Journal articles on the topic 'Voyages and travels Miscellanea'

Our paper aims at understanding how travelling shaped Michel Leiris’ life and work. For Leiris, travelling is first a therapeutic escape, which enables him to overcome hardships by breaking away from his environment. Dissatisfied with his nature of his travels, he searches for another way to travel by taking up ethnography, expecting that it will provide him with an opportunity to establish an authentic contact with others. Disillusioned by an ethnographic mission in Africa, he comes to realise that true contact can only be achieved through a common fight against colonialism. Chagrined by his numerous travels, he finally commits to a one-way journey by attempting to commit suicide.

The time of the Renaissance created the new model of the man-humanist. European patterns stimulated to the cultural or educational development of different fields of the social life. A bloom of the education took place, a thirst for knowledge, an interest in learning, world, travels, getting new experiences. A man educated, being good at foreign languages, opened for changes was appreciated. Geographical discoveries and their effects forever changed the image of the earth. Sixteenth-century peregrinations contributed to the development of states, economic and civilization expansion, and the bloom of culture area. Pedagogic meaning of Renaissance journeys is indisputable. Experience from voyages all over world, extending ranges, the permeation of cultures, the learning of foreign languages, the increase in the knowledge, the development of learning, education and artistic fields bear fruit to this day in the global scale.

This article focuses the relationship between journeys and photographs especially among anthropologists who travel. Having travelled to the Upper Negro River as an advisor of a PhD student, I discuss what digital photographs may mean in a context where verbal communication is impossible. Real or imaginary journeys are a source of images, reports, or travel logs in which it is difficult to discern what is real and what is fiction. After discussing a few famous scientific and literary journeys, the article focuses on some anthropological journeys and concludes that images produced by anthropologists are a result of trained intuition, a sensitive gaze, and memories of former travels. The article includes photographic essays that incorporate pictures I took in February 2012 among the Hupd'äh, in the Upper Negro River region.

“Journey in Mathematics: 'My Travels with Gulliver'” is a California state-approved fourth-through sixth-grade unit integrating mathematics, reading, listening, writing, and drawing. The unit is based on the classic story Gulliver's Travels, written by Jonathan Swift in 1726, which describes Gulliver's voyages to Lilliput, the land of tiny people, and Brobdignag, the land of giants. Titania is a land created by the authors of the unit, and Ourland is the students' own classroom. The unit encourages students to explore scaling, measurement, area, and perimeter in a hands-on fashion, such as when Gulliver encounters a carpet peddler.

AbstractThis article explores the circulation and use of travel writings within the seventeenth-century "culture of curiosity", focusing on a figure at the heart of this milieu, Melchisédech Thévenot (? 1622–1692), and his edited Relations de divers voyages curieux (1663–1672). The Thévenot case reveals the importance of travel writing for the scholarly community in a period when the modern boundaries between disciplines were not yet formed, and when the nature of geographical knowledge was undergoing radical change. The collection, discussion and publication of the travel collection are shown to be part of the program of Thévenot's experimental "assembly" to investigate the "arts".

There are few figures as universally beloved and yet recognizably “Middle Eastern” as Sindbad. The text of Sindbad's seven voyages travel easily across continents and languages and many of the tales blur imperceptibly into those of Homer'sThe Odysseyand Swift'sGulliver's Travels. Yet this swashbuckling adventurer is also firmly situated in the world of Abbasid Iraqandthe Indian Ocean world. Sindbad is clearly identified as a good Muslim and respected Baghdadi merchant, and while fantastical, there are recognizable geographic and cultural markers that locate his voyages within the Indian Ocean world. This iconic character of Arab popular culture pushes us to contemplate how easily the Arab world flows into that of the Indian Ocean.

The Royal Commonwealth Society (previously known successively as the Colonial Society, the Royal Colonial Institute and the Royal Empire Society and now linked with the Victoria League in Commonwealth Trust), was founded in 1868 and from its early days has maintained a library which now consists of 250,000¢ items, classified geographically; a substantial proportion of this is concerned with Africa. The small library of the Royal African Society was embodied in it in 1949. Subjects covered include all but purely technical ones, ranging from history, geography and politics to art, literature and natural history.The literature of exploration and discovery is particualarly extensive and there are original editions of nearly all the significant books in this field. The Library is also strong in general accounts of voyages and travels, collected voyages, and the publications of the major relevant societies; much material on Africa appears in this form.

The Royal Commonwealth Society (previously known successively as the Colonial Society, the Royal Colonial Institute and the Royal Empire Society and now linked with the Victoria League in Commonwealth Trust), was founded in 1868 and from its early days has maintained a library which now consists of 250,000¢ items, classified geographically; a substantial proportion of this is concerned with Africa. The small library of the Royal African Society was embodied in it in 1949. Subjects covered include all but purely technical ones, ranging from history, geography and politics to art, literature and natural history.The literature of exploration and discovery is particualarly extensive and there are original editions of nearly all the significant books in this field. The Library is also strong in general accounts of voyages and travels, collected voyages, and the publications of the major relevant societies; much material on Africa appears in this form.

