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Transcript of Burton, Kingsley & Pratt
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Jordan Voltz
Prof. Joshi
Engl - 210B Intro to English Studies
Prompt #3
10/13/13
The Familiar Exotic
While undoubtedly serving as enjoyable reading, 18th
and 19th
century travel writing had
the potential to be extremely harmfu. Richard Burton, in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage
to Al-Madinah and Mecca, and Mary Kingsley, author of Travels in West Africa, chronicle their
experiences in foreign lands by describing the cultures and lands they witness in terms and
concepts that are familiar to their European readers. This is problematic because these authors, in
making the cultures understandable by their European readers, fail to capture the intricacies of
these foreign societies, providing a discrepancy between their description of reality and reality
itself. In order to do this, these European authors craft an image of these foreign cultures which
their audiences would consider exotic and unique, yet uncivilized and savage. Mary Louise Pratt,
in her book Imperial Eyes, elucidates the issues with classifying these cultures as so; these
authors are cultivating the perception that these societies are prime for conquest and would
benefit from European culture and civilization1.
Burton and Kingsley demonstrate Pratt’s ideas of conquest through their descriptions of
the natives they encounter by applying their own foreign standards on appearance, religious
tendencies, and customs without understanding the functions of these elements within their local
society. This creates an exotic, yet familiar image of the native society which allows the
1Pratt, Mary Louise. From Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation (NY: Routlege, 1992) pg. 61
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Europeans to easily conceptualize the culture for the social and economic conquest discussed by
Pratt.
Burton and Kingsley, in their respective texts, describe the appearance of the native
inhabitants that they encounter from their own European perceptions, creating a misaligned view
of these cultures that is expressed within their writing. Pratt describes these actions as destructive
to the observed culture, creating severe misunderstandings of the existence of their society in
order to allow them to be classified inside of the European model of understanding2. In Burton’s
travels, he refers to a Meccan woman wearing a hija b as, “Here stalked the Badawi woman, in
her long black robe like a nun's serge, and poppy-coloured face-veil, pierced to show two
fiercely flashing orbs.3” In this quote, Bur ton classifies this woman’s hija b as a religious
garment, even though he only invites comparisons to it. The passage this quote is derived from
(as well as the near-entirety of the text) is primarily concerned with giving the reader a view of
the strangeness and similarities of Meccan religious customs, with the expectation that the “nun’s
serge” will be considered exotic, yet recognizable enough to include. However, Burton fails to
give any explanation for the function of the hijab within the culture and expects it to be passed
off as a curiosity that better indicates the similarities between his culture and Muslim culture.
Pratt understands this as a form of “systematizing nature”4
in which European naturalists
attempted to objectively verify their perceptions of the world, creating a clear standard of
“civilized” and “uncivilized”5.
Kingsley is primarily concerned with creating the perception of the uncivilized savage
when she describes the native chief as, “a villainous looking savage, [although] he behaved most
2Pratt 61
3Burton, Richard. From Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (NY: Dover, vol.2) pg. 173
4Pratt 25
5Pratt 32
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hospitably and kindly.6” In this quote, Kingsley is very clearly acknowledging that the chief’s
appearance is his defining trait and, although she does provide an aside reflecting upon his
personality, she is primarily concerned with how he fits into her uncivilized ideas of West
Africa. While Kingsley comes to the conclusion that the chief is uncivilized, she also provides
descriptions of his very civil behavior. This illuminates the interests that her society clearly
holds- a vested interested in the objectification of the European mindset and perspective which
invites alien cultures to exist as uncivilized within its shadow. Burton and Kingsley’s judgments
of these natives are based primarily upon their initial appearance, creating a disingenuous portrait
of these foreign societies in order to justify the author’s Euro-centric, classificatory mindset. In
further pursuit of this goal, these travelers also analyze the religion of these foreign societies in
an attempt to create analogues to their own, removing these rituals from their local context in
order to invite similarities.
Burton, in his journey through Mecca, describes the religious activities of the natives
through the lens of his own religion, applying Christian-centric vocabulary to describe Muslim
rituals and obscuring the significance these rituals hold within their society. Walking through
Mecca at night, Burton describes his experience with a Muslim man in the midst of a personal
religious ceremony,
“He threw his arms wildly about him, uttering shrill cries, which sounded like Ie le le le!
and held, he swayed his body, and waved his head from side to side, like a chained and
furious elephant straining out .the deepest groans. The Africans appear unusually subject
to this nervous state which […] would at once suggest "demoniacal possession”7
6Kingsley, Mary. From Travels in West Africa (Virago, 5
thed.) pg. 271
7Burton 175
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In this passage, Burton assigns the connotations of demonic possession to an intensely personal
Muslim religious ceremony. This is the most apparent discrepancy between the reality of events
and Burton’s perception of them because it immediately colors a Muslim religious ceremony
with the negative aspects of Christianity that Burton’s readers would be more than familiar with.
In addition, Burton furthers the collective image of uncivilized foreigners by depicting them as
exotic by comparing the man to an elephant, an exotic and representative image of Arabian
existence. This quote demonstrates Burton’s use of language in an attempt to portray this
ceremony as an exotic spectacle while still allowing it to be rationalized and understood in the
European mindset. These kinds of discrepancies are poisonous to the nature
Kingsley attempts to understand the function of marriage within the native society she is
studying, however, she does this by comparing their customs of marriage with the customs of
marriage that she is familiar with. “’The more wives, the less work,’ says the African lady, and I
have known men who would rather have had one wife and spent the rest of the money on
themselves, in a civilized way, driven into polygamy by the women.”8
In this quote, we can see
Kingsley entirely disregard the way in which partnership contributes to luxury in this foreign
society. Instead, Kingsley oversimplifies their social customs and applies her western
perceptions of partnership to this tribe, classifying them as polygamous. Doing so entirely
obscures the complexities in the native society’s marital structure which exists as a linear
structure (the quality of life increasing with each wife). This is opposed to Kingsley’s western
and dualistic classification of marital institutions that are solely defined by whether or not you
have one wife or many wives. . Branding this marital structure as polygamous and insisting that
her perception of this custom is not only absolute, but that it is crucial to the function of the
8Kingsley 212
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society, shows the inherent dangers in applying the European classification system-philosophy to
other systems of thought.
In their works, these travel writers subvert their subject’s culture by classifying them
within the European mindset and presenting them as an exotic, yet uncivilized society that would
benefit from European conquest. This is demonstrated by the ways in which the authors present
the native culture’s appearance, religious ceremonies, and customs through concepts that are
only familiar to a uniquely European audience. This allows the European reader to be convinced
that this foreign culture can be entirely understood and classified within their European mindset.
This, combined with the exotic and uncivilized perception of these societies that is perpetuated
by the travel writers, demonstrates Pratt’s idea that these travel writers were not harmless and
“served as handmaidens to Europe’s [conquest]”9.
9Pratt 34
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Works Cited:
Burton, Richard. From Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (NY: Dover, vol.2)
Pratt, Mary Louise. From Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation (NY: Routlege, 1992)
Kingsley, Mary. From Travels in West Africa (Virago, 5th
ed.)