Colloquia Germanica
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0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/91
2013
463
Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature: Georg Forster’s «O-Taheiti» (1779)
91
2013
Madhuvanti Karyekar
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Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature: Georg Forster ’ s «O-Taheiti» (1779) MADHUVANTI KARYEKAR T HE O HIO S TATE U NIVERSITY The German world traveler and translator, Georg Forster (1754 - 94), who has often been called the father of modern German Völkerkunde, published in 1779 a German translation of a Spanish report on the island of Tahiti. The essay must have had a special place within Forster ’ s understanding of the topic, for when he planned to publish a collection of his essays on anthropology in 1782, he assigned a place for this Tahiti essay. Consequently, he reworked the piece and published it in 1789 in the edition of his Kleine Schriften (Fiedler 686 - 87). 1 He translated «O-Taheiti» in a time when there were already various reports on the island available to German readers. Bougainville had written about it, Captain Cook ’ s narrative of the first voyage of circumnavigation had talked about it, and moreover, Forster and his father had provided further information on the island ’ s culture and lifestyle in their respective travel narratives based on their voyage with Cook into the South Seas. Yet Forster took efforts to (re)publish one more translation on the same subject and add another travel report to the already existing numerous travelogues on Tahiti. In what follows, I first concentrate on Forster ’ s interest and intention in translating this essay, and then consider the purpose this translation serves in his larger anthropological enterprise, and what it reveals to us about Forster ’ s understanding of observation and narration in travel writing. Forster translated «O-Taheiti» because he aimed to acquaint his German readers with the Spanish way of encountering and observing the foreign and writing about it. He felt such a contribution was well called for as all earlier reports on Tahiti were either from British, French, or German points of view. A report written by a Spanish captain, therefore, provided a novelty in Forster ’ s eyes, as it demonstrated a new perspective to observe the foreign, if not new information. «O-Taheiti,» like many other translations by him, represented Forster ’ s self-reflexive mode of travel writing that consciously attempted to achieve a balance between speculation and empirical observation by paying closer attention to the acts of observation and their subsequent narration. In so doing, Foster significantly diverged from seventeenthcentury empiricism in travel writing, which was a simple presentation of facts (encyclopedic), and he thus revolutionized travel literature by highlighting the role of the observing subject and his various viewpoints that become an integral part of travel narration. Around 1800, under the influence of the Copernican turn introduced by Kantian philosophy, German philosophers and literary scholars, through their own systems of thought and literature, tried to respond to three quintessential questions posed by Kant: What can I know? What can I do? And what can I be permitted to hope for? Out of the convergence of various branches of theoretical, practical, and intellectual enquiries - a practice of thought that so particularly defined the eighteenth century - there arose a fourth question that essentially subsumed all the previous three questions: What is the human being? (Wellmon 1). Many rational, empirical, moral, and philosophical responses to this question were being framed in the wake of Cartesian dualism, English empiricism, and the spirit of scientific and technical advancements of the age. Among many models of anthropology that arose simultaneously - sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in contrast to each other - Forster ’ s writings represent, I argue, a self-reflexive model of anthropology. It is self-reflexive, for Forster self-consciously integrated in his writings his understanding of the «limitations» on human knowledge - in this case the limitations on empirical observation and rational speculation - in discovering the «absolute» truth about humanity (i. e., about the difference between the races, various stages of civilization, and the development of various cultures), and accordingly supported the notion of a «relative» truth. By being so self-reflexive, Forster ’ s theory of anthropology - which took its own form mostly in critical commentary in translated travel reports, travel literature reviews, and essays - consciously worked with the tentative, probable, and open-to-testing nature of empirical knowledge. 2 Forster was a unique figure in eighteenth-century Germany in many respects; but above all due to his actual participation in Captain Cook ’ s second voyage of discovery (1772 - 75) and the original cosmopolitan attitude he developed because of his early intercultural upbringing, his writings depict the dangers of applying a stringent, one-sided mode of inquiry with novel urgency. Indeed, I argue that considering the physical, perspectival, and temporal limits on travelers who observe and narrate about their experiences, Forster reframed the fourth question from «What is the human being? » to «What does it mean to write about the human being? » In his practice of travel writing and translation, Forster emphasized that a travel narrative is not only shaped by the traveler ’ s observations (collected data), but also by the travel writer ’ s imagination - i. e., by how he relates the 212 Madhuvanti Karyekar particular observation to a universal idea, how he situates it in the cultural context and establishes «correlations» among his observations. He further showed that ethnographic and anthropological representations are essentially provisional and contingent - i. e., they are susceptible to more revisions in the light of new evidence. Forster ’ s writings on travel literature contribute to late eighteenth-century anthropology in that they do not escape the inherent dialectical nature of anthropological observations, but embrace and utilize it in combination with other narrative strategies for producing more realistic descriptions of various cultures. Consequently, this article reads Foster ’ s «O-Taheiti» translation as a commentary on the empirical and philosophical possibilities of any anthropological