The twelfth Duke of Edinburgh Lecture was presented in London on 15 October 1986 at the Royal Geographical Society to the thirty-ninth Annual General Meeting of the Institute, the President in the Chair. The lecturer, the President said in his introductory remarks, was a geographical scholar who had devoted much of his time to the verification of early voyages by following the paths described in the often legendary accounts:the travels of Marco Polo in 1961 and later the voyages on which the present paper is based, of St Brendan, Sindbad and Jason. In 1976–7 in the medieval leather boat Brendan he followed a route from Ireland across the Atlantic described in the 8/9th century Navigatio. In 1980–81 in the Arabian boom Sohar he sailed over 6000 miles from Oman to Canton in a reconstruction of Sindbad's seven voyages described in One Thousand and One Nights, and finally in 1984 in Argo, a reconstructed Greek vessel of the 13th century B.C., his voyage took him from Greece through the Bosphorus to Georgia in the USSR, following the legendary path of Jason in search of the Golden Fleece. No-one could be better fitted to reflect on the human factor in early navigation.

Abstract The voyages of Captain James Cook (1728–1779) inaugurated, among manifold historical processes, an encounter of textile traditions. Pacific Islanders were keenly interested in European fabrics; Europeans were fascinated by Oceanic textiles such as beaten bark cloth, which was extensively collected from Cook’s first voyage onwards. Among manifestations of European interest, bark cloth sample books such as those produced as multiples by Alexander Shaw in 1787 have been a focus of research and curatorial activity in recent years. This essay considers a recently-identified book of specimens which pre-dates Shaw’s by some fifteen years. It exemplifies a brief but seemingly intense European interest in Polynesian bark cloth, embracing the fabrics’ technical, material, aesthetic, social and ritual aspects.

Les mémoires de Robinson Crusoé sont « le livre le plus captivant jamais écrit pour des garçons », selon Leslie Stephen. Édité par Daniel Defoe, l’ouvrage s’est inscrit dans la conscience littéraire de la civilisation européenne et depuis trois siècles, nous éprouvons le besoin d’étudier et de synthétiser les questions scientifiques intrigantes et interreliées qu’il soulève dans les domaines de l’histoire, de la géographie, de la cartographie, de l’astronomie, de la géologie, de la botanique, de la zoologie, de la climatologie, de l’archéologie, de l’anthropologie, de l’ethnologie et de la linguistique. De plus, quand l’histoire est véridique, les lecteurs et lectrices la suivent sur une carte avec avidité. Or, l’une des îles de l’archipel Juan Fernández, au Chili, est connue sans raison évidente sous le nom d’ Isla Robinson Crusoe. L’île Cocos, au Costa Rica, nous parait être une candidate plus convaincante, si l’on se fie aux observations du narrateur sur la latitude, les marées, le climat, la flore, la faune et le relief topographique, ainsi que sur sa carte de 1719. Les voyages de Crusoé à travers la Chine, la Russie et les Pyrénées fournissent une information géographique unique, sous la forme de douzaines de toponymes. Les différentes éditions des trois parties du livre contiennent quelques coquilles dans les noms géographiques. L’itinéraire du voyageur est comparé à celui de l’ambassadeur Ides et à de nombreuses cartes contemporaines.

Abstract The travelogues from the late-19th century voyages of Iranians offer important knowledge on the political, social and cultural history of the modern state. Attention has been directed mainly towards the diaries of travels in Europe, less to the works recording the impressions of those who, for various reasons, travelled within the country during the Qâjâr era. Among these, the Khâterât-e Hâjj Sayyâh, by Mirzâ Mohammad ‘Ali Mahallâti, better known as Hâjj Sayyâh, is of remarkable interest. The article examines several aspects of this ‘travel diary’; in particular their revelation of the author’s critical and pessimistic vision of his homeland and those who are currently governing it. We observe the processes of defining a national ‘self’ in contrast to the ‘other’, influenced by comparisons between Europe and the needs for modernisation, but also from memories of greatness.

Abstract This article explores the scientific travels of French members of mendicant orders in the early modern Atlantic World. The Royal Cosmographer André Thevet, the Capuchin Claude D’Abbeville and the Minim Charles Plumier demonstrate a coherent but evolving Franciscan perspective in missionary scientific observation on the colonial frontier. It argues that the Franciscan monastic tradition, the Franciscan reform movement, and the teachings of the Minim order interacted with the colonial landscape and encounters with local environments and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic and Caribbean to produce a unique tradition of natural knowledge production. This tradition culminates in the convergence of the Minim worldview with the cartographic and observational program of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the Atlantic voyages of the French Minim friar and scientific traveler Louis Feuillée at the turn of the eighteenth century.

In his youth, Richard Henry Dana Jr. rebelled against the conventions of his upper-class New England upbringing when he signed on as a common sailor on a merchant ship bound for Alta California. The notes of his travels describe the strenuous life at sea, a captain’s sadistic streak, a crew’s mutinous tendencies, and California’s multicultural fur trade economy. First published in 1840, Dana’s travelogue Two Years Before the Mast became an unofficial guide for emigrants traversing the largely unmapped far western territories in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Connecting Dana’s widely-read narrative to current developments in the discipline, this article discusses strategies of visualizing literature and includes an exercise in ‘discursively mapping’ actual and imagined spaces and mobilities of the text. Considering strategies and toolsets from the digital humanities as well as theories such as Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, the article reflects on the methodological and practical pitfalls brought about by the visualization.

In reforming psalmody in early nineteenth-century New England, participants in the so-called “Ancient Music” movement imported the solemnly refined hymn tunes and scientific rhetoric of Europe. This transatlantic exchange was in part the result of European travels by a generation of young members of the American socioeconomic and intellectual elite, such as Joseph Stevens Buckminster and John Pickering, whom scholars have not previously associated with hymnody reform. This study asserts that non-composers, particularly clergy and academics, played a crucial role in the “Ancient Music” movement, and offers a fuller picture of a little-examined but critical period in the history of American psalmody. Tracing the transatlantic voyages of figures like Buckminster and Pickering reveals that the actions and perspectives of active participants in the Atlantic world shaped “Ancient Music” reform and that hymnody reform was part of a broader project of cultural and intellectual uplift in New England.

