Article ID: CBB269092739

Different Ways of Seeing ‘Savagery’: Two Nordic Travellers in 18th-Century North America (2019)

unapi

Andreas Hesselius and Pehr Kalm both spent time in eastern North America during the first half of the 18th century. Both came with an ardent desire to observe and learn about the natural environment and inhabitants of the region. Both produced writings, in the form of journals that have proved immensely useful to subsequent scholars. Yet their writings also display differences that illuminate the epistemological and sociological underpinnings of their observations, and which had consequences for their encounters with foreign environments. Hesselius, who served as pastor to the Swedish congregation in Philadelphia from 1712 to 1724, described his experiences and observations with what we might call a historical awareness, while Kalm, known as the first of Linnaeus’s students to travel to the New World, primarily offered dehistoricized and denarrativized taxonomic ethnographic descriptions. At first glance, Hesselius and Kalm appear to illustrate perfectly Michel Foucault’s description of the difference between Renaissance and classical epistemologies. Kalm’s disembodied and decontextualized representations fit well with Foucault’s description of natural history in the classical age as consisting ‘of undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves…and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words’. This article, however, points out that while Hesselius and Kalm arrive at similar descriptions of plants and other-than-human beings by employing different methodologies, when it comes to describing indigenous peoples their respective methodologies lead to radically different approaches, with Hesselius writing them into history, while Kalm relegates them to ethnology in the sense of savage ‘peoples without histories’.

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Article Bruce Buchan; Linda Andersson Burnett (2019) Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-7). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB269092739/

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Authors & Contributors
Bruyninckx, Joeri
Kelly L. Watson
E. Bennett Jones
Turner, Nancy J
Giulia Iannuzzi
Irving-Stonebraker, Sarah
Concepts
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Ethnography
Colonialism
Anthropology
Travel; exploration
Native American civilization and culture
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
Early modern
21st century
20th century, early
Places
North America
Australia
Guatemala
West Africa
Americas
United States
Institutions
University of California
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