enquiry displayed in travel writing. It shows that by emphasizing the importance of having a variety of viewpoints on the same matter, «O- Taheiti» displays an aspect of his self-reflexive anthropology - a comparative mode of thinking, which was one of the techniques he practiced to arrive at some probable (and/ or possible) and believable truth among the apparently different and often chaotic observations provided by a variety of travel reports. It enabled Forster to discuss within the text with a concrete example how the act of observation is acculturated, and how narrated observations turn out to be mediated, which he directed towards improving his readers ’ tolerance towards a provisional, composite, and temporal truth in travel literature anthropology. Ultimately Forster did not actually tell his readers «what» the human being is by providing them either with a classificatory or historical understanding; instead he engaged (and sought to educate) his readers ’ understanding by confronting them with «how» one should go about gathering the information about human beings, «how» one should formulate it, and present it. In the summer of 1778, the director of the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, Don Casimir Gomez Ortega sent Forster ’ s father - Johann Reinhold Forster - a copy of a travel report on the island of Tahiti written in Spanish, which can be found today among Georg Forster ’ s posthumous documents on geography (Fiedler 686). It has been conjectured 3 that the Spanish source text on Tahiti - a report on the author ’ s one-month stay on the island - was written by a certain Captain Don Domingo Boenecha between 1773 and 1775, based on his first travel to the island in 1772. 4 Forster acquired this report from his father, and decided to translate it into German. As the date at the bottom of the translation indicates, Forster finished the translation in November 1779, and perhaps immediately sent it for publication to his scientist and writer friend, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Fiedler 685). Forster, financially dependent on his translation work, did not attribute 213 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature much creative thought to his translations. Rather, in a letter to another philosopher friend, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, dated 10 December 1779, he wrote of himself as an automated «translating machine» that lacked the ability to create something original: «Ich glaube vom Göttingischen Magazin wird ein Stück auf Neujahr fertig [. . .]. Ein Fetzen von mir, jedoch nur Uebersetzung einer spanischen Handschrift über O-Tahiti, welche ich besitze. So eine Uebersetzmaschine bin ich, daß ich leider! Nichts eigenes denken kann» (Forster, Briefe 260). The translated essay, however, was more than a mere translation of the original report: it turned into a commentary on the subject of the island of Tahiti as well as on travel writing in general. Broadly speaking, one can divide Forster ’ s translation into three sections - a short introduction to the origin of Boenecha ’ s text, the actual translation of the source text, and Forster ’ s comments on the information provided in the source text. The comment section is by far the longest part of the text, even longer than the translation of the source text. As Forster highlighted in the self-review of the first part of his Kleine Schriften, the «O-Taheiti» translation supplements the Spanish source text with «einen ohngefähr dreymal so langen Commentar, welcher eine Art von Topographie jener berühmten Entdeckungen enthählt [sic]» (Fiedler 686). By adding a translator ’ s commentary to the information provided by the Spanish author, Forster established himself as the mediator, who intended to provide his reading public with the right kind of information, to «facilitate the comparison» with other reports about the island and to educate them in the act of reading travel literature as such («O-Taheiti» 38). At the same time, translating a travel report and supplementing it with extensive commentary was Forster ’ s way of intervening into the ongoing contemporaneous discussions about the study of humanity and anthropology in general. As recent scholarly research on Forster ’ s «Übersetzungsfabrik» (Roche 103 - 05) argued, Forster ’ s main intent in providing the German readership with translations of various travelogues was to keep the German readers abreast of the information about newly discovered parts of the world through the various voyages of the era (Martin, «Forsters Übersetzungen» 60 - 62). He, therefore, often questioned and rectified information in the source text by providing supplementary materials either in the body or the paratext of the target-language text (Martin, «Annotation and Authority» 200). Forster ’ s «fidelity» was not to the form or to the content of the source text as such but to the veracity of the information provided therein, for according to his understanding, the purpose of travel literature was to serve the spread of knowledge. In accordance with these objectives, it was, for instance, a common practice not to translate the entire text, and to publish 214 Madhuvanti Karyekar only a selected and abbreviated translated text - partly because the publishers of travel literature (translated or otherwise) were usually in close competition with other publishers, and partly because the translators were focused on presenting only the newly acquired, credited information, and thus avoiding repetition of the material (Martin, «Forster und die Reiseliteratur» 1635). Martin further maintains that in the spirit of providing the most useful and accurate information through their translations, the translators changed the original to such an extent that, practically, one has to consider the translation a completely different work (1635). In her article on the role of translators ’ prefaces in late eighteenth-century travelogues, Birgit Tautz purported that late eighteenth-century conventions of translating travelogues often involved «cutting portions of the original, and fabricating facts about travel, in accordance with a particular ideology or philosophy on the part of the writer, translators, and/ or editor» (155). This was due to the fact that the relationship between translation and authorship in terms of hierarchy was yet to be clearly defined. Working in the wake of Johann Christoph Gottsched ’ s «enlightened, normative poetics,» many translators felt obliged «to improve, expand or abridge» if the original text called for better (re)presentation. 