Critical light is shed on Emotional World Tour: diarios itinerantes (Miguel Gallardo and Paco Roca, 2009), a multilayered meta-text about the creation of and subsequent promotional tour for two award-winning comics from 2007, Arrugas and María y yo. Though numerous scholarly studies have attended to these narratives of disability (Alzheimer’s and autism), I argue that Gallardo and Roca were among the first to reflect on their own comics critically, an exercise carried out from within the realm of comics creation. In the context of recent theorizations of scholarly composing with comics and an intensification of self-reflexivity within the Affective Turn, I read Gallardo and Roca’s play on the early ‘voyages and travels’ genre as a means of harnessing its powers of scientific and intellectual enquiry to comment on image/ text representations of cognitive disability, and of theorizing from early on about the changing landscape of comics in twenty-first-century Spain.

The story of the people who sailed the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Hawai‘i, Samoa, and points beyond is well documented, yet historians have neglected the voyages themselves and what the travelers encountered on the five-day to five-week journeys to their destinations. Those who crossed the Pacific recorded their thoughts about the sea creatures they discovered, the birds that followed the ships, and the potential of American expansion to the islands. They gossiped about their shipmates, celebrated the change in time zones, and feared the sharks that swam near the vessels. The voyagers had little else to distract them from the many miles of endless water, so they paid attention to their surroundings: nature, people, and shipboard activities. The adventures on the ships enlivened their travels to the islands of the Pacific and proved to be an opportunity to expand their personal horizons, as well as their hopes for the United States.

John Lawson's A new voyage to Carolina, an important source document for American colonial natural history, was first printed in 1709 in A new collection of voyages and travels, a two-volume set that also contained travel books translated by John Stevens. Lawson's publishers were leaders in the book trade of early eighteenth century London, and the New voyage is typical of the resurgent popular interest in foreign travel narratives and exotic flora and fauna that began in the late 1600s. The New collection was among the earliest examples of books published in serial instalments or fascicles, a marketing strategy adopted by London booksellers to broaden the audience and increase sales. Analysis of London issues of the New voyage indicates that the 1709, 1711, 1714, and 1718 versions are simply bindings of the original, unsold sheets from the 1709 New collection edition, differing only by new title-pages, front matter, and random stop-press corrections of type-set errors. Lawson's New voyage illustrates important aspects of the British book trade during the hand press period of the early eighteenth century.

This article analyses chapters from Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817) and Rosalind Amelia Young’s Mutiny of the Bounty and Story of Pitcairn Island, 1790‐1894 (1894) in the context of US American perception of Pitcairn Island’s cultural identity. It envisions both Delano’s account of the island and the Californian Seventh-day Adventists’ missionary work, as described by Young, as examples of epistemic violence. The latter derives from imperial misrepresentations of the islanders as well as an imposition of US American cultural identity upon them. The violence committed against Pitcairn’s community is discussed in connection to Delano’s self-proclaimed approach of non-intervention and his depiction of the islanders as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘children of nature’, as well as to the direct involvement of the Adventists who converted the islanders. This article tests whether Delano’s and the Adventists’ approaches are mutually exclusive or whether they represent two different visions of the same imperialist project to constitute Pitcairn Islanders as the colonial ‘Other’.

The paper presents Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as the first systematic attempt to claim that the normal methods of testing belief and opinion for clarity, consistence, coherence, and how they stand to the facts are powerless when applied to deep-seated normative commitments, or what Wittgenstein dubbed “framework truths.” To subject our norms to normative critique requires a measure of self-alienation that cannot be achieved merely by looking hard at or thinking hard about our world and ourselves. However, by closely examining the contrived counterfactual scenarios (or, as I have shown in former work, by exposure to the normative critique of significant others), that Swift is shown to claim, such normative framework assumptions can be challenged to great effect! The standard epistemologies of his day—Baconian empiricism and Cartesian rationalism—fiercely ridiculed in the course of Gulliver’s third voyage are cruelly dismissed as powerless to change the course of science and keep it in normative check. The transformative effect of the clever thought experiments presented in the three other voyages (of imagining London shrunk to a twelfth of its size and enlarged to giant proportions, and a more responsible and intelligent race of beings inserted above (normally sized) humans) enable Swift to obtain critical normative distance from several major assumptions about politics, religion, aesthetics, ethics, and much more, including the limits of the thought experiment itself. The paper then goes to show how the same kind of counterfactual scenarios are put to impressive use in the Talmudic literature, with special reference to foundational questions of ethics and law.

The main part of this study is preceded by information on the subject of dynamically increasing, since the beginning of the 18th century, participation of Polish women from wealthy houses in social life. It can be confirmed by, among others, their travels abroad to e.g. Italy with its rich resources in the form of works of art including those preserved from ancient times being of great interest then. In the main stream of investigation the author focuses on the preserved French travel journal (“Mes voyages”) of the journey that Waleria from the Stroynowskis Tarnowska undertook to Italy in years 1803–1804 with her husband Jan Feliks and her father Walerian. The analytical and interpretational considerations refer to the fragments concerning the buildings observed by the countess during her Italian journey, which were to a various degree damaged by the power of time or human activity and that was indicated by singled out synonymous terms used for ruins. The crucial aspect of this reflection is concretisation of Tarnowska’s impressions depicted in descriptions from close contact with antique and modern edifices, not too rarely preserved in a remnant form. According to the author of this study references to and descriptions of ruins in the analysed journal are the expression of not a genuine passion but rather of the influence of contemporary fashion for ancient times and great curiosity for the world during the first journey abroad and the will to see and then record in writing all that was required to see during this Italian trip. They also prove psychologically conditioned perception of wors of art.

