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Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy
been rare.’ It was within such considerations that I started investigating the central ar¬
chives and libraries of Hungary a couple of years ago and looking especially for books
of natural history and geography in them that were published in the old Kingdom of
Hungary during the early modern—modern period. One of the most important results
of that research was to find that, not only specific knowledge about non-European
indigenous peoples, but more generally concepts about human society and social
evolution had arrived in east-central Europe to a great extent by adaptations of works
originating in foreign cultural centers, like those of France, Great Britain, and/or the
German principalities (Sz. Kristóf 2011, 2012a, 2012b and 20129.
In the following, I am going to discuss a book that conveyed a similar knowl¬
edge to the eastern/east-central European region, and whose visual and textual con¬
tents relating to sociocultural stereotypes formed of US, that is, eastern Europe itself,
had contributed possibly to the representation of Otherness in our region around the
turn of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. I started examining this
work earlier, aiming those studies mostly at a western European and a specifically
Hungarian audience (Sz. Kristöf 2011 and 2012b). Publishing a greater number of
images and providing a broader and, in some respects, more detailed analysis of the
book as a whole, I would like to introduce it this time to an east-central European
scholarly readership with the admitted intention of looking for partners for a future,
multilateral cooperation in which to continue its research.
A series of concepts have emerged from my previous studies that appear useful
for the elaboration of a more advanced methodology of research for the analysis of
illustrated books, as the book in question was. These concepts relate closely to the
topic currently in focus, namely “visual encounters with alterity,” and some of the
possible ways of its complex—textual/visual/social and, at the same time, historical,
and anthropological—investigation. I have gathered those concepts together, and it
is according to them that I am going to structure what follows. These concepts may
provide some clues for a more general methodology of studying the phenomenon of
visual Othering in a textual context, what is manifest in the case of illustrated texts,
such as scientific books, schoolbooks, newspapers with drawings, and caricatures.
The medium of the encounter
The first concept I propose relates to the place/very spot of “visual encounter with
alterity.” One always should see very clearly where/in what kind of sources/media
one identifies that encounter and how the particular source/medium itself affects
its representation.
In my case, it is a schoolbook, a late-eighteenth-century illustrated German
For example, Thomas 1994; Jardine-Secord-Spary 1996; Spary 2000; Schiebinger-Swan 2005;
Cañizares-Esguerra 2006; Ogilvie 2006 and Mason 2009. For important beginnings in Hungary, see
Fejös-Pusztai (eds.) 2008, and Korall Tarsadalomtérténeti folydirat 2006, vol. 26 (Utazók és utazások).
See also Sz. Kristóf 2011.
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