5 The practice of translating travel literature also stood in close relation to the purpose of travel writing in the late eighteenth century, which was to educate the reading public about the geographically and culturally distant as well as newly discovered parts of the world as faithfully as possible (Martin, «Forster und die Reiseliteratur» 1635). Forster ’ s understanding of travel literature as an important part of the organization of knowledge was also shaped by the special conditions of eighteenth-century reading circles. The end of the eighteenth century saw a large increase in travel literature in the book markets. Travel books played an especially important role in bringing knowledge of the world beyond Europe to the educated public at a time when it was difficult to distinguish between geography and travel books, especially those concerning the non-European world (Tzoref-Ashkenazi 3). Indeed, travel books were among the most popular literary genres and were well-represented in private libraries, in the stocks of reading societies, and in commercial lending libraries. But at the same time, this proliferation meant that public opinion was forming on the way these travel accounts were written. 6 By the late eighteenth century, travel narratives were traditionally seen as falling into two groups: the instructive account and the travel narrative written purely for entertainment (Batten 7 - 8). Then there were literary fictional accounts, which were not based on actual travels, but emulated the style of the travel literatures in essence. 215 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature Such fictional accounts confronted their readers with the «foreign,» which made them reflect on their «own» culture, society, and social milieu in general. Montesquieu ’ s Lettres Persians (1721) and Jonathan Swift ’ s Gulliver ’ s Travels (1726) belonged to this third category, as they introduced the early conceptions of cultural relativism. Considering the popularity of these works, many authors of travel literature decided to follow the lighter fictive style, where they emphasized the elements of exotic and cultural differences. But unlike Lettres Persians or Gulliver ’ s Travels, these works often failed to reach a fruitful comparative analysis of the familiar and foreign cultures (Wolff 6 - 9). Also, following the publication of Laurence Sterne ’ s Sentimental Journey (1768), there was a tendency to overemphasize the travelers ’ sentimental (emotional) responses in the written account. Forster criticized the style of those who exaggerated the emotional as well as those who were too pedantic and talked about a new form of travel writing in his preface to A Voyage Round the World, which he described as «philosophical history of the voyage» (14). He wanted to achieve the self-implicating and thought-provoking literary style as practiced by Montesquieu and Swift, a writing technique that did not just enumerate the events of the voyage in a dry manner, but invoked an intellectual participation of the readers by presenting them with the traveler ’ s insights. He also incorporated the traveler ’ s emotional response to the surroundings in the descriptive process. At the same time, he did not want to overemphasize the role of the traveler-writer ’ s imagination. Forster ’ s approach to converging the traveler-writer ’ s imagination with the observed empirical facts toward a synthetic middle ground can be described by Moravia ’ s idea of «epistemological liberalization» (247 - 50). Moravia postulated that the mainstream of the eighteenth century distinguished itself from the seventeenth century in one major aspect: where the seventeenth century identified science substantially within physics and mathematics, favoring «categories and procedures of an abstract, systematizing, deductive, and nomological type,» the eighteenth century discovered that epistemology also needs «rehabilitation of senses,» «inductive construction of explanatory models,» and the «pluralization of cognitive strategies,» among others (248). As Zammito noted, Diderot ’ s Pensées sur l ’ Interprétation de la Nature [Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, 1753] offered an example of how «interpretation» - a poetic or hermeneutic approach - can be extended to the natural sciences. According to Zammito, Diderot believed in the place of hypothesis in empirical science, but insisted that this hypothesis should be imaginative, in that there should be a place for «imagination, analogy, and every individual creative and inventive faculty» 216 Madhuvanti Karyekar (qtd. in Zammito 229). Accordingly, Diderot distinguished between the mere observateur, what in today ’ s language would be a positivist, and the interprete, one who would seek general principles behind the observed phenomena (229). In assimilating the perspectival and physio-temporal limits in travel narration, Forster certainly «interpreted» his (and other travelers ’ ) observations and presented them as a part of his more scientifically oriented inquiry of the phenomena. In that regard, one can find in his conception of observation and its narration an influence and development of «epistemological liberalization» in the first half of the eighteenth century as proposed by Buffon, Blumenbach, and Diderot, among others. But Forster differed from them in one important respect - he did not find himself torn «between metaphysical allegiances to dualistic spiritualism and models in empirical life science that clearly undermined such neat distinctions» (Zamitto 233). He chose to bracket the more metaphysical questions (such as whether reason and language belong to a divine, spiritual intervention), and did not decide in favor of one way or the other. He instead focused more on the question of how one should guide the anthropological inquiry that is a merger of «observation» and «interpretation,» to use Diderot ’ s distinctions. Thus, in writing a travel narrative, Forster set himself a goal of presenting his experiences not only within the context of the natural world he described, but also with special attention to the cultural, national, and temporal context of the observing subject. He reviewed and translated various travel reports with the same goal in mind - he accordingly shaped his comments on the style and content of the translated text. In justifying his act and the nobility of his intention in translating the Spanish text, Forster observed: Unsere Begriffe von Völkern, welche nur selten besucht werden, und uns Deutschen wenigstens nur vom Hörensagen bekannt geworden sind, dürften leicht eine schiefe Richtung bekommen, zumal wenn wißbegierige und wahrheitsliebende Leser nicht den Wunsch befriedigen können: in Ermangelung des eigenen Anschauens, in so viele Gesichtspunkte als möglich geführt zu werden, von wannen andere gesehen haben; und ihre Nachrichten unter einander zu vergleichen. («O-Taheiti» 35) This «we» - a cumulative term Forster used here for «Germans» - can easily form not-so-accurate notions about the non-European parts of the world and their inhabitants, especially those that are rarely visited; the danger of forming lopsided notions is even greater for the Germans, according to Forster, for they get the newer information about the recently discovered parts of the world most of the time only through second-hand information. 