Resumo As narrativas de viagem convidam à leitura por estarem vinculadas a diversas áreas do conhecimento e da sensibilidade, suscitando reflexões, dentre elas, sobre a formação e a propagação de discursos de/sobre viagem. Dentro do universo da literatura de viagem, propõe-se uma leitura transversal de textos que são marcados pela valorização do testemunho. Prioritariamente entendido como prova e fragmento da verdade, o testemunho do típico narrador-viajante adquire, ao longo do tempo, um caráter de encenação. Da mesma forma, a ênfase na viagem como modo de testemunhar os lugares assume a forma de práticas superficializadas. Anunciadas como bens de consumo, as viagens são comercializadas em pacotes “estampados” com imagens-clichê, produzidas para estimular a contemplação fácil e o registro rápido durante percursos padronizados. A forte influência do mercado turístico na conformação da cultura das viagens estimula uma renovação nas tradicionais identidades do viajante, que tendem a ser inspiradas na ideia do viajante-testemunha. As anotações de viagem de Alain de Botton e Claude Lévi-Strauss auxiliam a reflexão.Palavras-chave: viagem, literatura de viagem, mercado turístico, identidade do viajante.AbstractTravel narratives are inviting for the reading because they are linked to several areas of knowledge and sensibility, and bring up reflections, among them, about the structuring and propagation of travel discourse. Inside the universe of travel literature, we propose a transversal reading of the texts that are distinguished by valorization of the testimony. Previously understood as proof and fragment of the truth, the typical traveler-narrator testimony acquires, in time, an ethos of play-acting. In the same way, the emphasis on traveling as a way to witness places takes the shape of superficialized practices. Portrayed as consumer goods, travels are sold as “colorful” packages with cliché images that boost easy admiration and quick registering throughout standard routes. The tourism trade’s strong influence in structuring travel culture boosts a renewal of the traditional traveler identities, usually inspired by the notion of travelers as witnesses. The travel notes from Alain Botton and Claude Lévi-Strauss are helpful on this reflection. Keywords: Travel, travel’s literature, tourism trade, traveler identity.RésuméLes récits de voyage nous invitent à la lecture, en raison de leur liason avec des différends domaines de la connaissance, de la sensibilité et la propagation du discours à propos des voyages. Dans l'univers de la littérature de Voyage, nous proposons une lecture croisée des textes qui mettent en valeur le témoignage du voyageur. Le témoignage type de ce narrateur-voyageur est entendu, la plupart du temps, comme une preuve et/ou morceau de vérité. Alors, au long du temps, il devient une mise en scène du voyage. De même, l'accent mis sur le voyage comme moyen d'appréhender les lieux engendre des habitudes de voyages superficiels. Les voyages, annoncées comme des biens de consommation, sont vendus en " packs " par des images clichés produites afin de stimuler la contemplation et/ou l’inscription facile et rapide dans des voies standardisées. La forte influence du marché du tourisme dans l’élaboration de la culture du voyage stimule un renouvellement des identités traditionnelles du voyageur qui ont tendance à être inspiré par ce narrateur-voyageur. Les notes de voyage de Alain de Botton et Claude Lévi- Strauss nous aideront durant notre réflexion.Mots-clés: Voyage, littérature de voyage, marché du tourisme, identité du voyageur.

Research objectives: On the basis of a recently discovered map – found in the manuscript library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg – of Iske Kazan’s fortification made by P.N. Rychkov in 1770, this article investigates the manner in which its population protected itself against its foes in the restless era that witnessed the dissolution of the Golden Horde and the transition to the Kazan khanate. It additionally asks why in fact this map was composed. Research materials: Combining the evidence of Rychkov’s map with archaeological findings and in dialogue with the relevant historiography, the authors place the map in its historical context and ponder its significance, and suggest why this map was made in 1770. Results and novelty of the research: It appears that Iske Kazan’s inhabitants turned to a unique manner to defend themselves against their enemies, using a wall-moat-wall design to prevent any storming by mounted troops, different from what has been hitherto thought about the ruins of this defensive structure. This manner of defending seems eminently well suited to the restless conditions prevailing in the Volga-Kama region around 1400 and the art of war as practiced in this region. The article additionally suggests why this map was made in 1770, linking it to the general desire of the Romanov government to discover much more precisely how its subjects lived their lives. This impetus was born from the introduction of the Western-European scientific mindset in Peter I’s reign, which paid much closer heed to a realistic understanding of nature and culture. The Russian Academy of Sciences mounted from the 1720s onward a host of scientific expeditions, which almost resemble voyages of discovery, to map the tsarist empire, of which Rychkov’s travels formed a part. The article hints at the possibility that such fact-finding missions gradually allowed the central government in St. Petersburg to increase its power over its subject peoples.

