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canonical centers of Europe’s emerging genres of empirical ethnographies and literatures of observation. As scholars are increasingly appreciating, in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Europe’s growing encounters with cultural difference through various cultural contact zones
3—from zones of conquest along its own expanding borders to beyond, through missions, crusades, pilgrimages, and travels in the East—led to a growth in ethnographic curiosity about others and to the creative rebirth of empirical or observed ethnography, not seen in the West for some one thousand years.
4 Unlike the modern discipline of academic anthropology, ethnographic writing has a long premodern history and can be found wherever and whenever discrete cultural groups have moved across their borders to collide with customs and mores at variance with their own and had the means and motivation to record those differences. We cannot expect to identify these new medieval ethnographers through self-designation as “ethnographers” or designation of their works as “ethnographies”—instead they used terms like “descriptio” (description), “itinerarium” (journey), and “travels” to title their narratives. These terms suggest the extent to which ethnographic writing coupled with other genres of travel, including geography, topography, cosmography, pilgrimage, crusade, ambassadorial reports, and missionary reports, in the medieval period, as indeed, it would continue to do so until the modern era, when professional ethnography finally replaced the long-running unprofessional observations and “practical ethnographical ‘science’ of merchants, navigators, missionaries … [and] colonial administrators.”
5 But we can identify medieval ethnographic writers by a common language they share with each other and with modern practitioners of ethnography in describing their discursive aims. For the practitioners of early European ethnography consistently write of an intent to describe and record the differing manners and customs (Latin: “ritus et mores”; Old French: “coustumes”; Middle English: “maneres and lawes”) of the peoples they are observing.
6 The twelfth-century renaissance of classical learning notwithstanding, the rebirth of ethnography in the late medieval period took place without direct access to its most relevant classical literary and scientific models, such as Herodotus’s
Histories and Tacitus’s
Germania, underscoring the role of direct observation in the growth of the new genre. Along the expanding borders of twelfth-century Europe, Adam of Bremen wrote extensive descriptions of Scandinavian and Baltic peoples, and his continuator, Helmold, wrote an account of the pagan Slavic customs and religious rites.
7 Gerald of Wales, meanwhile, broke the mold of ethnography as an appendage to history to write arguably the first “ethnographic monograph” of the postclassical era, his
Description of Wales.
8 While the twelfth century saw such sporadic ethnographic activity, events of the thirteenth brought about an impressive spurt of ethnographic accounts of the Mongols, who had staged a series of devastating eastern European campaigns before suddenly receding in 1242 on the death of Great Khan Ogodei. Elected pope in 1243, Innocent IV responded both by renewing calls for a crusade on Europe’s eastern front and by organizing a series of missions to convert and collect information regarding the threatening empire to the east, which gradually came to be seen rather as a potential ally against the Muslims in the Middle East and as containing possible converts to Christianity. John of Plano Carpini’s mission of 1245–48 to Mongolia stands as an important breakthrough in empirical ethnography for its details and for classifications of Mongol life according to categories that recall Herodotus’s own.
9 But it was the Flemish William of Rubruck’s mission of 1253–55, sponsored by Louis IX, that yielded the most outstanding medieval example of accuracy in observation, and the most immediate and realistic of accounts of the thirteenth-century missions to Mongolia, one still admired as a source on Asian religions of the era.
10 Also in the thirteenth century, Marco Polo’s
Divisament dou monde (Description of the World), surviving in 130 manuscripts, set a future standard for lay ethnography in its attraction of a wide audience to ethnographic writing.
Mandeville’s Travels, in the fourteenth century, indicated the full potential of that medieval and post-medieval audience for descriptions of worldly diversity, surviving in over 300 manuscripts and dominating the genre of travel and ethnographic writings well into the sixteenth century.
11 Of my sources, only Jean de Joinville’s crusader account of life in Egypt and the Latin Kingdom, filled though it is with ethnographic content, is newly being treated as a seminal medieval “ethnographic” work. Its inclusion in this study serves as an important corrective to the frequent exclusion of the Crusades as a source of ethnographic production.
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The implications of the dialogic poetics of such seminal early European ethnographic writers as Gerald of Wales, William of Rubruck, and the Mandeville author are profound, and, as I show, rather different than the implications of multifocality as it has been elaborated in other, adjacent medieval representational disciplines such as chronicle writing and painting.13 For the recourse to external perspectives on Europe in a genre about cultural difference evinces a new self-scrutiny and self-consciousness about European cultural identity as seen from an outside perspective, often enough a politically more powerful one: here, as elsewhere, dialogism emerges from the margins of power.14 Dialogic engagement with alternative perspectives, moreover, implies the incorporation and integration of that alterity within one’s own emerging self-definition, a thesis that has emerged in a number of recent “postcolonial medieval” studies of European encounters with difference.15 The result, rather than the consolidation of European cultural identity through the encounter with difference, or a European self-confidence prefiguring that to come in the era of New World conquests,16 is the loosening, relativizing, and redefining of European identity through such encounter. A genre about difference that ends up stressing the difference of the home culture; a genre about difference that, rather than consolidating the identity of its readers and writer, exposes that identity to new and destabilizing perspectives on it; a genre about difference that incorporates that difference as part of the home culture’s self-definition: all of this rather turns what we know and think about ethnography, rooted as most of those assumptions are in its modern manifestations, on its head.
And all of this makes ethnography composed in light of another’s word a difficult and dangerous proposition for medieval authors and their audiences. As the chapters that follow show, such a dialogic ethnography exposes ethnographer-writers as well as their audiences to the unfamiliar and heterodox voices, words, and gazes of medieval Europe’s others, and, inextricably linked to these, to medieval Europeans’ own considerable feelings of discomfort and disorientation before such worldly perspectives. In their display of such European disorientation, these ethnographies attest to a number of related features of late medieval European encounters that are central to the book’s thesis. First, they stand as a record of premodern affect: namely, of the uneasy, disquieting feelings that often attended engagements with difference in spaces of dialogic encounter in the premodern period. Far from simply celebrating worldly diversity, these intercultural ethnographic accounts instead attest to the difficulty of true intercultural engagement with alterity and to the frequent discomfort of self-scrutiny and self-consciousness before the gazes of cultural and religious others. They show that the voices and gazes of the other—rather than a mere projection or fantasy of that self as Orientalist criticism would suggest—amounted to an irreducible force capable of significantly disorienting the medieval European self. And they attest, perhaps above all, to the productive force of such disorientation, which pushed ethnographers and their audiences well beyond the anchoring stability of Latin Christendom’s received orthodoxies—those of crusade, mission, and classical anthropologies—into unscripted terrain, where there could and did emerge new modes of thinking about both self and other. Finally, such new modes of thinking and writing in light of another’s word signal the strikingly still open nature of European identity itself in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, an openness replete, as we will see, with both possibilities and hazards.
In tracing the reciprocal gazes of selves and others engaged in dialogic encounter, In Light of Another’s Word also uncovers a history of the premodern ethnographic gaze and of the visual poetics of ethnography before empire. These, I show, diverge in several, decisive ways from modern ethnographic poetics. As Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford have found in separate studies of ethnographic form, the conventions of twentieth-century “formal” ethnography developed in such a way as to deny the participation of the ethnographer in the field as observer, despite the fact that
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