217 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature As a result, readers form incorrect conceptions about these newly discovered peoples and parts of the world. Forster thereby implicitly commented on the need to undertake more voyages to the least-visited places on earth, and on the (un)fortunate situation of the German people, who could not participate in such voyages of exploration as they lacked an empire that could fund such voyages of discovery. Since the views of the German readers about «foreign» peoples and places were often based on second-hand information, Forster continued, they seemed to be misconstrued. Forster further argued that the danger of forming misconceptions would still remain, even if the «inquisitive» and «truth-loving» readers wished to sieve through the hearsay for more truthful information. This is so, Forster observed, because German readers usually do not get access to the range of travel reports that could provide them with various points of views on one matter. In translating yet another report on Tahiti, Forster aimed to provide his readers with an additional viewpoint on Tahiti, one that his readers could compare with that of Bougainville, Cook, J. R. Forster, or anyone else. He acknowledged that readers already might have read many reports on the same subject, and precisely for this reason, the readers can now look beyond what is represented in the report. They could compare the information from various reports and see how each of them described for example the nature of the islanders, their lifestyle, their religion, and their morality. In a way, Forster was educating his readership to look for «how» rather than «what» was (re)presented in the travel narrative. What mattered in this case was providing readers with as many perspectives as possible. The benefits of reading various reports, Forster elaborated, lay in the context of individual and national identities and viewpoints, as well as the aesthetic appeal of «full color» reportage: Ein Jeder hat Gelegenheiten zum Sehen gehabt, die ihm eigen waren, und sich keinem anderen darboten. Ein jeder [sic] hat aber auch seine eigene Art zu sehen. Nationalcharakter, Nationalpolitik, Erziehung, Klima, und was sonst nicht alles? Sind eben so viele Häutchen im Auge, deren jedes die Strahlen anders bricht, wenn schon das anatomische Messer sie nicht finden kann. Allein wenn der Spanier, der Franzose, der Engländer und der Deutsche, ein jeglicher [sic] anders sehen, und sich darauf berufen ihr humor, aqueus, vitreus und crystallinus sey so gut beym einen wie beym andern; - alsdenn mag der Philosoph berechnen, welche Farben jene unkörperlichen Brillen spielen, und aus allen den bunten Resultaten die klare lautere Wahrheit zusammenschmelzen. («O-Taheiti» 35 - 36) For Forster, the way one observes is always innate to each observer. Even when two observers are observing one and the same event, their observations are expected to be singular and unique, because each observer decides 218 Madhuvanti Karyekar differently where to look, what to look at, and how to look at it. Already in the preface to his A Voyage Round the World (1777), he had argued that two travelers seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and moreover each reported the fact invariably differently, according to individual sensibilities and peculiar modes of thinking. For example, Forster and Captain Cook both had written their accounts of the second voyage of circumnavigation, but Forster believed that the readers should read both accounts, as they were bound to be different in their emphasis on and elaboration of the same events (13 - 14). This difference had to do partially with the fact that both Captain Cook and Forster were assigned different offices and duties on the journey. Since Captain Cook had a specific geographical task, his eye could have sought only the things that furthered his task at hand, whereas Forster, as he himself stated, had a freer hand to choose what to observe. But there would still be a difference of accounts, so Forster, were both Cook and Forster assigned to the same tasks. Forster ’ s discussion showed his early awareness of the fact that the selection of what to see, and the interpretation of what one has seen, depends on the prior acculturation of information from the observer. As a temporal and dynamic human being, every observer is bound to observe in a manner that is unique to him and him alone. 7 Add to this uniqueness all the extra qualities such as «Nationalcharakter, Nationalpolitik, Erziehung, Klima, und was sonst nicht alles? » which affect the way reality is perceived. All these external factors impose on observation, according to Forster, «perspectival limits,» a phrase Barnouw used to describe Forster ’ s understanding of the «colored glass» through which every observer is bound to look (324 - 25). The perspectival limitations, this «colored glass» through which the individual viewer must look, or the «Häutchen im Auge,» enable and drive the observation, impacting what the observer sees, or rather chooses to see. His use of the term «Häutchen im Auge» is apt, for it can be understood either as the actual clear liquids (or membranes as in aqueous humor, vitreous humor, and crystalline humor) in the eyes, or metaphorical layers formed as a response to the process of acculturation - the layers which we gain as we keep growing in a certain environment, culture, society, and so on. Barnouw has observed that Forster always used the spelling «Eräugnis» for the German «Ereignis» (event) (338). In so doing, Barnouw argued, Forster emphasized the link of the object to visual perception, for «Eräugnis» stresses the etymological connection between event and the perception of the same through the eyes: Old High German (ir)ougen, «to have in front of eyes,» turned into Middle High German eröugnen, eröugen. The English «event» is also developed from Latin evenire, «to come out» (Barnouw 328). 