Following the author’s previous work on reconstituting the transmission to Europe, disappearance, and eventual publication under other names of the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym’s manuscript work on Chinese medicine, this article recounts the recent discovery of some of these manuscripts. They are kept at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, and were originally part of the Chinese Library of the Elector of Brandenburg, where they were acquired from Dutch officials who had earlier bought them from the Jesuit Philippe Couplet (who had obtained them from Boym’s last companion). The complex story of these manuscripts’ travels documents the keen interest in Chinese medicine among the many competing European powers and institutions in the seventeenth century; it also shows that we should be careful in assessing whether the publication of Boym’s seminal work under other names was willful plagiarism, or a result of contemporary tensions and confusion. Cet article fait suite aux travaux antérieurs de l’auteur sur la transmission en Europe, la disparition puis la publication sous d’autres noms des travaux manuscrits sur la médecine chinoise du jésuite polonais Michael Boym. Il relate la découverte récente d’une partie de ces manuscrits dans la bibliothèque Jagiellonienne à Cracovie, et montre qu’ils viennent de l’ancienne bibliothèque chinoise du Grand Electeur de Brandebourg, où ils ont été originellement acquis auprès d’officiers hollandais qui les avaient achetés auprès du jésuite Philippe Couplet, qui lui-même les avait obtenus du dernier compagnon de Boym à la mort de celui-ci. L’histoire complexe des voyages de ces manuscrits met en lumière le fort intérêt pour la médecine chinoise de la part des diverses puissances et institutions européennes du 17e siècle, alors en vive concurrence ; elle nous engage aussi à la prudence quant aux jugements que l’on peut porter sur la publication des travaux pionniers de Boym sous d’autres noms, qui doit autant aux tensions et confusions politiques du temps qu’à un plagiat intentionnel.

<p>O artigo apresenta a trajetória acadêmica de Vera Zolberg (1932-2016), considerada uma das fundadoras do campo da sociologia da arte nos Estados Unidos. Com base em um relato da socióloga, durante sua última visita ao Brasil, o texto revela as adversidades que ela enfrentou para obter uma formação acadêmica pelo fato de ser mulher, judia, casada e mãe. Da infância no South Bronx, aos estudos no Hunter College, à vida em Boston e no Texas, até o doutorado na Universidade de Chicago, o depoimento de Vera Zolberg evidencia o movimento de sua subjetividade entre oportunidades e adversidades, contingências e surpresas, viagens e deslocamentos em busca de sua autonomia intelectual, assim como nos revela peculiaridades da sociedade norte-americana que raramente aparecem nos discursos sobre o cenário do pós guerra naquele país.</p><p> </p><p>THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART AS A VOCATION: an account of Vera Zolberg</p><p>The article presents the academic trajectory of Vera Zolberg (1932-2016), one of the founders of the field of sociology of art in the United States. Based on an account of the sociologist made during her last visit to Brazil, the text reveals the adversities that she faced in order to obtain an academic training by being a woman, a jew, a wife and a mother. From childhood in the South Bronx, to her studies in Hunter College, to the life in Boston and in Texas to University of Chicago, Vera Zolberg’s testimony evidences the movement of her subjectivity between opportunities and adversities, contingencies and surprises, travels and journeys in search of her intellectual autonomy, just as it reveals to us the peculiarities of American life, which rarely, appears in discourses about the postwar scene.</p><p>Keywords: Vera Zolberg. Academic formation. Intellectual autonomy. Sociology of art.</p><p> </p><p>LA SOCIOLOGIE DE L’ART COMME UNE VOCATION: un rapport de Vera Zolberg</p><p>C’est article présent le trajectoire academique de Vera Zolberg (1932-2016), une des foundatrice du champ de la Sociologie de l’Art dans L’États-Unis. Basé sur un rapport de la sociologue fait lors de sa derniéré visite au Brésil, le text révèle les adversités auxquelles elle a été confrontée afin d’obtenir une formation académique en étant femme, juive, épouse et mére. De l’enfance dans le sud du Bronx, aux etudes au Hunter College, à la vie à Boston et au Texas à l’Université de Chicago, le témoignage de Vera Zolberg montre le mouvement<br />de sa subjetivité entre opportunité et adversité, contingences et surprises, voyages et déplacement à la recherche de sa autonomie intellectuelle, comme nous révèle les particularités de la vie américaine, qui apparaît rarement dans les discours sur la scène de l’après-guerre.</p><p>Mots-clés: Vera Zolberg. Formation academique. Autonomie intellectuelle. Sociologie de l’Art.</p>

Gilles Saussier has moved away from photojournalism to develop new documentary strategies which find their place in books or exhibition spaces. Among his works, Le Tableau de chasse (2010) and Spolia (2018) are presented as travel books to Romania. The first favors the deconstruction of photojournalism practices, when the second presents itself as a patient investigation carried out in the footsteps of La Colonne sans fin by Constantin Brancusi.

In his travel narratives (Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary, during the years 1806 and 1807, Voyages en Amérique) and his Memoirs, Chateaubriand notes the end of a “world of wilderness”. He focuses his attention on the art of dance in America, which for him had become the sign of a civilisation on the brink of extinction. Aware of the imminent obliteration of a world trekked by travellers, he thus seeks to record a History and a culture destined sooner or later to sink into oblivion.

The Coppet group, a circle of thinkers around 1800, put displacement and the crossing of borders at the heart of its productions. Born out of a sense of national disaffiliation, the group plays a founding experimental role for the consciousness of the subject in travel narratives. Soliciting travel as much in the exploration of a country as in philosophy and knowledge, Germaine de Staël's De l'Allemagne is both a travel narrative and a metaphysical breviary. In a tone close to autobiography, the author observes an inner region rather than a foreign country.

