The Dictionary of Human Geography (64 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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exploration
At its basic level, exploration is usually taken to refer to the growth of know ledge of the gLobe that resulted from various voyages of discovery and scientific exped itions. But the very vocabulary of discovery and exploration is contested by revisionists, who query its appropriateness in contexts where it is more morally responsible to speak of invasion, conquest or occupation. The reason is that these labels unmask the pretended innocence and ethical neutrality that the standard scientific sounding idioms convey (see ethics). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whatever the allocation of moral account ability, there can be no doubting the signifi cance of what Driver (2001) calls the ?cultures of exploration? on the scientific enterprise in general and the development of geography in particular (see also geography, history of). Traditional chroniclers of these exploits have tended towards a progressivist interpretation of scientific knowledge, cartographic history and global awareness (Baker, 1931). The vast maritime expeditions of Cheng Ho from 1405 to 1433, for example, have been commended for their contributions to Chinese marine car tography and descriptive geography, although, in contrast to later voyages, the purpose of the mission was neither the garnering of ?scientific? information nor commercial conquest (Chang, 1971). Similarly, the writings of Ibn Battuta during the late Middle Ages have been read as an encyclopaedic conspectus of the Islamic world (Boorstin, 1983). (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is, however, with the European voyages of Reconnaissance during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that putative connections between scientific ?progress? and geographical ?exploration? begin to be more closely associated (see also science; travel writing). Writers such as Hale (1967), Parry (1981) and O?Sullivan (1984) suggest that the first scientific laboratory was the world itself and that ?the voy ages of discovery? were in a fundamental sense experiments to test the validity of Renaissance geographical concepts. In such scenarios, the names of Bartholomew Dias, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and, perhaps most of all, ?Prince Henry the Navigator? assume heroic status. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Indeed, the reciprocal links between voy ages of exploration and scientific enterprises were deep and lasting. Francis Bacon reflected in his Novum organum of 1620 that the opening up of the geographical world through such expeditions foreshadowed the expansion of the ?boundaries of the intellec tual globe?? beyond the confines of ?the narrow discoveries of the ancients?. Support for this interpretation has come from those attaching crucial significance to the Portuguese encour agement of navigational science and math ematical practice through the work of the Jewish map and instrument maker Mestre Jacome. This Jewish tradition of Mallorcan cartography, instrumentation and nautical sci ence was perpetuated by Abraham Zacuto and Joseph Vizinho, while Francesco Faleiro, Garcia da Orta and Pedro Nufies did much to further medicinal botany, cartography and natural history during the first half of the sixteenth century (Goodman, 1991). Such accomplishments have been canvassed to sub stantiate the claim that this Jewish style of sixteenth century Portuguese science pro vided the catalyst for ?the emergence of mod ern science in Western Europe? (Hooykaas, 1979; Banes, 1988, p. 58). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Nevertheless, even partisan commentators concede that the scientific advances of the ?Age of Discovery? were by products of com mercial, evangelistic and colonial motives. Ostensibly more scientific were the Pacific exploits of Enlightenment figures such as Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, Joseph Banks, the Forsters, Jean Francois de la Perouse and George Vancouver (Beaglehole, 1966). And yet with them too political factors loomed as large as scientific ones: pre voyage briefings on settlement possibility, resource inventory and the staking of colonial claims all revealed the strategic significance of everything from cartographic survey to ethnographic illustration (Frost, 1988). Still, the scientific achievements were substantial Cook, for instance, took with him astronomers, surgeons and naturalists, and successfully completed an accurate recording of the transit of Venus. Precisely the same was true of later explor ations in South America and Central Africa. Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland, for example, used their South American find ings at the turn of the nineteenth century to break the bonds of the static taxonomic system of Linnaeus, and ultimately to create a dis tinctive mode of scientific investigation what Cannon labelled ?Humboldtian science? in which ?the accurate, measured study of wide spread but interconnected real phenomena? was interrogated ?in order to find a definite law and a dynamic cause? (Cannon, 1978, p. 105; cf. Dettelbach, 1996). Again, Roderick Murchison, who has been dubbed England?s scientist of empire, virtually orchestrated the British colonial assault on Central Africa in the Victorian period through his oversight of the Royal Geographical Society, and used a variety of explorers to test his own geological theories there (Stafford, 1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is not space here to delineate in any detail the scientific contributions of a host of other exploratory ventures: the Napoleonic survey of Egypt, Baudin?s deadly mission to ?New Holland?, the succession of Russian voy ages into the Pacific by Krusentern, Kotzebue and Lutke, the Royal Geographical Society?s efforts to reduce the Australian outback to cartographic enclosure, Lewis and Clark?s western territorial expedition, Darwin?s Beagle circumnavigation, the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes, the voyage of T.H. Huxley on The Rattlesnake, a variety of late Victorian ventures to West Africa, A.R. Wallace?s sojourn in Borneo, the oceano graphic survey of The Challenger, and exped itions to the poles in the early decades of the twentieth century, to name but a very few. Chief among their scientific achievements were the discovery of numerous unknown species of plants and animals, new theories of organic dispersal, novel interpretations of human cultures, the mapping of fossils and strata on a global scale, cartographic intensifi cation and advances in astronomical observa tion. The power of this scientific legacy is so engrained in the discipline?s collective memory that various expeditionary ventures continue to receive the sponsorship of institu tions such as the Royal Geographical Society and the National Geographic Society, and to provide a language in which to speak of geographical excursions into other threatening environments, such as urban ethnic ?no go? areas. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The acquisition of scientific knowledge by explorers was a multifaceted enterprise and raised critical epistemological questions that have persisted up to the present day (see epis temology), not least in settings where exped itionary space is itself experimental space (Powell, 2007). The accumulation of scientific knowledge required careful management. First, the crying need to discipline distant observers in the effort to standardize their findings found expression in works such as the Admiralty?s 1832 Hints for collecting ani mals and their products, Richard Owen?s Directions for collecting and preserving animals (1835) and later the RGS?s Hints to travellers (1854). Works of this stripe continued a long standing tradition that included John Woodward?s Brief instructions for making obser vations in all parts of the world (1696). The production of manuals such as these was part of an exercise in what might be called the geography of trust; namely, how to ensure observational reliability and disciplined data gathering (Carey, 1997, 2006). Second, the scientific knowledge gleaned from explor ations involved not only the assemblage and movement of objects, both natural and cultural, around the world, but their re conceptualization and reclassification acc ording to some prevailing norm or taste (Thomas, 1991; Dritsas, 2005; Hill, 2006a, b). Third, the transformation of local data into universal knowledge that was critical to exploration science involved metrological standardization and thus the production and calibration of precision instruments (see instrumentation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The significance of expeditionary exploits, however, cannot be restricted to matters of cognitive ?progress?. And merely stating that the growth of these scientific knowledges was situated within the framework of imperialism is to pay scant attention to a whole suite of issues to do with the construction of Western identity, the representations of ?exoticism?, the inscription of ?otherness?, the reciprocal con stitution of scientific discourse and colonial praxis (see colonialism) and the decoN structioN of cartographic icoNograpHy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) cuLtures of exploration were thus woven with political, artistic and literary, as well as scientific, threads. It was, for example, as a consequence of the European Age of Exploration/Reconnaissance/Conquest that the idea of the ?west? and ?Western ness? received its baptism. europe?s sense of dis tinctiveness from the regions that the naviga tors encountered was embedded in a discourse about identity that represented ?the West? and ?the Rest? in the categories of superiority inferiority, power impotence, enlightenment ignorance and civilization barbarism (Hall, 1992b). Seen in these terms, Europe?s rendez vous with the New World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was as much a moral event as a commercial or intellectual one, and induced a sense of ?metaphysical unease? because it confounded standard conceptions of human nature (see also Pagden, 1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The construction of this ?discourse of the West?, of