Rethinking expeditions: On critical expeditionary practice

1 Postcolonial reading of the expedition

In the introduction to his seminal critique of exploration history, Fabian (2000: 5) describes what has become the clichéd image of the expedition’s protagonist:

Intrepid, heroic, courageous: these are but some of the obligatory adjectives preceding the noun explorer. In the illustrations of travelogues, those verbal flourishes parallel pictorial ones: the traveler’s quasi-military garb, his faraway gaze, his proud and determined posture. He rides or walks ahead of his caravan; a few porters and guards are recognizable, while the rest blend into a file that gets smaller and smaller until it disappears in the landscape.

Fabian’s work is part of a broader corpus that critically returned to the archive in search of a more nuanced historiography of expeditionary culture and the process of colonial knowledge production. In a review of this broad historiographical revision, Dane Kennedy (2007) points to the work of Edward Said (1978), Paul Carter (1987) and Mary Louise Pratt (1992) as prominent critiques of the discourses and epistemologies of exploration that fed expeditionary practice. Though each offered distinct disciplinary critiques and geo-historical foci, these works illuminate the complicity of exploration discourse in the project of imperial expansion and its intellectual legitimation. This critique was accompanied by a parallel historiographical corpus that sought a more primary and empirical engagement with the archive of exploration, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of earlier biographies of ‘the great explorers’ (on this shift see Liebersohn, 2014: 41–2). One strand in this corpus analysed the way expeditions served the social and ideological orientations of state institutions like the British Admiralty (Stafford, 1999; Richardson, 2007) and voluntary societies that funded expeditionary work and to a large extent set their scientific agendas, the Royal Geographical Society being an obvious and well-documented example (Driver, 2000; Stafford, 2002; Gillham, 2001). A second strand focused on the experience of expeditions in the field. This entailed a critique of the imaginative construction of distant lands as inherently alien and savage (Rabasa, 1993), a characterization that enabled imperial powers to advocate a civilizing mission that was, in Simon Ryan’s words, ‘an anchorage for a mythological justification of possession’ (1996: 208). Yet later studies highlighted a different historiography of experience which provided a more granular, at times even intimate, understanding of the expedition as a space mired with uncertainty rather than stoic resolve; immensely dependent on indigenous labour and knowledge; reliant to a greater extent on the benevolence of rulers in Cairo and benefactors in Adelaide than on the expertise of civil servants in Whitehall (Kennedy, 2013; see also Rockel, 2006; Fabian, 2000; Thomas, 2014).

This expansion of the historiographical lens was also accompanied by greater attention to the transformative power of expeditionary practice. Beyond dispelling the popular myths of heroic conquest, the collision between metropolitan scientific protocols and non-western quotidian realities exposed the fragility of core values and concepts that underpin the European imperial project. The revelations of the atrocities carried out by the rear column during Stanley’s Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1886–9), for example, led to criticism that publically questioned the ‘civilizing mission’ and humanitarian ideals for which expeditions were celebrated (Driver, 2000, ch. 6; Youngs, 1994: chs 4 & 5). These debates around expeditionary violence function as a colonial mirror, ‘which reflects back onto the colonists the barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savage or evil figures they wish to colonize’ (Taussig, 1984: 495). Yet another critique focuses on the obsessive gathering, classification, interpretation and archivization of expeditionary knowledge, which exposed the ‘collective improvisation’ (Richards, 1993: 3) that lies at the heart of the imperial project, a laborious effort to compensate for the impossible task of exact civil control. Addressing the anxieties that ran through one of the most iconic expeditionary endeavours, Slemon (2006) notes that the mapping, naming and attempted ascent of ‘Everest’ in the mid-19th century took place exactly at the time of growing British and Russian competition over Tibet and Nepal, making the mountain an allegory of domination at a moment of imperial crisis.

