Abstract
According to Chuma, a ‘headman’ on a nineteenth
The book's seven engaging chapters, introduction and conclusion are formulated around the work's theoretical frame made from a collage of well-known valuable contributions of Mary Louise Pratt, especially, as well as works by postcolonial scholars Lowri Jones, Felix Driver, bell hooks, Beau Riffenburgh, Joseph Campbell, Tariq Jazeel, Edward Said and others. 1 Performances of explorers’ personas abroad, at home, in the flesh, mind and on private and public pages, and spoken word, are examined. Overall, this work builds on the unacknowledged concept of ‘double vision’ previously developed in histories of anthropology and taken up by historians of science and geography.
In time-old fashion, the book opens with an account of cannibalism, and ‘the body’ is the privileged object and category in each chapter. Although it primarily draws on important, but familiar, theoretical grounds and largely previously published works, On the Backs of Others surveys, sifts, weaves together and judges these otherwise disparate texts so as to produce a monograph offering a wider depiction of gendered, English-, Scottish- and British-‘subaltern’ and human-animal beings and identities and behaviours.
Chapter 1 examines purported ‘heroic’ bodies’ leakiness. The Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers's images and statues of explorers’ bodies are briefly discussed. The limiting effects of the term ‘heroic’ are discerned, but definitions of ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ are omitted. Attention to tales and notions of the heroic amongst the peoples, for instance the Yao of east Africa whom British explorers encountered on their journeys – and about whom readers deserve to know more – would lend themselves to this chapter.
In showing how ‘traditionally’ conceived explorers’ bodies were dependent on the bodies and minds of so-called ‘subaltern’ helpers in basic survival, botanical knowledge, interpretation of landscape features and deployment of scientific instruments, in Chapter 2, the transnational hybridisation of minds and bodies, and mutual engagement in a common task, are recognised.
The undertaking of certain forms of labour by African or Asian men and women resulted in their descriptions as ‘servants’ in some places. Yet, performed elsewhere, the same tasks were seen as carried out by expedition members. How bodies were disciplined and the limits of that practice are the subject of Chapter 3. Expeditions often moved through different lands and shed one population of participants as quickly as they gained new ones. In this way the fluidity, shiftiness and intersecting qualities of individual and collective entities of bodies, roles and identities, even gendered, racialised and hierarchised ones, are demonstrated. As the army officer, explorer and diplomat Richard Burton is singled out, it would have been useful to have background information about how his transnational upbringing and army values and practices may have shaped his language, outlook and behaviour towards expeditionary intermediaries.
Animal bodies, from mosquitos to dogs, snakes, horses, lions, bears, turtles, orca and other primates and encounters with and perceptions of them by both British peoples and the folks assisting or serving them populate the next chapter. Animals were frequently ranked in heroizing hierarchies and understood in utilitarian terms. Yet also of concern here are the complex histories of the changing and variegated constructs of race and racialising language, attitudes and behaviours, which are ill-served by simplification and generalisation. Figures of speech and thought were such that it is easy to infer too much. The ‘anthropomorphization’, of certain animals, animalising, humanising and dehumanising terms are alluded to (216).
The documentation of bodies’ multisensory modes of experiencing and knowing are what this chapter seeks to detail, but tropes that have already been undermined by others are pedalled here. The valorisation of vision in geography and what are referred to as ‘within Western systems of knowledge’ are overgeneralisations that do not address specific instances of the production and reception of travel accounts and the array of diverse image and material forms associated with them. This, it is argued, sustained a ‘level of detached objectivity’. Yet in the field, on expeditions, as on hunts, for many locals and foreigners alike, hearing, smell and taste were and are as significant as sight. ‘Contemporary writers often suggested that women's eyes were inferior to men's, except perhaps when it came to understanding minor details and domestic affairs’ (155), Armston-Sheret writes, but this does not apply to all women in all situations and activities. Mary Sommerville was trusted to translate complex French texts into English, Marianne North's botanical paintings were respected and women's work was relied on in factories.
The next chapter discusses how human, and non-human primates, embodied minds commonly observe, examine and enjoy looking at, other bodies from afar and up close, often finding both ways to liken them to their own and others to distinguish them. ‘Scientific (and now discredited) understandings of the body’ change, as Armston-Sheret puts it – yes, but, as studies elsewhere show, the ‘professionalization of geography’ was an ambiguous process and one mostly in name only. As well we know, the outputs of exploration that were visual, textual, rhetorical, exhibitionary and both documentary and fictional were derived from the ‘senses of upper-class white men’ as well as their subaltern colleagues. Perceptions of sensory capabilities crosscut with ones of notional class, race and gender. Then, as now, some claimed that women were better placed to observe domestic spheres rather than broader political matters. The chapter suddenly turns to Erik Mueggler's The Paper Road to discuss experiences of observing and being observed could make explorers aware of their ‘deep involvement in the flesh of the world – its viscera, its filth’ (159). 2 The ‘relationship’ between exploration, writing and power is connected to European explorers’ sense of powerlessness and dependence and their deployment of narration to reassert control. Or, of course, to turn the hardship and risk to personal profit, financial or reputational. Notions of ‘local’, European and non-European identities could have been more precisely delineated here. However, we also learn that the ‘Inuit man’, Mangaq, met and attempted to assist remnants of the failed Franklin expedition men. The limited language skills of both parties, ‘left some Inuit feeling that white men had “quite the same minds as small children … They are easily angered, and when they cannot get their will they are moody and, like children, have the strangest ideas and fancies”’ (160).
