, they
had a significant function for the texts describing them: they guided the traveller as
well as readers from the world at home to those out there no longer on the ground
of religion, but on the more properly ethnographic basis of various inventories of
what was deemed essential for a civilized as against savage or barbarian forms of
life. Endlessly describing other forms of life as lacking in a meticulously specified
series of respects, these travellers constantly shaped and reshaped their own and
their readers' images and claims of a very broad spectrum of the essential traits of
civility and propriety. Their ritual of reaggregation no longer had any explicit
reference to the Holy Land or God's revelations. Therefore their accounts can
perhaps be claimed as among the first in which one culture has ritually venerated
itself, to paraphrase Durkheim, by endlessly changing and repeating its written
descriptions of others.8
Compared to all these voyages to places outside Europe and Christianity,
vernacular accounts of travels inside Europe became a regular literary habit late in
the day. From a long series of Hodoeporica, poems written in Latin and praising a
wide range of cities, universities and famous people of the learned world, we know
a lot about the traffic of humanist students and scholars visiting all parts of Europe
from the late fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century; from guidebooks,
instructions, maps and topographies, from a few diaries, autobiographies and

23 I
 surviving letters and correspondence as well as on the basis of common sense and
many other sources, we can be sure that most voyages took place to less
spectacular destinations than the ones almost exclusively described in the travel
literature of the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Trying to answer the
question why it has taken so long for travels inside European Christianity to
become seen as something worth describing in the form of a Reisebericht might
give us a further clue as to the workings of the ritual of reaggregation.
In a traditional, sedentary society, travelling is always a prerogative of the few, of
either posivitively or negatively privileged minorities who are always viewed with
some sort of suspicion by the majority staying at home. Inside this mobile minority,
the majority is again made up by the negatively privileged: the outlaws and the
poor, the disinherited and those without land or other property, those, in other
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words, who have no place in society as a territorial system. The minority of the
positively privileged, on the other hand, might have all sorts of other reasons for
going than sheer necessity, business or professional duties. In order for their
travels to appear legitimate, however, there has to be a feedback from mobile status
to noble estate, from their mobility to the territorial order they temporarily leave, a
link binding them to territorial position in spite of temporary absence.
As the number of their accounts suggests, late medieval pilgrims and knights of
the cross had few problems with the legitimacy of their adventures. Contenting
themselves with destinations closer to home than both Jerusalem or Santiago de
Compostela, however -- and this likewise is amply confirmed by the almost total
absence of accounts of that kind of journey even though they must surely have
taken place in great numbers -- some other framework had to be invented in order
to make sure that travelling would not cut the essential link to territorial power. For
the nobility, therefore, knightly academies, which had already become
institutionalised from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, were bound to be
a most attractive solution to the challenge of combining spatial mobility to territorial
power.
With these academies and the generalisation of the practice later to be known,
especially in England, under the name of the Grand Tour, a noble practice of
voyage and journey could develop and flourish which in the end, though with
considerable delay, also led to the emergence of a tradition of describing these
travels in the form of printed accounts written by the traveller himself. Following the
process leading to this result will, even though I only have time to do so in a rather
schematic way, perhaps allow a better understanding of the social mechanism at
play in the ritual of reaggregation.
From the last decades of the sixteenth century onwards, readers interested in

232
 European travels no longer had to content themselves with the few available
guides and topographies. They could also satisfy their curiosity and prepare
themselves by a series of so-called apodemic books which, mostly written by
humanist scholars, contained general considerations and reflections as well as
many practical instructions for the art of travelling, and detailed advice on how to
behave, what to observe, and where to go. Interestingly, these apodemic treatises
invariably recommended their learned as well as noble readers -- and those
aspiring to become so -- to keep diaries and to note down whatever they saw on
their way.
Far from being travel accounts themselves, the apodemic books were
supplemented from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards by a number of
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accounts of noble voyages and visits to the knightly academies written by the
Hofmeisfer, who, belonging socially to much the same group as the learned authors
of the apodemic texts, were paid for by the parents to follow the often rather young
noble tourists to their mostly southern European destinations. Originally addressed
to the authors' employers alone, some of these texts were also printed as books.
If to the accounts written by the Hofmeisfer we add that an increasing number of
members of the urban bourgeoisie, at least from the beginning of the eighteenth
century onwards, could afford and was willing to let its prospective heirs have an
education similar to that enjoyed by the nobility, we finally have reached the point
where it became possible for the traveller to write an account of a voyage without
running the risk of dissociation from the still territorial basis of power and prestige.
One important price, however, invariably had to be paid by such travellers, at least
until the last decades of the eighteenth century: whatever these travellers wanted to
describe, it had to be something more than manners and customs, habits and daily
life, the cultural, social and political institutions which contemporary travellers to
destinations outside Europe have described so abundantly. Inside Christian
Europe, things had to be noteworthy, curious, significant or remarkable in
themselves, of special historical, political, religious or aesthetic value and interest,
to be assigned any role in the ritual of written reaggregation. Collections of items
referring to other worlds in time as well in space, the Kunsf- und Wunderkammern
of the time, were in fact among the most popular objects of early bourgeois
travellers' ethnographic curiosity.
Having followed the evolution or natural history of German travel accounts from
the late fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, I have for the earlier extra-
European accounts mainly concentrated on their cosmological significance, on the
kind of other worlds which they have described; while, when dealing with those
inside Europe, I have focussed on the social mechanisms behind their emergence.