There was more here than shoring up the empire’s geopolitical uncertainties. The archive of expeditions provides insights into more intimate psychic and emotive experience of their participants and reveals an affective terrain of anxiety, ignorance and bewilderment that exceeds the conventions of self-aggrandisement and personal triumph. For Jonathan Lamb (2001), the history of expeditions exposes the fear of a fraying 18th-century ‘self’, demonstrating more subtle forms of exchange that exist between explorers and indigenous populations, a recurring theme in the historiography of exploration (see, for example, Smith, 1960; Schwartz, 1994; Douglas, 2014). In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton (2000) meticulously documents the time and space of contact that preceded the establishment of colonial government in the Canadian west coast. This account recognizes the profound effects of expeditionary encounters on both explorers and indigenous populations, which in neither case falls into Manichean stereotypes. Moreover, the expeditionary encounter identified here takes place both on highly localized scales of interaction on board Cook’s ship and in the more abstract spaces of contact forged in ledgers, maps and journals. These hyper-local encounters are in turn shown to have immense impact on the macro-geographies of Enlightenment thinking, capitalism and colonialism.

Clayton’s work also stands out for its ability to overcome the ‘two-camp mentality’ (Mills, 2001: 740) that sets historical analysis of the colonial world against a theoretical body of postcolonial critique. To a large extent, scholarly engagements with the expedition remain largely dominated by the association of expeditions squarely with the colonial toolkit. However, several post-colonial scholars have identified the expedition as a highly productive space through which to rethink the theoretical contours of the colonial encounter. In an account of Ludwig Leichhardt’s second Australian expedition, Lars Eckstein identifies expeditionary encounters as acts of ‘colonial mimesis’, ‘where each world is dynamically translated into the other, ultimately unsettling conceptions of self and world at both ends’ (Eckstein, 2015: 519). Lorenzo Veracini (2015), meanwhile, analyses the settler colonial expedition as a unique type guided by the primary effort to disinherit the indigenous population and permanently inhabit its space, rather than the exploratory and extractive motivations that guided most imperial expeditions since the 18th century.

Though hardly forming a cohesive body of scholarship, post-colonial historiographies and theoretical engagements reveal the expedition to be a multifaceted practice that contains the full spectrum of the colonial process – from violence and dispossession to emancipatory acts and profound transformation of epistemic worlds. Yet the dominant critical concern remains historical in its orientation rather than seeking a revision of expeditionary practice. Later on we return to some of these insights to consider how these realisations can be expanded and used to critically engage with this practice in the 21st century.

2 Feminist expeditionary traditions

Expeditions are perhaps the most obvious instrument of that particular historiography of geography that was rightly derided as an ‘exclusionary chronological litany of white, male, aristocratic heroes’ (Mitchell and Smith, 1990: 223). Yet a growing body of feminist scholarship over the past three decades highlights the role of women in exploratory history and, in particular, the alternative epistemology that feminist historiography brings to the fore. This corpus does more than just note the history of women’s participation in expeditions from the early 20th century, but presents a significantly different approach to core elements of expeditionary discourse that validate it as an instrument of knowledge production. In a recent study of women’s participation in and experience of RGS-funded expeditions in the 20th century, Evans (2015) points out how this critique particularly sought to problematize the centrality of the destination and the conventions of self-fashioning that dominate geographical expeditionary discourse.

The very essence of expeditions, it seems, concerns their arrival in and analysis of a site that is set as their ultimate target. This element – the idea of travelling into the unknown, into dangerous places – remains an inseparable element of expeditionary imaginaries, of the discursive conception of expeditionary spaces, and of the process of validating and authenticating expeditionary knowledge production. The conquest of the desired, and very often feminized, destination becomes ‘a performance which enacts some of the discipline’s underlying masculinist assumptions about its knowledge of the world’ (Rose, 1993: 65). These conventional imaginations of expeditionary ‘sites’ also shaped the ideal protagonist for their ‘discovery’ – the stoic, enduring hero, capable of coping with difficult, dangerous and even life-threatening expeditionary conditions (Rose, 1993; see also Sparke, 1996). As feminist critique of these discourses illuminates, heroic endurance is deeply intertwined with gendered imaginations, envisaging a (white, heterosexual, able-bodied) male hero fieldworker, often in conjunction with a feminized nature of which he is master (Rose, 1993; see also Maguire, 1998; Hall et al., 2002).