219 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature In other words, in using «Eräugnis» over «Ereignis,» Forster consciously emphasized the witnessing eye (and «I») behind every observation. Forster ’ s self-reflective incorporation of the observer (his «eyes» and «I» both) in the narrated observation looks consciously at the fact that our observations become mediated through these invisible layers in our eyes. This mediation, however, is not negative or obstacle creating for Forster. On the contrary, just as the clear liquids in our eyes contribute to the optical power of the eye, the metaphorical layers or films also enhance our capacity to observe - they help us observe things with perspectives. The metaphorical (and invisible) layers in our eyes, in fact, turn our views into viewpoints, or Sichten into Ansichten. Moreover, because of this «individual manner of seeing,» no matter how strenuously one aims to provide scientifically objective facts, the ethnographic observation is bound to be less than objective. In other words, the particular observations can never guarantee universal approval that the scientific fact of the gravitational force can have. Such observations, however, can provide the readers with various «veritable» facts. Provided that, so Forster, any countryman (the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Englishman, or the German) sees differently and uses his eyes well to grasp what reality presents before him (hence the appeal to use all three humors of the eye as well as an appeal to everybody to do it equally well), none of those facts will and can be universally true, but they should and can be relatively true. In this manner, the observer can only make a claim for Wahrscheinlichkeit rather than absolute, certain Wahrheit. The truthfulness that Forster expected to find in travel narratives is connected to his self-awareness that a traveler ’ s observations do not have claim to the ultimate truth. All he emphasized then, was that the traveler should report all he saw and how he saw it, without letting his judgment getting clouded by any racial or cultural prejudices. While contemplating another limitation of human observation and how to tackle it in travel narratives, Forster observed in «Cook der Entdecker»: In der That ist es offenbar, daß so vieler wiederholten Besuche ungeachtet, unsere Kenntniß von jener Insel noch jezt [sic] sehr unvollkommen seyn müsse, und daß es auch schlechterdings unmöglich sey, auf Entdeckungsreisen, die einen bestimmten Zweck haben, den ganzen Umfang aller Verhältnisse eines jeden neuentdeckten Landes zu erschöpfen. (259) Forster wrote this piece in 1787, almost twelve years after his first visit to Tahiti and claimed that knowledge about Tahiti was still incomplete, despite repeated visits by various travelers. He was not blaming the method of any observer in particular here. On the contrary, he was pointing out the obvious: that it was impossible to grasp things in their entirety on these voyages of discovery. First of all, such voyages were driven by specific motives. The crew 220 Madhuvanti Karyekar employed in the service of the employer went after the facts that they were supposed to look for. Secondly, these voyages were for a limited time period. Forster asked in relation to such a goal: How many of the actions and events making up the main points of a broader picture are likely to take place in the short span of a traveler ’ s stay? For example, he stated that Cook visited the Tahitian islands four times and only during his last visit did he witness a human sacrifice. Forster accepted that the observations made during a limited period will be insufficient to give «complete» knowledge about nature (flora, fauna, wild life, and human life) - every season produces its own flowers and fruits, animals and birds change their habitats, and these environmental changes affect the human life inhabiting these regions. In view of these limitations, Forster claimed, «dem Reisenden bleibt unter diesen Umständen weiter nichts übrig, als aufmerksam zu beobachten, und das gesehene [sic] treu zu erzählen» («Cook der Entdecker» 259). Forster mainly asked that the travel writers be self-conscious about and accordingly integrate these limitations of observation in the way they recounted their observations, and proposed further that it will be the task of readers to put together the «klare lautere Wahrheit» from any given travel report by comparing and contrasting the presented facts («O-Taheiti» 65). With the essay «O-Taheiti,» Forster hoped to make his readers aware of the intricacies involved in the act of observation and narration of those observations in travel writing. He accepted that the Spanish report on Tahiti Island did not provide any new information as such, nevertheless in order to be fair to the very mode of travel writing, even the confirmation of what had already been told should not be neglected by the researcher of humanity. Therefore, Forster wrote, «Es wird auch manche Beobachtung hier mitgetheilt, welche entweder den unsrigen zuwider läuft, oder gänzlich in unseren Werken fehlt, und über einige Gegenstände neues Licht verbreitet» («O-Taheiti» 36). The Spanish account was valuable in spite of and because of its distortions, contradictions, and occasional lack of information. This is the part where Forster consciously assumed the role of the traveler who was not just a person proficient in the source and the target language, but a person who was an expert on the subject matter as well. He placed himself in front of his readers as a translator who not only had been there, but had also kept abreast with new information on the subject matter. Thus Forster remarked at the beginning of the comment section: «So weit ich befugt bin, von dieser Nachricht zu urtheilen, trägt sie das Gepräge der Zuverlässigkeit» («O- Taheiti» 48). He referred directly to his authority, his «Befugt-Sein» (having power of/ capacity of) that enabled him to judge the credibility of the information provided. For example, he observed in the beginning that 221 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature Was die Lage der Insel, ihre äußerliche Beschaffenheit, Größe und natürlichen Produkte; die