SCIENTIFIC TRAVELS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GEOGRAPHICAL IDEAS IN PORTUGAL DURING THE 19TH CENTURY - The main goal of this paper is to establish the relationship between scientists movements, the circulation of ideas and the appearance of some basic works for modern Portuguese geography, around 1870. The break between a purely descriptive geography and modern geography is traditionally situated in the 1870's. Perhaps it was prepared by the contacts established inside Europe between scientists. It seems that natural sciences, agronomy and forest science had leading roles in this process. On this subject, we will try to explore the official missions and the stay of portuguese students in Northern Europe. This way, we will be able to trace the contribution of the ideas of Bernardino de Barros Gomes, who contributed towards the development of geographic thought a long time before geography became a University institution.

In the context of France’s increased interest towards Safavid Persia during the second half of the 17th century, Persian women draw the attention of the French travelers, despite their habitual seclusion. The present article aims at analyzing the story of an encounter of several Persian ladies on a ship, told by Barthélemy Carré, Colbert’s envoy to the East Indies; thus the traveler has the opportunity to speak directly to them on his way home thanks to an ingenious method. This floating harem proves to be an ambiguous place, a prison as well as a space of intriguing intercultural and intergender exchanges.

International audience Joanna Bator is a contemporary writer, who has in recent years become increasingly popular not only among readers but also with critics. As an expert of culture and a scholarship winner of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Japan Foundation, she visited Tokyo three times. Published in 2004 (reprint 2011), Japoński wachlarz [The Japanese Fan] is the result of Bator’s Asian travels. The Japanese Fan is a personal and subjective recording of the experience of cultural otherness that feels an European, Polish, writer while working as a lecturer at the University of Tokyo. In this book, Joanna Bator use an original creative technique she calls: zuihitsu, “as the brush guides.” The book constituted a sort of collection or set of travel pictures from which emerges an image of Japan. Joanna Bator est une écrivaine contemporaine, qui jouit ces dernières années d’une popularité grandissante non seulement auprès des lecteurs, mais également auprès de la critique. En tant qu’anthropologue et lauréate des bourses de la Japan Society for the Promotion of Science ( JSPS) ainsi que de la Japan Foundation, elle s’est rendue à Tokyo à trois reprises. Publié en 2004 (réédition en 2011), Japoński wachlarz [L’Éventail japonais] est le fruit de ces voyages asiatiques. L’Éventail japonais constitue la trace personnelle et subjective de l’expérience de l’altérité culturelle vécue par une Européenne, une écrivaine polonaise, pendant la durée de son lectorat à l’Université de Tokyo. Dans ce livre, Joanna Bator recourt à une technique de création originale qu’elle appelle zuihitsu, autrement dit « en suivant le pinceau ». Le livre constitue dès lors une sorte de collection ou ensemble d’images de voyage dont émerge une image du Japon.

In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. Amazonian: The Penguin Book of New Women’s Travel Writing. London: Penguin, 1998. Callahan, Maureen. “Eat, Pray, Loathe: Latest Self-Help Bestseller Proves Faith is Blind.” New York Post 23 Dec. 2007. Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage, 1995. 212-20. Dahl, Roald. Revolting Rhymes. London: Puffin Books, 1982. Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Fortunati, Vita, Rita Monticelli, and Maurizio Ascari, eds. Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary. Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1936. 237-48. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New Jersey: Penguin, 2007. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Red Riding Hood.” Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. 144-9. Hahn, Nicolas. “Too Dumb to Know Better: Cacogenic Family Studies and the Criminology of Women.” Criminology 18.1 (1980): 3-25. Hard Candy. Dir. David Slade. Lionsgate. 2005. Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Howells, Elizabeth. “Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More.” Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference, eds. F.J. Antczak, C. Coggins, and G.D. Klinger. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 131-7. Hyland, Paul. The Black Heart: A Voyage into Central Africa. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. USA: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Morris, Mary. Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Perrault, Charles. Perrault’s Complete Fairytales. Trans. A.E. Johnson and others. London: Constable & Company, 1961. Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Warner Bros. 2011. Sanders, Joshunda, and Diana Barnes-Brown. “Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream” Bitch Magazine 47 (2010). 10 May, 2011 < http://bitchmagazine.org/article/eat-pray-spend >. Siegel, Kristi. Ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidi. “Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between.” Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 194-207. Swan, Sheila, and Peter Laufer. Safety and Security for Women who Travel. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.