As Domosh importantly identifies, post-Victorian exploratory practices of women like Louise Boyd integrated scientific activities into their expeditions, but these quests were not explicitly meant to discover ‘new lands’. The so-called new lands that Boyd surveyed were discovered by accident:

Louise had never set out to ‘conquer’ and ‘discover’; she more or less stumbled upon what became Miss Boyd Land and the Louise Boyd Bank. So when she at last decided to go to the North Pole, her motive was curiosity and a need for emotional satisfaction rather than ambition. (Olds, 1985: 290; quoted in Domosh, 1991: 101)

What emerges here is not a comprehensive feminist expeditionary agenda. At best, these are fragments of critical interventions in the broad masculine historiography of expeditions and the epistemology of exploration. However, these historical chapters and the critical interventions inspired by them remain crucial components in any reconsideration of the role of expeditions as a contemporary critical methodology.

3 Radical traditions

One of the most important efforts to critically reshape the notion of the expedition was carried out by the Society for Human Exploration, a short-lived though powerful educational and research project that operated intermittently from 1968 to 1975. The project was launched by a group of geographers and community activists, and included several ‘geographical expeditions’; most notable among them were the 1969 Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), which was followed three years later by the Canadian-American Geographical Expedition. Aiming to break traditional conventions of research and institutional education, the project sought to combine an agenda of socially-committed scholarship with radical explorations of action research strategy (Katz, 1996). In what became a cornerstone of radical geography (Heyman, 2007; Castree, 2000; for an opposing position see Peet, 1978: 15), the expeditions and the pedagogy they promoted offered a critical response to the social and political context of the time, particularly the US civil rights and anti-war movements and the racialized violence that had become an endemic feature of the North American inner-city (Horvath, 1971; Merrifield, 2008). The Society for Human Exploration and the subsequent discussion inspired by its work provides us with the third element in the critical reconsideration of expeditions, primarily through its role in facilitating broader practices of critical pedagogy and emancipatory techniques.

The insistence on holding on to the seemingly-arcane notion of the expedition was part of a conscious attempt to rid exploration of its exotic and imperial impulses. Rather than simply dismiss the tainted practices of exploration, the project appropriated and recalibrated them to function as critical methodologies. Bill Bunge (1969: 2), who led the project along with local community leader Gwendolyn Warren, suggested that the purpose of exploration would no longer be a search for paradise but a search within the self, a means to develop ‘a more appropriate base map for our times’. Bunge addresses this problematic legacy explicitly, stating that ‘unlike earlier expeditions, so many of which were exploitative […] human explorations are “contributive” (resource contributing instead of resource taking)’ (Bunge, 1969: 4). This was part of a broader reversal of the expedition’s priorities and the democratization of its research process, from the formulation of the problems that are to be addressed to the total immersion of the researcher in a community:

It is also a democratic, as opposed to an elitist expedition. Local people are to be incorporated as students and as professors. They are not to be further exploited. Their point of view is given first place. It is democratic also in that if planning work results [in negative outcomes], and that is one of the main purposes of the Expedition, then the planners, the geographers, are expected to live in the mess that they created. (Bunge, 1969: 4)

Despite their critical merits and contribution to the formation of a different pedagogy and, as such, a different power/knowledge relation, the expeditions carried out by the Society for Human Exploration were often articulated through the familiar language of self-aggrandizing militarism and a rather conventional rhetoric of masculine exploration (Katz, 1996). The ethos of collaborative knowledge production and the challenge this poses to the privileged status of the individual academic-researcher/explorer is undermined by Bunge’s rhetoric: ‘If there are any dirty or dangerous or doubtful experiences to be faced, the geographers go first, and the leader of the Expedition goes very first’ (Bunge, 1969: 5). Though it does not altogether disclaim the contributions of the Society for Human Exploration and its expeditions, this machismo is a familiar echo of the somewhat more conventional heroic self-presentation of the expeditioner, which undermines its core effort to decentralize individual triumph for the rarely-spectacular production of situated knowledge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bunge’s work became – at least nominally – an inspiration for more recent geographic engagements with urban exploration (Garrett, 2013; Pinder, 2005). As Mott and Roberts (2014) note, these accounts of urban exploration often valorize the individualized embodied experience of ‘the field’, and conform to a familiar image of the late 19th-century explorer, complete with ‘a “hard body” [which] embodied strength, fortitude, and glorified athleticism that endured extreme hardship, and in fact thrived on adventure, daring and danger’ (Morin, 2008: 908). Despite their best efforts, the deeper conventions that have plagued expeditionary discourse and practice for centuries seem to permeate even more recent radical experimentations that seek its subversion.