Bildung der Einwohner, und ihre Arbeiten betrifft, weicht fast gar nicht von den Berichten ab, die Wallis, Bougainville, Cook und ich davon abgelegt haben. Über das Klima, die sittliche Verfassung und die Religion liefert er interessante Bemerkungen, und wo er die Art sich zu kleiden, sowohl als die Verfertigung des Zeuges beschreibt, wird manches wie mich dünkt, noch faßlicher als zuvor gesagt. («O-Taheiti» 48) Here, Forster presented the Spanish report «in comparison» to previous travel reports and created an intertext by situating his translation in relation to other similar travel reports. He thereby highlighted that he had first-hand as well as meticulously expanded knowledge of the subject. Therefore he went on commenting that the information provided by the original author was credible, as it did not deviate from what others had said before. In some places, he even praised the original author for narrating some things more accurately than others had done before, and at other times he credited the author with providing native names of the plants and places on the island. By juxtaposing the author ’ s information with earlier information, Forster underlined his own capacity to add comments, to correct some information, and to pronounce criticism on the manner of the narration. He positioned himself so as to convince readers that he was the ultimate - and trustworthy - expert on the subject matter. He proceeded very methodically by citing what the original author had said, imbuing it every now and then with his critical remarks based on his own experiences and observations on Tahiti, and what he had read in other travel reports. For the most part, Forster was in agreement with what Captain Boenecha described. But when it came to the description of the characters of the islanders, Forster noted that, «Wer die englischen und französischen Nachrichten von ‹ O-Taheiti › ohne Vorurtheil gelesen hat, wird ebenfalls Spuren der spanischen Denkart in der Schilderung finden, die der Ungenannte hier von dem Charakter unserer Insulaner macht [. . .]» («O-Taheiti» 64). In other words, Forster emphasized that in the characterization of the islanders, the readers are not only reading factual information, but also a Spanish way of interpretation. The Spanish report described - and here we will just have to rely on Forster ’ s German translation of the source text - the Tahitians as follows: Die Insulaner sind gelehrig, sehr verständig und geschickt. Sie lieben die Bequemlichkeit und den Müssiggang; sind schlau und diebisch [. . .], gierig im Essen, und ausschweifend in der Wollust, wovon die häufigen Statuen von schändlicher Gestalt im ganzen Bezirke der Insel, ein Zeugniß gaben. Sie lassen sich von ihren Weibern gänzlich regieren [. . .]. («O-Taheiti» 44) 222 Madhuvanti Karyekar What Forster found decisively Spanish in this description was the Spanish author ’ s definitive way of describing the Tahitians - i. e., Boenecha just pronounced «das Urtheil» that the Tahitians were cunning and larcenous (64). He did not explain how these characteristics are situated in the cultural and environmental context of Tahiti. On that note, while commenting on Boenecha ’ s view of looking at the character of the islanders, Forster observed, «Ich will ihnen [den Tahitianern] hiemit keineswegs ihre natürlichen Fähigkeiten und Anlagen, weder die Verschlagenheit und das diebische Wesen, noch den Hang zur Bequemlichkeit und zur Wollust abläugnen, worüber schon so vieles anderweitig bekannt geworden ist» («O- Taheiti» 64). Forster made explicit that he was not denying the observation (i. e., the possible events on which Boenecha based his remarks). From his own experience, he knew that there was a grain of truth in what Boenecha observed. His objection, however, was to the way Boenecha recounted his observations. By presenting his observations as the ultimate facts, Boenecha, argued Forster, observed in many cases hastily («eilfertig gesehen») and pronounced his verdict even more hastily («und noch eilfertiger geurtheilt») («O-Taheiti» 67) - a folly which Forster himself tried to avoid in his own travel writing since the days of his very first travelogue. Consequently, before declaring a judgment that Tahitians are by nature thieves, Boenecha ’ s report, according to Forster, should have mentioned that their life style is quite simple and their daily needs to sustain their existence were easily fulfilled by their surroundings. Therefore when they saw something like European goods (tools, food), they got an irresistible desire to see its use for themselves. For them, the concept of «ownership» might not exist. For if they had that concept, they would not have allowed the travelers to roam their land as freely as they did. If, Forster continued, one wanted to talk about the idleness of the Tahitians, one should mention that the nature of the island provided them with enough food for their basic needs. And one should remember that hard work was only born out of need and deficiency. If one calls them greedy and voracious eaters, then one should also recall and talk about their big stature, their extraordinary strength in wrestling, and their corpulence («O-Taheiti» 64 - 65). Virtue and vice, Foster concluded, were relative concepts, which had to be judged by the standards of the culture that embodied them. «Auf diese Weise vermeiden wir den Vorwurf, daß wir fremden Völkern unsere Gedanken leihen, und uns dafür das Recht nehmen, sie nach dieser unbilligen Voraussetzung zu züchtigen oder loßzulassen» (64). By using the collective pronoun «wir,» Forster addressed, engaged, and directed his readers ’ attention to the ways one ought to describe observations and events. 