There is an old Danish fable that says that the Devil was watching when God created the earth, and that, as the creation progressed, he became increasingly agitated over the wondrous achievements he was made to witness. At the end of it all, the Devil turned to God, and said, ‘Now, watch this.’ He created Iceland. It’s a vision of the country that resembles my own. I have always thought of Iceland as the island apart. The place that came last in the earth’s construction, whoever the engineer, and so remains forever distant. Perhaps that’s because, for me, Iceland is a home far from home. It is the country that I am from, and the place to which I am always tending—in my reading, my travels, and my thoughts. But since we left when I was ten, I am only ever in Iceland for mere glimpses of the Devil’s work, and always leave wanting more, some kind of deeper involvement. Perhaps all of his temptations are like that. Iceland’s is an inverted landscape, stuck like a plug on the roof of the Earth, revealing all the violence and destruction of the layers beneath. The island expands as the tectonic plates beneath it move. It grows by ten centimetres a year, but in two different directions—one towards the States, and the other towards Europe. I have noticed something similar happening to me. Each year, the fissure is a little wider. I come to be more like a visitor, and less like the one returning to his birthplace. I last visited in February just gone, to see whether Iceland was still drifting away from me and, indeed, from the rest of the world. I was doing research in Germany, and set aside an extra week for Reykjavík, to visit friends and family, and to see whether things were really as bad as they appeared to be from Brisbane, where I have lived for most of my life. I had read countless bleak reports of financial ruin and social unrest, and yet I couldn’t suppress the thought that Iceland was probably just being Iceland. The same country that had fought three wars over cod; that offered asylum to Bobby Fischer when no-one else would take him; and that allowed Yoko Ono to occupy a small island near Reykjavík with a peace sculpture made of light. Wasn’t it always the country stuck out on its own, with a people who claimed their independent spirit, and self-reliance, as their most-prized values? No doubt, things were bad. But did Iceland really mean to tie itself closer to Europe as a way out of the economic crisis? And what would this mean for its much-cherished sense of apartness? I spent a week of clear, cold days talking to those who made up my Iceland. They all told me what I most wanted to hear—that nothing much had changed since the financial collapse in 2008. Yes, the value of the currency had halved, and this made it harder to travel abroad. Yes, there was some unemployment now, whereas before there had been none. And, certainly, those who had over-extended on their mortgages were struggling to keep their homes. But wasn’t this the case everywhere? If it wasn’t for Icesave, they said, no-one would spare a thought for Iceland. They were referring to the disastrous internet bank, a wing of the National Bank of Iceland, which had captured and then lost billions in British and Dutch savings. The result was an earthquake in the nation’s financial sector, which in recent years had come to challenge fishing and hot springs as the nation’s chief source of wealth. In a couple of months in late 2008, this sector all but disappeared, or was nationalised as part of the Icelandic government’s scrambling efforts to salvage the economy. Meanwhile, the British and Dutch governments insisted on their citizens’ interests, and issued such a wealth of abuse towards Iceland that the country must have wondered whether it wasn’t still seen, in some quarters, as the Devil’s work. At one point, the National Bank—my bank in Iceland—was even listed by the British as a terrorist organization. I asked whether people were angry with the entrepreneurs who caused all this trouble, the bankers behind Icesave, and so on. The reply was that they were all still in London. ‘They wouldn’t dare show their faces in Reykjavík.’ Well, that was new, I thought. It sounded like a different kind of anger, much more bitter than the usual, fisherman’s jealous awareness of his neighbours’ harvests. Different, too, from the gossip, a national addiction which nevertheless always struck me as being rather homely and forgiving. In Iceland, just about everyone is related, and the thirty or so bankers who have caused the nation’s bankruptcy are well-known to all. But somehow they have gone too far, and their exile is suspended only by their appearances in the newspapers, the law courts, or on the satirical T-shirts sold in main street Laugavegur. There, too, you saw the other side of the currency collapse. The place was buzzing with tourists, unusual at this dark time of year. Iceland was half-price, they had been told, and it was true—anything made locally was affordable, for so long unthinkable in Iceland. This was a country that had always prided itself on being hopelessly expensive. So perhaps what was being lost in the local value of the economy would be recouped through the waves of extra tourists? Certainly, the sudden cheapness of Iceland had affected my decision to come, and to stay in a hotel downtown rather than with friends. On my last full day, a Saturday, I joined my namesake Kári for a drive into the country. For a while, our conversation was taken up with the crisis: the President, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, had recently declined to sign a bill that ensured that Iceland repaid its debts to the British and Dutch governments. His refusal meant a referendum on the bill in the coming March. No-one doubted that the nation would say no. The terms were unfair. And yet it was felt that Iceland’s entry into the EU, and its adoption of the Euro in place of the failed krónur, were conditional on its acceptance of the blame apportioned by international investors, and Britain in particular. Britain, one recalled, was the enemy in the Cod Wars, when Iceland had last entered the international press. Iceland had won that war. Why not this one, as well? That Iceland should suddenly need the forgiveness and assistance of its neighbours was no surprise to them. The Danes and others had long been warning Icelandic bankers that the finance sector was massively over-leveraged and bound for failure at the first sign of trouble in the international economy. I remember being in Iceland at the time of these warnings, in May 2007. It was Eurovision Song Contest month, and there was great local consternation at Iceland’s dismal showing that year. Amid the outpouring of Eurovision grief, and accusations against the rest of Europe that it was block-voting small countries like Iceland out of the contest, the dire economic warnings from the Danes seemed small news. ‘They just didn’t like the útrásarvíkingar,’ said Kári. That is, the Danes were simply upset that their former colonial children had produced offspring of their own who were capable of taking over shops, football clubs, and even banks in main streets of Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London. With interests as glamorous as West Ham United, Hamleys, and Karen Millen, it is not surprising that the útrásarvíkingar, or ‘Viking raiders’, were fast attaining the status of national heroes. Today, it’s a term of abuse rather than pride. The entrepreneurs are exiled in the countries they once sought to raid, and the modern Viking achievement, rather like the one a thousand years before, is a victim of negative press. All that raiding suddenly seems vain and greedy, and the ships that bore the raiders—private jets that for a while were a common sight over the skies of Reykjavík—have found new homes in foreign lands. The Danes were right about the