233
 Both the social and the cultural or cosmological aspects have of course been there
right from the start. Instead of, by way of conclusion, either reducing the one to the
other or spreading even more confusion, I would like to let you decide about the
social or cultural reasons which in the last instance lend authority to ethnographic
texts.

5. The End

As I have suggested several times already, the final decades of the eighteenth
century changed the social as well as the cultural or cosmological conditions for
performing travel accounts so radically as fundamentally to invalidate the model for
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ritual analysis suggested in this essay for the preceding period. In the 1770s and
EOs, we can observe statistically a number of striking developments: a literally
exponential increase in the total number of published accounts; a marked decrease
in the distance to be covered by the traveller in order to publish an account,
expressing itself in an increase of the share of travels inside Europe and, among
the latter, an increase in the share of travels within the German territories, both even
exceeding the increase of the total output.
Along with all this goes, firstly, the ever more widespread use of the form of
travel letters, somehow indicating a beginning awareness of the partiality or
Sfandorfgebundenheif of both writer and reader; and secondly a differentiation of
the genre into sentimental, literary travelogues on the one hand, and those with
encyclopaedic, statistical (as the word then was used) and scientific objectives on
the other, which, as becomes particularly obvious in the numerous parodies of both
kinds of accounts, likewise strongly contributed to the erosion of the travellers'
authority; thirdly and finally, all this went hand in hand with a conscious trivialization
and banalization of the subjects announced in the title and treated in the text.
Writing a travel account in the last decades of the eighteenth century was no longer
a privilege of the few, at least not according to the self-understanding of the minority
by now increasingly fighting all kinds of privileges, apparently including even their
own.
In other words: the ancien rbgime of ethnographic discourse and description
organized around the authority of the trained and conscientious eyewitness and a
certain reaggregational ritual, was almost imperceptibly, but very effectively
overthrown and removed in Germany in the same decades in which another nation
violently did away with perhaps mere serious obstacles to progress and
development. Metaphorically speaking, the travellers, whose calling once it was to

234
 tell about the other worlds they themselves had seen and observed in interaction,
were -- if one could imagine it -- gradually decapitated or at least put to other jobs:
to writing literature for example, or doing scientific research. There is of course no
reason to deny that many most important travelogues in fact were written by
missionaries and others after the breakdown of the ancien regime of ethnographic
discourse. It still seems to me, however, that there once was a time in which
travellers could be trusted and criticized in a way difficult to understand today.9

For those familiar with the discussions and debates about ethnographic writing and
ethnographic authority in the 1980s in California and elsewhere, my story and
analysis might easily be misunderstood as yet another attempt at undermining the
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very foundations of fieldwork and modern anthropology as practised since the

beginning of our century.
When anthropology in the early decades of this century rediscovered the
potential authority of the participant observer, this also was due to the discovery that
other cultures and societies which, after the breakdown of the ethnographic ancien
regime -- yes, I do claim that my German sources, despite all the necessary
reservations, do represent a particular timing of a more general European natural
history -- and through the second half of the nineteenth century, only very slowly
recovered at least the dignity to allow them to represent early, but general, stages of
human, cultural, and social evolution. Revitalizing the authority of the participating
eyewitness, as Malinowski did in the Introduction to his Argonauts of the Western
Pacific in 1921, was under no circumstances a naive endeavour. On the contrary,
Malinowski, through choosing his title as well as through his book's systematic
focus on the Kula exchange, thematized a fundamental observation, which also
inspired for example Victor Segalen's pioneering ethnographic novel Les
immemoriaux from 1909, as well as van Gennep's Rites de passage from the same
year. Common to all these three founding documents of modern anthropology is a
simple discovery: the discovery that travelling and intercultural intercourse, that the
recognition and misrecognition of 'others', can no longer be seen and defended as
the exclusive privilege of the modern West. Analysing travel accounts and
ethnographic texts as ritual performances rather than failed attempts to tell the truth
might perhaps help better understand the multiplicity of modes of understanding
and misunderstanding our own and other cultures and societies in the past as well
as in the present

23.5
 Notes

1. For a more detailed discussion of the role of Plato in the (pre-)history of

anthropology and ethnographic discourse, see Remotti 1990: 69-75. The first in
practice to follow part of Plato's advice appears to have been the Council of the
Republic of Venice (see Valensi 1989 and 1990 for an excellent analysis).

2. For a critical analysis of 'anti-racism' based on the distinction between

xenophobia and xenophilia, see Taguieff 1987.

3. This urge also stands behind the tradition of 'supplements', which Denis Porter
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has analysed in his Haunted Journeys (1990).

4. On 'meaninglessness' in ritual, see Staal 1979.

5. For a more detailed analysis see Harbsmeier 1994

6. For more about the 'prehistory' of the genre, see Harbsmeier 1985, 1986 and
1994 (ch. "Vorgeschichte").

7. For the role of these descriptions for the prehistory of the concepts of despotism,
see Harbsmeier 1994, chapter 5 ("Gegenwelten"). The Venetian relationes,
however, have obviously been much more important for European political thought
(Valensi 1989, 1990).

8. For a detailed analysis see Harbsmeier 1994, chapter 6 ("Aussenwelten")

9. For an analysis of this coupure in the history of travel writing, see Harbsmeier
1989, 1991, 1992a, 1992b.

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236
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Frazer, James G. (1890),The Golden Bough. The Roots of Religion and Folklore,
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Harbsmeier, Michael (19859, "On Travel Accounts and Cosmological Strategies:
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Studies in Travel Writing, Number 1 (Spring 1997)

2.38