223 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature He explained this point further by giving his readers an example, one from a European context they would understand. He maintained, while a layman would easily judge Northern Europeans to be overeaters, doctors and dissectors would know that Northern Europeans are overeaters only in relation to the eating habits of Southern Europeans. In fact, a Northern European is not an overeater at all, but eats according to the «Richtschnur» (guideline) of his bodily demands as defined by cultural standards and environmental conditions. The layman does not consult or draw together the differences in climate and their impact on the body, therefore he judges hastily. In contrast, doctors and dissectors take into account other factors that work as guidelines for his/ her behavior and only then form their judgment («O-Taheiti» 65). Clearly, Forster wanted his readers to be those «dissectors and doctors» who gather enough information about the context before pronouncing the judgment. Also, in emphasizing the individuality of observation and justifying his translation on the ground of this individuality, Forster was giving his reading public his own example of how one should practice anthropological enquiry. Foster had visited Tahiti twice during his circumnavigation with Captain Cook, he had written about the island, its inhabitants, and their way of life in English and in German. Still, he could not remain «indifferent» to the Spanish report on Tahiti. In other words, he performed the task of the philosopher that he so clearly described - «alsdenn mag der Philosoph berechnen, welche Farben jene unkörperlichen Brillen spielen, und aus allen den bunten Resultaten die klare lautere Wahrheit zusammenschmelzen» («O-Taheiti» 35 - 36). As he claimed elsewhere, the diversity of the represented viewpoints should whet the appetite of the reader for the new, the unknown, the not-yet experienced. He was convinced that the more these reports differed in detail from each other, the more entertaining they would become in allowing readers to travel in their imagination with these narrations. And the more variety of viewpoints presented in these accounts, the more satisfying the pursuit of knowledge would be for the readers in «guessing» (erraten) the true character of the inhabitants and the real nature of the land («Über die Insel Madagaskar» 625). Forster ’ s insistence on gaining access to a variety of travel reports is justified considering the time of his activity, when dissemination of gathered knowledge happened mainly through the distribution of books and periodicals. It was also the time when Europe was becoming aware of other «cultural» parts of the world - of the fact that «there were other Europes» as Raymond Schwab stated (7). Knowing as much as possible about the rest of world by comparing and contrasting the informa- 224 Madhuvanti Karyekar tion from these accounts was, according to Forster, indeed advantageous to the mind of the readers, who could at least travel vicariously. Of course, Forster clarified, travel reports could never take the place of the actual experience of having been there, having eye-witnessed the events, but such reports could at least give those among his readers who could not travel to these places an idea about the world outside of their daily life. For a chance to compare various reports about the same place meant not to confront the world «im todten Buchstaben,» but to research the world in the traveler ’ s spirit, and with his knowledge and art of perception («Über die Insel Madagaskar» 625 - 26). In that regard, «O-Taheiti» also delineated the role of the philosopher-reader, who had the task of looking at all the impressions gathered by various individuals and then summarizing the information by performing a contrastive analysis so as to arrive at the idea of truth about the facts. Forster ’ s translation was an example for his readers, and he was actually asking them to take on that task by reading as many travelogues as possible so that they might be exposed to a plethora of information. At the same time, he made his readers conscious of the fact that the truth from this comparative reading would always be composite, relational, and therefore shifting, but not, for this reason, less important a goal for his readers. Notes 1 This article follows the translation published in the «Akademie Ausgabe» of Forster ’ s collected works, which is based on the reprint from 1789. According to the editors of the volume, the differences between the two editions were limited - in the later version, Forster left out critical comments on Buffon and his school, and revised a section on religious practices in Tahiti (Fiedler 687). 2 It should be made clear here that late eighteenth-century German anthropology was not yet divided into two defined branches that separated the theory of anthropology from its practice; however, two groups of tasks - observation, description, and collection in the field; and theorizing about human nature, origins, history, lifestyles, and civilization - were usually carried out by two separate groups of people: the task in the field - the practical anthropology - was performed by travelers (including captains, scientists on the expeditions, sailors); and the task of speculation and theorizing by philosophers and professors in Europe, relying on the empirical information provided by the first group (Esleben 26). Both groups, however, aimed at providing material to build a comprehensive narrative of humanity. Forster was the first of the ethnographic observers who was also a naturalist, not only more capable of observing, but also more disposed to analyze and generalize his observations, at the same time firmly grounding them in the observer ’ s experience (Ackerknecht 85 - 86). 225 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature 3 The editors of volume 5 mention that when Ortega sent the report to J. R. Forster, he did not disclose details about the origin of it, so that even Georg Forster could only surmise about the author: «Er hat nicht für gut befunden, sich zu nennen, allein er ist entweder Officier oder Wundarzt, und wahrscheinlich das erstere gewesen» («O-Taheiti» 38). Another report, which was signed by Boenechea and could be found in an archive of the official documents of the General of India in Sevilla, was translated into English by B. G. Corney in 1913. The editors purport that the Spanish source text was most probably written by Boenechea, for Forster ’ s source text contains some passages similar to Corney ’ s English translation of Boenechea ’ s report (Fiedler 686). 4 As competition to the increasing number of British and French expeditions in the Pacific, the Spanish government had started to send ships from Peru to the West more frequently, so that they could retain their claim on some of the newly discovered island territories or lands of the Pacific Ocean as well as establish new missionary stations there. So it happened that Captain Don Domingo Boenechea set out from the port of Callao in 1772 with the frigate Santa Maria Magdalena, or Aguila (Adler), and reached the island of Tahiti on 19 November 1772 where he resided until December 20. He returned to Callao in April 1773 and set out again on 20 September 1774 with the Aguila and an accompanying ship carrying two Franciscan Fathers with the intention of converting the Tahitians to Christianity and acquiring the land for Spain. Boenechea died during this second stay on Tahiti, which lasted from 27 November 1774 to the end of January 1775. Very soon after, the Franciscan Fathers gave up on converting the Tahitians to Christianity and eventually returned to Callao with Captain Don Cajatano de Langara, again onboard the Aguila (Fiedler 685). 