1 Destination: (Not) getting there

Let us begin at the end. On 4 October 2015, a 39-word message was sent from an official at the Egyptian Embassy in London, which turned down our request to enter Bir Tawil, an unclaimed territory situated on the border between Egypt and Sudan. The precise message read (all typos in the original): ‘I am soory to inform you that the Egyptian authorities in Cairo informed us that they are not going to be able to acoomodate your planed visit to Egypt and grant you the required permissions to continue your journey.’

This message marked, in more ways than one, the dead-end of a 6000-mile expedition we led in the autumn of 2015, in search of no-man’s land. The expedition, which set off in London and travelled through Western Europe, the Balkans and Cyprus, had its final destination in Bir Tawil, a trapezoid-shaped territory on the Egypt–Sudan border, which to this day remains unclaimed by either country. In quite a literal manner, by rejecting our request, the Egyptian authorities marked the end of the road for our research journey, forcing us to end our journey south at a desert checkpoint on the outskirts of Aswan, surrounded by piles of dumped construction debris and flying plastic bags. More than 400 miles from our intended destination, we were forced to U-turn and head back.

On the face of it, we simply joined a long tradition of expeditions that failed to reach their destination, though unlike many of our predecessors, we didn’t die trying. The moment when an expedition is forced to turn back has become a recurring and conventional motif in the canon of expeditionary tales, and in itself, offers few critical insights. However, there is a longer process of exchange and negotiation that precedes this singular moment. Formulating our critique through these extended durations potentially shifts attention from fantasies of conquest to subtler geographies of knowledge and spatializations of power.

In our case, the laconic message was the last in a months-long series of correspondences and conversations undertaken in an effort to receive Egyptian approval for our request to reach Bir Tawil. One element that became obvious during this process was the bewilderment of many Egyptian officials about our destination. Several times during these phone calls and face-to-face conversations, our interlocutors – Embassy officials, staff at the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau – admitted complete ignorance about Bir Tawil, and had no clue who would be in a position to grant access to it. In one of these conversations a secretary at the Egyptian Cultural Bureau admitted she had never heard of the place, but added, ‘This sounds like a fun trip. Can I join?’

This recurring bewilderment and bureaucratic confusion is partly due to the murky demarcation of Egypt’s southern border. At its core was the 1899 British-Egyptian treaty, which set the border between Egypt and Sudan along the 22nd parallel (British and Foreign State Papers, 1902: 19). Three years later, however, another document was drawn up by the British. This one noted that a mountain area just south of the 22nd parallel was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than with Sudan. The document stipulated that henceforth this area – Bir Tawil – should be administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, a much-larger triangle of land north of the 22nd parallel, named Hala’ib, abutting the Red Sea, was assigned as grazing land for tribes who are largely based in Sudan, and thus now came under Sudan’s jurisdiction (Office of the Geographer, Department of State, 1962; Reyner, 1963). Because of its proximity to the coast and its potential mineral wealth, both countries claimed Hala’ib, and consequently neither has sought to extend their sovereignty over Bir Tawil over the intervening decades. From this historical maze, a no-man’s land was born, hence our initial curiosity about this desert territory.

But for Egyptian officials, our request posed a rather peculiar dilemma. In one phone conversation, a secretary at the Egyptian Embassy who knew about the southern border and its sensitivities said that he could not issue us a permit to access Bir Tawil because Egypt doesn’t recognize it as part of its sovereign jurisdiction. ‘This isn’t ours, so I can’t say you can go’, he said.

