Georg Forsters literarische Weltreise: Dialektik der Kulturbegegnung in der Aufklärung (review)

This study offers a welcome and timely analysis of the strategies used by Georg Forster to capture, convey, and question the different facets of cultural encounter in the late Enlightenment. Following in the wake of recent moves by scholars of travel writing—notably Nigel Leask—to understand nonfictional travelogues as pieces of literature in their own right, May’s monograph explores the discursive construction of exotic peoples, places, and customs within the contexts both of eighteenth-century European thought on the foreign and of Forster’s own literary project. Focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on Forster’s Reise um die Welt, May demonstrates how Forster’s representation of exotic climes, including the southern Pacific Islands and Tahiti, corrected and relativized the predominantly idealized pictures of such “utopias.” It did so by pointing up ambiguities in the relationship between observer and observed, in the questions European travelers asked as they sought to interpret the foreign, and in the prevailing cultural agendas within which they operated. For while “discovery” was central to Enlightenment concerns, May shows how Forster constantly queried notions of “fremd” and “eigen,” “Entdecker” and “Entdeckte,” as well as the topos of European (male) domination of the (female) erotic Other. Indeed, Forster’s representation of the foreign experience required radical rethinking of modes of observation that recast what could be understood by “subjectivity” and “perspective” in this period. By drawing to readers’ attention the highly relative notion of what “truth” can entail, May proposes that Forster was actively encouraging them to move away from positivistic models to acquire a greater level of self-reflexivity, thus allowing them to explore for themselves new avenues of inquiry. For if the distorted picture of extra-European cultures was based not only on ignorance or error but also on deep-seated prejudices, Forster set out to offer a new approach to representing and evaluating the encounters between cultures.

Forster, the “father” of modern anthropology, made vital contributions to European knowledge about how language and society operated in such exotic cultures. Yet as May rightly notes, ethnographical research has tended to focus more on what Forster saw, leaving equally important questions unasked about how such information was gained. In focusing on precisely these questions, May shows that greater emphasis still needs to be placed on the role adopted by the natives as “instructors” and “deliverers” of knowledge to European explorers. Forster stresses just how central such local figures were in enabling European travelers to make sense of the foreign, not least by providing them with native terms, which, by gaining international currency, could replace the many confusing and conflicting words coined by foreign sailors for the same phenomena. Acquiring such knowledge was never easy, May reminds us. A close analysis of Forster’s language demonstrates how he highlighted the care with which he made his observations, yet also flagged nagging doubts about discrepancies and language problems; Cook similarly worried about native reticence at responding to seemingly “idle” questions. The fragmentary nature of the facts that could be recorded and the incomplete picture that could therefore be constructed were also echoed in the narrative forms that Forster adopted, which offered a multiperspectival approach to the presentation of knowledge that explicitly highlighted issues of cultural subjectivity.

Research has hitherto focused principally on points of encounter and initial contact (such as at landfalls or on harbor entry), where difference and “otherness” seemed to be articulated most clearly. Borrowing from intercultural communication studies the notion of “critical incidents”—intercultural experiences in which the communication experienced by one or all parties is considered ineffective or inappropriate or dissatisfying—May argues that other moments of encounter are equally important in understanding how Europeans communicated with the natives, which strategies they adopted, and how (un)successful these essentially were. Such processes of communication were by no means one-way—natives are repeatedly portrayed as “curious” figures—but the information thus acquired was a comment as much...