5 Tautz ultimately claims that later eighteenth-century travelogues in translation defined translators ’ roles and the logic of translation in a complex manner. Translation became more akin to writing, and translators assumed the role of a mediator «representing the foreign cultures, while simulating the community of readers, while asserting the self of a translator, who mimes, inevitably, an author» (157). Forster, with his numerous translator ’ s prefaces and translations with critical comments, embodies a translatorauthor. 6 According to Tzoref-Ashkenazi, when the book market was growing fast, travel literature expanded not only in absolute numbers but also in terms of its share of the entire market. This was not just a German phenomenon. According to one estimate, about half of the 15,000 travel books that were published in Europe during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries appeared during the second half of the eighteenth century, while the number of travel books that were published in Germany during the eighteenth century has been estimated at 5,000 to10,000. The growing numbers reflected the strong public demand (3 - 4). 7 Forster ’ s notion of a temporal human being owes a lot to Buffon ’ s influence on him. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 - 88), who is often commended as the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the eighteenth century, was a French naturalist and one of the prominent philosophers of the time who conceptualized nature as temporalized. He also developed further Montesquieu ’ s thought that the «environment» - milieu and climate - is important in the reconstruction of human experience. It has been argued that up to Buffon ’ s time, man had never been studied, except as an individual; Buffon was the first who studied man as belonging to a species (Zammito 228, 441). Zammito states that the same thought was further developed by Blumenbach and systematized by the Scottish Enlightenment. For 226 Madhuvanti Karyekar Forster ’ s reading of the Scottish Enlightenment and its influence on this voyage see Uhlig, «Theoretical or Conjectural History.» Works Cited Ackerknecht, Erwin H. «George Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Ethnology.» Isis 46.2 (1955): 83 - 95. Barnouw, Dagmar. «Eräugnis: Georg Forster on the Difficulties of Diversity.» Impure Reason: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany. Ed. Robert C. Holub and Daniel W. Wilson. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993. 322 - 43. Batten, Charles. Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth- Century Travel Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Esleben, Jörg. Enlightement Canvas: Cultures of Travel, Ethnographic Aesthetics, and Imperialist Discourse in Georg Forster ’ s Writings. Diss. U of Rochester, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1999. Forster, Georg. A Voyage Round the World (1777). Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 1. Ed. Robert L. Kahn. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968. - . Briefe bis 1783. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 13. Ed. Siegfried Scheibe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978. - . «Cook der Entdecker.» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 183 - 319. - . «O-Taheiti.» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 35 - 71. - . «Über die Insel Madagaskar [Zu: Des Abbés Rochon Reise nach Madagaskar und Ostindien].» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 617 - 38. Fiedler, Horst, Klaus-Georg Popp, Annerose Schneider, and Christian Suckow. «Erläuterungen: Einführung.» Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde. Georg Forsters Werke. Vol. 5. Ed. Horst Fiedler et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985. 677 - 815. Martin, Alison E. «Annotation and Authority: Georg Forster ’ s Footnotes to the Nachrichten von den Pelew-Inseln (1789).» Translation and Literature 15.2 (2006): 177 - 201. - . «Die Rolle von Georg Forsters Übersetzungen in den intellektuellen Netzwerken seiner Zeit: Thomas Forrests Voyage to New Guinea (1779).» Georg-Forster- Studien 12 (2007): 59 - 75. - . «Übersetzung und die Entdeckung der Welt: Georg Forster (1754 - 94) und die Reiseliteratur.» Übersetzung: ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. Harald Kittel, Juliane House, and Brigitte Schultze. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. 1634 - 41. Moravia, Sergio. «The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man.» History of Science 18 (1980): 247 - 68. 227 Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature Roche, Geneviève. « ‹ Völlig nach Fabrikenart › : Handwerk und Kunst der Übersetzung bei Georg Forster.» Weltbürger - Europäer - Deutscher - Franke: Georg Forster zum 200. Todestag. Ed. Rolf Reichardt and Geneviève Roche. Mainz: Universitätsbibliothek, 1994. 101 - 36. Schwab, Raymond. Oriental Renaissance: Europe ’ s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680 - 1880. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Tautz, Birgit. «Cutting, Pasting, Fabricating: Late 18th-Century Travelogues and their German Translators between Legitimacy and Imaginary Nations.» The German Quarterly 79.2 (2006): 155 - 74. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Chen. «The Experienced Traveller as a Professional Author: Friedrich Ludwig Langstedt, Georg Forster and Colonialism Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany.» History 95.317 (2010): 2 - 24. Uhlig, Ludwig. «Theoretical or Conjectural History. Georg Forsters Voyage Round the World im zeitgenössichen Kontext.» Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 53.4 (2003): 399 - 414. Wellmon, Chad. Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2010. Wolff, Larry. «Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment.» The Anthropology of the Enlightenment. Ed. Marco Cipolloni and Larry Wolff. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 3 - 34. Zammito, John H. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 228 Madhuvanti Karyekar