course, depended crucially on the idioms in which the new worlds were repre sented. The categories, vocabularies, assump tions and instruments that the explorers brought to the encounter were, understand ably, thoroughly European, and so the worlds of ?the other? were interrogated, classified and assimilated according to European norms. That the language of the engagement was fre quently gendered, moreover, facilitated the rep resentation of new LaNdscapes in the exotic categories of a potent sexual imagery intended to indicate mastery and submissiveness. (NEW PARAGRAPH) If the foundations of Western discourse were laid during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were reinforced during the following centuries when euroceNtric modes of represeNtatioN continued to constitute regional identities. One such construction was what Edward Said termed ?orientalism? a (NEW PARAGRAPH) discursive formation through which ?European culture was able to manage and even pro duce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively? (Said, 1978, p. 3). And, indeed, the idea of the Oriental or Asiatic type certainly gripped Western imaginations. In nineteenth century Britain, for example, what was termed ?oriental vice? in the very heart of England ?heathenism in the inner radius? as it was (NEW PARAGRAPH) called expressed anxieties about the moral authority of Christian England (Lindeborg, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The procedures facilitating the marginaliza tion of the Oriental realm, and at the same time (NEW PARAGRAPH) its critical role in European self definition, were also perpetuated in other places and in other terms. The variety of representational devices that Cook and his coterie of naturalists and draughtsmen deployed whether Banks? abstract taxonomics or Parkinson?s evocation of anthropological variety succeeded in encapsulating the Pacific world within the con fines of European epistemologies. Moreover, their penchant for designating names the naming of places (see place names), peoples and individuals at once invented, brought into cultural circulation and domesticated the very entities that were the subjects of their enquiries (Carter, 1987). That Cook?s team was engaged in what Salmond (1991, p. 15) terms ?mirror image EtHNograpHy? is beyond dispute. But just because their modes of cat egorization were suffused with the expectations of eighteenth century society should not be permitted to gainsay the remarkable accuracy of their accounts of physical phenomena. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The cuLturaL poLitics embedded in these various ventures were further reinforced by the artistic and literary crafts of Western explor ation. The evocation of distant peoples and places owed much to the supposedly realist works of visual art produced by painters such as Jean Leon Gerome (Nochlin, 1991). Indeed, the standard scholarly practices of science, history and comparative literature were themselves profoundly indebted to artis tic representation (Smith, 1960; Stafford, 1984). In the tropical world, for example, travelling artists such as William Hodges and Johann Rugendas gave visual form to the changing discourse of tropicaLity in which scientific observation and aesthetic preference reinforced one another (Driver and Martins, 2005). In similar vein, the use of photographic technology to ?capture? distant sites and sights, served no less to constitute than to represent imperial subjects and spaces (Ryan, 1997). At the same time, overseas escapades provided writers of fiction with resources to stimulate readers? imaginations. In some cases, this took the form of adventure stories that fostered new senses of heroic masculinity and projected European fantasies onto non European worlds (Phillips, 1997). In others, evocations of far away realms were shaped by utopiaN or dys topian literary tropes, which were deployed by writers not only to imagine foreigners but to re imagine themselves (Fulford, Lee and Kitson, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Evocations such as these contributed mas sively to the generation of global imaginative geographies (Gregory, 1994). Thus the americas, in one way or another, were con structed according to European predilections (Harley, 1990; Mason, 1990; Greenblatt, 1991); later, the Pacific was re composed as a coherent geographical entity (MacLeod and Rehbock, 1994) as was ?darkest Africa? (Brantlinger, 1985) as these toponymic labels were brought into cultural currency. The same can also be said of the tropical world a conceptual space that came into being courtesy of the conjoined forces of geographical exploration, colonial administra tion and tropical medicine (Arnold, 1996b; Livingstone, 1999; Stepan, 2001). Moreover, exploration and exhibition frequently went hand in hand, as in the case of Egypt, which found its people and places enframed, ordered and exhibited to suit European curiosity (Mitchell, 1988). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Space does not permit further elucidation of such motifs in other regions. Suffice to note that in the

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