[...]an travel writing interacted with enlightenment natural history to produce a Eurocentered form of global or “planetary” consciousness.

[Pratt considers] the classificatory schemes of natural history in relation to the vernacular peasant knowledges they sought to displace.

tourist propaganda
testimonio
oral history


If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought.


the passport: contact zone, like the flirting gaze of an Iranian woman with German ambassadors in Olearius images
Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone.
metropolitan modes of representation

creating (your own) autonomous decolonized cultures
dynamics of creole self-fashioning

Pratt's “contact zone”: the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.

“contact language”: an improvised language that develops among speakers of different tongues who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade.

“colonial frontier” --> “contact zone” shifts the center of gravity and the point of view
...the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect

a “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other


* travelers and travelees *
in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power


***strategies of innocence*** (constructed in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest)
--> main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a figure (Pratt sometimes calls) the “seeing-man”: (an admittedly unfriendly label for) the white male subject of European landscape discourse--he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess


the idioms of travel and exploration


two processes in Northern Europe (“planetary consciousness”):
•the emergence of natural history as a structure of knowledge
•the turn toward interior exploration
+
•Bourgeois forms of subjectivity consolidated themselves
•new territorial phase of capitalism propelled by searches for raw materials began
•coastal trade extended inland
•


ways of reading and focusing rhetorical analysis

...................................

[Brancaforte]

word + image
art + science
visual + discursive

the reality that he [Olearius] has experienced

Conley: “the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble [por harf پر‌حرف], copious, emphatic, printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words”

questions of
•authorship
•political power
•intellectual influence


Meerwunder, exotic curiosities from the sea


“we were about a gun-shot's distance”

in the age of incipient European colonialist expansion

a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time




proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations. “Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together.” (Stewart 2012)
(the ground of Iran on which Olearius stands cannot be summarized in a literalized description, under the spell of a kind of cartographic shorthand [tond-nevisi تند نويسى، مختصر نويسى], into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world)
*writing can be:
•the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles --> speculative concept of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds.] your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
 }--> to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding [=/= “to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized[...]