Icelandic economy, just as they’d been right about the Devil’s landscaping efforts. But hundreds of years of colonial rule and only six decades of independence made it difficult for the Icelanders to listen. To curtail the flight of the new Vikings went against the Icelandic project, which from the very beginning was about independence. A thousand years before, in the 870s, Iceland had been a refuge. The medieval stories—known collectively as the sagas—tell us that the island was settled by Norwegian chieftains who were driven out of the fjordlands of their ancestors by the ruthless King Harald the Fair-Haired, who demanded total control of Norway. They refused to humble themselves before the king, and instead took the risk of a new life on a remote, inhospitable island. Icelandic independence, which was lost in the 1260s, was only regained in full in 1944, after Denmark had fallen under German occupation. Ten years later, with the war over and Iceland in the full stride of its independence, Denmark began returning the medieval Icelandic manuscripts that it had acquired during the colonial era. At that point, says the common wisdom, Icelanders forgave the Danes for centuries of poor governance. Although the strict commercial laws of the colonial period had made it all but impossible for Icelanders to rise out of economic hardship, the Danes had, at least, given the sagas back. National sovereignty was returned, and so too the literature that dated back to the time the country had last stood on its own. But, most powerfully, being Icelandic meant being independent of one’s immediate neighbours. Halldór Laxness, the nation’s Nobel Laureate, would satirize this national characteristic in his most enduring masterpiece, Sjálfstætt fólk, or Independent People. It is also what the dominant political party of the independence period, Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, The Independence Party, has long treasured as a political ideal. To be Icelandic means being free of interference. And in a country of independent people, who would want to stop the bankers on their raids into Europe? Or, for that matter, who was now going to admit that it was time to join Europe instead of emphasizing one’s apartness from it? Kári and I turned off the south road out of Reykjavík and climbed into the heath. From here, the wounds of the country’s geological past still dominated the surface of the land. Little wonder that Jules Verne claimed that the journey to the centre of the world began on Snæfellsnes, a peninsula of volcanoes, lava, and ice caps on a long arm of land that extends desperately from the west of the island, as if forever in hope of reaching America, or at the very least Greenland. It was from Snæfellsnes that Eirík the Red began his Viking voyages westwards, and from where his famous son Leif would reach Vínland, the Land of Vines, most probably Newfoundland. Eight hundred years later, during the worst of the nation’s hardships—when the famines and natural disasters of the late eighteenth century reduced the nation almost to extinction—thousands of Icelanders followed in Leif’s footsteps, across the ‘whale road’, as the Vikings called it, to Canada, and mainly Winnipeg, where they recreated Iceland in an environment arguably even more hostile than the one they’d left. At least there weren’t any volcanoes in Winnipeg. In Iceland, you could never escape the feeling that the world was still evolving, and that the Devil’s work was ongoing. Even the national Assembly was established on one of the island’s most visible outward signs of the deep rift beneath—where a lake had cracked off the heath around it, which now surrounded it as a scar-scape of broken rocks and torn cliffs. The Almannagjá, or People’s Gorge, which is the most dramatic part of the rift, stands, or rather falls apart, as the ultimate symbol of Icelandic national unity. That is Iceland, an island on the edge of Europe, and forever on the edge of itself, too, a place where unity is defined by constant points of separation, not only in the landscape as it crunches itself apart and pushes through at the weak points, but also in a persistently small social world—the population is only 320,000—that is so closely related that it has had little choice but to emphasise the differences that do exist. After a slow drive through the low hills near Thingvellir, we reached the national park, and followed the dirt roads down to the lake. It’s an exclusive place for summerhouses, many of which now seem to stand as reminders of the excesses of the past ten years: the haphazardly-constructed huts that once made the summerhouse experience a bit of an adventure were replaced by two-storey buildings with satellite dishes, spa baths, and the ubiquitous black Range Rovers parked outside—the latter are now known as ‘Game Overs’. Like so much that has been sold off to pay the debts, the luxury houses seem ‘very 2007,’ the local term for anything unsustainable. But even the opulent summerhouses of the Viking raiders don’t diminish the landscape of Thingvellir, and a lake that was frozen from the shore to about fifty metres out. At the shoreline, lapping water had crystallized into blue, translucent ice-waves that formed in lines of dark and light water. Then we left the black beach for the site of the old Assembly. It was a place that had witnessed many encounters, not least the love matches that were formed when young Icelanders returned from their Viking raids and visits to the courts of Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. On this particular day, though, the site was occupied by only five Dutchmen in bright, orange coats. They were throwing stones into Öxará, the river that runs off the heath into the Thingvellir lake, and looked up guiltily as we passed. I’m not sure what they felt bad about—throwing stones in the river was surely the most natural thing to do. On my last night, I barely slept. The Saturday night street noise was too much, and my thoughts were taken with the ever-apart Iceland, and with the anticipation of my returning to Brisbane the next day. Reykjavík the party town certainly hadn’t changed with the financial crisis, and nor had my mixed feelings about living so far away. The broken glass and obscenities of a night out didn’t ease until 5am, when it was time for me to board the Flybus to Keflavík Airport. I made my way through the screams and drunken stumblers, and into the quiet of the dark bus, where, in the back, I could just make out the five Dutchmen who, the day before, Kári and I had seen at Thingvellir, and who were now fast asleep and emitting a perfume of vodka and tobacco smoke that made it all the way to the front. It had all seemed too familiar not to be true—the relentless Icelandic optimism around its independence, the sense that it would always be an up-and-down sort of a place anyway, and the jagged volcanoes and lava fields that formed the distant shadows of the half-hour drive to the airport. The people, like the landscape, were fixed on separation, and I doubted that the difficulties with Europe would force them in any other direction. And I, too, was on my way back, as uncertain as ever about Iceland and my place in it. I returned to the clinging heat and my own separation from home, which, as before, I also recognized as my homecoming to Brisbane. Isn’t that in the nature of split affinities, to always be nearly there but never quite there? In the weeks since my return, the Icelanders have voted by referendum to reject the deal made for the repayment of the Icesave debts, and a fresh round of negotiations with the British and Dutch governments begins. For the time being, Iceland retains its right to independence, at least as expressed by the right to sidestep the consequences of its unhappy raids into Europe. Pinning down the Devil, it seems, is just as hard as ever.