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  • Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century
  • Ellen Strain (bio)

Figures

1898. In Canton, a group of tourists seated in sedan chairs are carried on the shoulders of several barefoot, bare-chested Chinese men .

(“Tourists Starting for Canton.” Edison)

1903. In another part of the world, an Egyptian man steadies his donkey so that a tourist may mount and then leads the animal and its passenger into a line of similarly equipped tourists heading for the pyramids of Sakkarah .

(“Tourists Starting on Donkeys for the Pyramids of Sakkarah.” Edison.)

1903. At a dock in Jaffa, Syrian rowers pull their boats into shore while tourists loaded with suitcases are assisted on board by indigenous men wearing fezzes and burnooses .

(“Tourists Embarking at Jaffa.” Edison.)

As these turn-of-the-century films illustrate, motion picture cameras of the early silent period were drawn to images of Westerners in motion against [End Page 71] exotic backdrops. Cameramen deployed across the globe captured on film the contrast between privileged travelers who left home via luxurious ships or newly-built railroads and non-Western peoples who awaited their guests with empty rowboats and unsaddled donkeys. An equally stark comparison could be drawn between these foreign laborers viewed by their visitors as technologically backwards and the theater-seat tourists who by their attendance became participants in the technological “marvel of the century”—moving pictures. In either case, technology and leisure drew clear dividing lines between the haves and the have-nots, the tourists and the toured.

Surveying the history of film from these early travelogues to the widescreen adventures of the fifties to contemporary IMAX magic carpet rides, not only do touristic viewing pleasures seem to be a staple within cinema, but the foreign locale appears to constitute the ideal testing ground for new simulation technologies. What may be less evident from examining the short history of film, however, is the notion of touristic viewing as an historically-specific phenomenon which developed in the decades immediately preceding cinema’s inception and which was imported into cinema in a developing form.

While fascination with imagined beasts and fantastic human oddities inhabiting the globe’s furthest corners stretches back over centuries, touristic experience—whether simulated or actual—brings the Western subject face to face with the spectacle of difference, the exotic landscape dotted with wondrously “alien” human and animal faces. A series of developments paved a course from the distanced and indirect apperception of foreign lands as enjoyed by readers of travel literature to the pleasures of “being there” as a notable, widely-marketed cultural feature. The tourist-spectator position was the product of a burgeoning world view which neared maturity by the turn of the century. This capitalist view of the world as a reservoir of products, raw materials, and experiential pleasures melded with scientific understandings of the universe and a technological confidence on the part of the West. One outcome was the learned pleasures of the touristic as defined by the visual objectification or the conversion of the cultural Other into spectacle; the separation of the tourist from the toured; and the identification of the tourist with a figure of mastery such as the explorer, colonialist soldier, or anthropologist. [End Page 72] In other words, touristic pleasure made possible the creation of a safety zone within which the exhilaration of geographical proximity with the Other could exist without compromising other less literal forms of distance. The marketing of touristic pleasures in the pre-cinematic era helped popularize a coherent set of strategies for viewing cultural Otherness, a set of strategies which can only be analyzed in the context of a culturally-shared world view and late nineteenth-century developments, including the professionalization and popularization of anthropology, improved transportation, the consolidation of capitalism, and the cultural ascendancy of the mechnically-produced image.

The ascendancy of touristic viewing took place against a background of unprecedented Western contact with the so-called margins of the earth. In the decades before the close of the nineteenth century, missionaries, surveyors, explorers, anthropologists, and colonialists vowed to fill in the few remaining blank spots on world maps and to close up the larger gaps in knowledge...

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