Can nineteenth-century British travel writing be considered ethnography? How would such a perspective impact theoretical considerations of nineteenth-century British travel writing? My presentation will develop an enlightening dialogue between nineteenth-century British travel writing and contemporary theoretical scholarship on ethnography. Such a dialogue will open the door to new insights into travel writing as a genre and, more particularly, new insights into the ways in which nineteenth-century British travel writers adapted and utilized this methodology.
Most often, current definitions of ethnography as an anthropological research method trace its roots back to Franz Boas' landmark ethnographic study, The Central Eskimo (1888), and to Edward Tylor's crucial contribution to ethnology, Primitive Culture (1871). These definitions argue that ethnographic writing developed as a "professional science" acting in direct contrast to what Bronislaw Malinowski, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1932), terms "Victorian bigotry." However, as Christopher Herbert, in Culture and Anomie (1991), suggests, these definitions are not only limiting, but perhaps misguided. Through debunking the "myth of objectivity," central to Malinowski's 1932 "creed" of ethnography, Herbert shows that ethnography toward the end of the nineteenth century was no more in the realm of "science" than was earlier travel writing criticized by Malinowski as evidencing "Victorian bigotry, complacency, ignorance, and hypocrisy."
Launching off from Herbert's argument, I will provide a new definition of ethnography, which will firmly implant its roots not only back to Herbert's eighteenth-century missionaries in Polynesia, but also to texts such as Abbe Dubois' Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India (1817) and Harriet Martineau's How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838). Resituating travel writing under the umbrella of ethnography then leads to important considerations of the ways in which British travelers adapted and utilized ethnography. Thus, following my redefinition of nineteenth-century travel writing as ethnography, my presentation will include a brief examination of how future scholarship on "travel writing" would benefit from consideration of contemporary ethnographic theory. I will touch on how ethnographic theory enlightens considerations of the ways in which nineteenth-century British travel writers worked to develop and maintain their cultural hegemony around the world, and the ways in which feminist ethnographic theory might enlighten considerations of nineteenth-century British female travel writers.
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