This candid statement from the embassy official was in fact highly revealing. It illuminates how existing improvisatory structures of governance (Jeffrey, 2013) and bureaucratic anxieties are amplified when confronted with no-man’s land. These spaces frustrate normative access regimes and restrict conventional forms of state performativity, but there is no way to bring these lacunae to light without going through the Sisyphean process of request, explanation, reassurance and persuasion. Taking this into account, if we look once more at the short refusal message which denied us access to Bir Tawil, it suddenly reads not simply as a casual dismissal by an indifferent state machine, but as a carefully considered effort to state a clear restriction without ever assuming any responsibility for the space in question. Note that the text neither mentions Bir Tawil by name nor makes any determination about the ability or inability to access it. Instead, it only polices the general permissions to continue our journey. The restriction of access in this case seems almost secondary, masking a more intricate relationship of the sovereign to the administration and preservation of territorial integrity, as well as the policing of mobilities that potentially threaten this integrity (e.g. Brown, 2010; see also Gregoriou, 2006). This threat, we would argue, is first and foremost discursive – with the written permit acting as a powerful technology of rule (Shenhav and Berda, 2009) and an equally potent signifier of those spaces that remain un-ruly and un-ruled. ³

There is certainly more to say about the administrative and political webs that surround no-man’s land, as well as the peculiarities of the Egypt–Sudan case. But we posit this debate to illustrate the potential of productively undermining the expeditionary destination. It would of course be nearly impossible to imagine an expedition completely devoid of an end-point. Our suggestion is therefore to turn to the extensive paper trails that surround the expedition and which offer critical insights without necessitating an actual presence in or arrival at a predetermined destination. The consequence is first a dismissal of any fantasy of conquest that continues to fuel expeditionary imaginations and, relatedly, the heroics associated with the figure of the explorer. Put rather crudely, if you can’t get there, you can’t claim to own it. Secondly, against the conventional focus on the isolated moment of arrival and the singularity of the destination (with its highly conventionalized choreographies and documentary practices; Ryan, 2013), what is proposed here is a more subtle attention to the multiple temporalities of the expedition – durations of actual travel, but just as importantly, the significance of waiting, experiences of deferrals and practices of delay. These dimensions of immobility were certainly not absent from historical experience of the expedition (Fabian, 2000: 43–5). But foregrounding their contemporary appearances links the expeditionary practices to critical efforts to rethink waiting, deferral and delay, not as signs of incompetence or error, but as intentional acts of governance and integral components of state-generated uncertainty (Griffiths, 2013; Bagelman, 2016).

2 Chance encounters: Structuring serendipity

During a brief stopover in Sarajevo in late September 2015, midway through the No-Man’s Land expedition, we met the Bosnian film director Danis Tanović to talk about his debut film, No Man’s Land (2001). What was initially planned as an hour-long meeting on the cultural dimensions of no-man’s land in the context of the Balkan war turned into a conversation that spanned several hours, a meal and a walking tour of Sarajevo led by Tanović himself. At the end of the day, he handed us a parting gift hastily retrieved from his nearby apartment – a bottle of wine with an intriguing name. This was a bottle that had been presented to him in 2001 when his debut film was receiving prizes at film festivals around the world, and had somehow survived unopened for the next 14 years. The wine, like the film for which it was presented, was called ‘No Man’s Land’.

The label told us that the wine was Bulgarian, produced in a town called Damianitza, and a quick check of our map showed Damianitza close to Bulgaria’s southern border with Greece, and only a short detour from the route we planned to take three days later. We were intrigued to know more and, after many wrong turns and several confused phone calls, we found the town, the winery and the man who had produced the bottle of wine given to us a few days before.