Rather than lessening with travel, Burton's racial prejudices hardened. He became ‘one of the most fierce and vocal advocates of the view that black Africans constitute a distinct and inferior species of humankind’ (163). The author argues that Burton used racism to re-establish his position as the observer of others, but such attitudes would have benefitted from contextualisation in relation to Burton's career prospects and finances, his relationships with anthropological and geographical societies and his own education and reading interests. Meanwhile, Bird perceived in terms of, and perpetuated, racial stereotypes, but she also recorded what we might call ethnographic observations of the Indigenous Ainu people of Japan (223). The imperious Isabella Bird ‘generally showed little interest in the motivations of those who looked at her’, but she noted that some Japanese boys regarded her as a kind of monkey with a monkey keeper for guide (223). The anti-colonial and anti-foreign resistance encountered by Bird during her travels for The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) included being called a ‘foreign devil’, something detailed by other travellers in the region (172).
Chapter 7 bravely broaches sex in geographical exploration and sexual and sexualised bodies. Explicit connections to the concept of Wanderlust and the paradox of public and private sexualities across all levels of British society might have been made here. Male masturbation is examined, but not that of women or subaltern travellers, nor how geographical – both topographical and social – displacement could offer nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women the opportunity for sexual freedom and exploration. How did women explorers, whether the British and Europeans or ‘subalterns’ portering, cooking or accompanying their partners on European expeditions, manage menstruation in different environments? Did the author consider that in some cases subaltern women might not have felt any shame in using their bodies sexually in order to fulfil their own subjectively defined ends? Contraception and also the procreation of children by explorers are further important subthemes deserving more attention.
The text usefully spotlights why travel and actual experiences of perceived human and environmental diversity remain vital, be they in one's own town or country or abroad. Geography students, especially of the northern hemisphere and anglophone countries, are privileged to have such experiences. The plight of other contemporary ‘explorers’ such as migrants who endure such mental and physical hardships and sacrifices is also suggested by this work. Lastly, that everyone is now an explorer of knowledge, in view of the rafts of information now relatively freely accessible on the internet, is worth pondering.
This entry-level text is suited to a general readership, undergraduates and Masters-level students on geography, history and related subjects, around the world. It will potentially be used to introduce what were collaborative expeditionary practices as well as individual and collective experiences of a roster of intrepid, often financially insecure, men and women who were explorers of others’ worlds. Issues of location, environment and identity, as the work recognises, variously shaped different expeditions, but a more complete picture of the impact of the ways explorers’ writings changed over time and space has yet to be published (159). How the category of the human body is a relatively recent concept and was so in the nineteenth century, and how it, nevertheless, remains, a debated and unstable category, has yet to be detailed. For neither the category of the body, nor of the human, have ever been singular. There are multiple, deeper histories about how humans have variously essentialised bodies, and more generally about ontology and materialism, to harness in this regard. Greater thought for readers’ needs would have seen this work offer explanations of terms such as ‘scurvy’, ‘hero’ and ‘halal’. The familiar images included might have been closely scrutinised as should have been the notion of image and practices of image-making in exploratory activities and in historical research, teaching and writing.
Nevertheless, perhaps readers, like me, will be left wanting to understand why, and for what subjective motivations and ambitions, an east African woman hitched a ride on a British expedition, with what we see as the risks that doing so entailed, bound for the coast, disappearing shortly after she had reached her destination. Was this a function of how European explorers introduced new influences or not? Did she see an opportunity, one she might not have otherwise had? Additionally, the text could have boldly stated that guides or intermediaries were explorers too, and it could more extensively distinguished between the category of ‘explorer’ or ‘traveller’ or ‘researcher’ or ‘scientist’ throughout the chapters. This lack is especially felt when we consider that the ‘lower-class’ steward Reginald Ford on the Scott's National Antarctic Expedition (1901–04), also known as the Discovery expedition, made a decades-long later career as a lecturer about his role. 3 That account, like innumerable others, evidences some of the ways in which established roles and identities, and other categories that are only very provisionally conceived of, were profoundly reconfigured on expeditions, in the field and on travels. It also attests to how the ongoing powerful appeal of exploration histories was fashioned by multiple, and more diverse than most accounts let on, minds and bodies.