Prepared for UNESCO Seminar on “Sharing Intangible Cultural Heritage: Narratives and Representations,” Oaxaca, January 2009. The material presented here was developed in lectures given at the University of California, Berkeley; Michigan State University, Kalamazoo; the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of California at San Diego; and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, University of Melbourne. Em diálogo direto com questões voltadas para a compreensão das dimensões linguísticas presentes em torno dos realinhamentos planetários, sociais, ecológicos, econômicos, políticos e imaginários impulsionados pela globalização contemporânea, o presente artigo está focado no diálogo sobre o papel e a importância da linguagem para a definição e mesmo determinação dos processos e transformações operadas por essa globalização, principalmente, levando em consideração a necessidade de inserir a língua no centro desse debate, como importante categoria de análise para a reflexão sobre a dinâmica das transformações em curso.

One example of how the humanities involved large-scale data collection is how the languages of the world were mapped in the heyday of European colonial expansion, from the late 18 th to the early 20 th century. As the 'science of language' (i.e. linguistics) took shape as a discipline, languages that were previously only known fragmentarily in the West if at all became objects of research. This was a process in which linguistic fieldwork was initially mainly done by missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and in which language classification overlapped with geography and ethnic (racial) classification. This article traces the various stages of this process, from late 18 th century comparative vocabularies and Lord's Prayer collections to large-scale state-sponsored surveys in the early 20 th century, like Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India and Boas' Handbook of American Indian Languages. Particularly it focuses on three interrelated aspects of that process: 1) how linguistic information was reformulated as abstracted and decontextualized data; 2) the use of language material as a specimen representing a linguistic and ethnic species; and 3) the intersection of language study with other disciplines.

This thesis recovers the practice of ‘armchair geography’ as an overlooked, yet significant aspect of the mid-nineteenth-century culture of exploration. These histories are popularly associated with such famed explorers as Dr David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke, who travelled across Africa. Yet, far from the field, there were other geographers, like William Desborough Cooley and James MacQueen, who spoke, wrote, theorised, and produced maps about the world based not on their own observations, but on the collation, interpretation, speculation, and synthesis of existing geographical sources. The dominant historical trope of geography through the nineteenth century is one of transition, shifting from an early modern textual practice of the ‘armchair’ to a modern science in the ‘field’. This thesis challenges such a limited view by demonstrating how critical practices continued to be a pervasive presence in the period 1830–1870, and how these two modes of geography co-existed and o...

Working forward from Hakluyt, this essay proposes a model for the discussion of the usually complicated way in which often one-time authors are generated out of explorers and travellers in the centuries before the age of professional travel writers.

This article deals with the textual legacy of Dutch Brazil, in particular the ethnographic descriptions in one of the most popular works about the colony: Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum. Barlaeus never set foot in Brazil, but was an important Dutch intellectual authority in the seventeenth century. To compose the Rerum per Octennium, he relied on a wide variety of available sources, not only firsthand observations, but also classical, biblical and other contemporary sources. From these, he made a careful selection to produce his descriptions. Recent research shows that the Dutch participated in networks of knowledge and imagination as well as in a more familiar early modern trading network. This article reveals that Barlaeus’ descriptions not only circulated as knowledge, but also produced new knowledge. The Rerum soon became one of the standard works about the colony due to the importance of its author and its composition. Furthermore, the article discusses the rhetorical techniques used in some selected descriptions in order to shed light upon the strategies Barlaeus used in his discourse on the strange reality of the New World. For example, his ethnographic descriptions employed parallel customs or events from the classical Antiquity or the Bible. In these comparisons he displays both his intellectual capacities and shows his desire to comprehend this exotic reality.

This article unravels a discourse of discovery in early English writings on India, suggesting that this discourse works through three stages. The first stage constructs a fantasy of discovery about India even before the Englishman’s arrival in the country. This demanded a representation of Indian wonders and the wondrous geographical-physical expansion of England into the distant reaches of the known world. In the second stage a narrative organization of the “discoveries” of Indian wealth and variety was achieved through the deployment of three dominant rhetorical modes—visuality, wonder, and danger. In the final stage the Englishman meticulously documented but also sought to explain the discoveries in the narrative form of the “inquiry.” The “inquiry” shifted the discourse from that of India as a wondrous space to India as knowable and therefore manageable one. The sense of wonder modulates into a more organized negotiation, as a quest for specific information and as means of providing this information. Keywords: discovery, early modern, English travel writing, India, narrative strategies

Geography was one of the instruments the Dutch used to master the knowledge about their colonial possessions. In the Dutch Indies, geographical knowledge was developed by the Dutch colonial government and introduced to the natives through schools. The school textbooks in the Dutch colonial periods were important media for disseminating the modern geography knowledge to the natives. By analysing three geography textbooks from 1875 to 1920, this paper examines how was a new spatial mode portrayed and disseminated through colonial textbooks of geography, and how did modern geography build a new subjectivity among the colonized society. Applying Foucauldian discourse analysis, this paper aims to explicate the roles of media in producing a new spatial mode in the Dutch Indies. This study finds that geography textbooks have introduced the Hindia Netherland as a single entity under the Dutch colonial power. The textbooks, as the narrative explanation of the map, have legitimized the map as an established truth. Not only trained the natives how to read the maps, they have also trained the natives how to make the maps. They have constructed a new mode of spatiality, through which the natives were perceived as individuals, placed in and belong to certain territories, no longer related to certain rulers. The modern geography was the perfect instrument of colonial epistemological domination. It has emerged as a new knowledge or power of humans and their regions, through which the Dutch colonial government has changed the traditional 'mandala' form of power into a modern 'geo-body' form