Founded in 1940 and nationalized in 1947, the Damianitza winery had for most of its operational life produced large quantities of cheap wine for the proletariat of the Soviet Union. Grapes for red wine were sourced from across southern Bulgaria, including the south-facing slopes of the former Cold War frontier between Bulgaria and Greece. Some of the best growing conditions for indigenous Melnik grapes were to be found within the frontier zone – the 5km-wide tract of graduated restrictions, watchtowers, fences, patrol stations and armed police that sought to keep Bulgarians ‘in’ and Westerners ‘out’. When the Damianitza Winery was re-privatized in 1997, the new owners saw an opportunity to capitalize on the intriguing collision of viticulture and geopolitics by using the grapes from the exclusion zone to make their signature wine, which they named ‘No Man’s Land’.

Vineyards still cover the landscape of the former no-man’s land and so, too, do remnants of the Cold War. The neat rows of viticulture cultivation intersect with the rusting wires and concrete stanchions that used to form near-impenetrable defences against capitalism. Military patrol booths have been repurposed as agricultural storage sheds, and watchtowers still peak above the surrounding hilltops – visible reminders that the border was once a highly surveilled forbidden zone. This intersection of pristine preservation of age-old agricultural environments and destructive militarization marks one of the common features of no-man’s land, a space where destruction and conservation so often go hand-in-hand (Leshem and Pinkerton, 2016; Coates, 2014). But how visible would these sites have been without the serendipitous presentation of the wine bottle a few days earlier in Sarajevo? The realization that we could, so easily, have driven straight through this landscape without uncovering this particular narration of no-man’s land forced us to reflect on the interrelationship between ‘the expedition’, chance and serendipitous encounters.

Viewed solely as ‘the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident’ (OED), serendipity seems a rather flimsy foundation for rethinking the expedition as a critical research practice. Too much seems to be left to blind luck. However, we return to this concept not simply to reiterate its ‘“disorderly,” “messy” features […] but also [its] substance, method, and significance’ (Fine and Deegan, 1996: 437). One of the most influential attempts to rethink serendipity in social scientific research was carried out by the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton, who traces the term to the mid-18th century. Coined by Horace Walpole, serendipity was based on the title of a ‘silly fairy tale’ (as Walpole himself described it), The Three Princes of Serendip. In a letter to a friend, Walpole noted that the three heroes of this tale ‘were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’ (quoted in Merton and Barber, 2004: 1). For Merton, it was the coupling of accidents and sagacity – coincidence and logical intent – that made serendipity more than a random accident. This tension between structuration and event, between control and creativity, also highlights serendipity’s active critical potential, posing, in Lorrain Daston’s (2004: 30) terms, an ‘uncomfortable conundrum’ to empiricist methodologies that venerated intent, predictability and the deliberate mind of the scientific discoverer. Rather than submit to the confines of the planned and the predictable, serendipity heightens our attention to ‘the way concepts emerge from the unexpected bumps and nudges of the material world’ (Silver, 2015: 236).

Seeing serendipity as a critical inclination towards the unexpected has great potential in re-orienting the expedition from its deeply teleological underpinnings, its intellectual and practical focus on predetermined goals, toward a more inductive process of conceptualization. Our own expedition was motivated by a deep uncertainty about the conceptual foundations and empirical realities that constituted no-man’s land. Intentionally structuring the expedition to accommodate unexpected detours is not just a matter of logistical flexibility (that is often at odds with the requirements of risk assessment and emergency action planning), but of conceptual openness and a willingness to cede some of the control over the direction of the research.

It is important to note that serendipity presents its own pitfalls. Fine and Deegan (1996: 437), for example, argue that the inclusion of occurrences of serendipity in accounts of ethnographic fieldwork is a battle won long ago. Narratives celebrating the play and surprise of research are now deeply woven into the conventional orientation of critical social research. But exactly because of the common presence, an uncritical celebration of serendipity may inadvertently reinforce the heroic image of the social scientist who pulls meaning from chaos. It is impossible to ignore this risk. But, we would argue, the critical effort to challenge the overreliance on predetermined procedures and predictable outcomes of knowledge production that have dominated expeditionary logics for centuries must draw inspiration from the important alternatives offered by feminist histories of exploration and their willingness to structure a very different encounter with the world.