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Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
b. Visual strategies of Othering
By what kind of images did this message—this particular reading—convey to
students and professors alike? The geographical representations of the schoolbook
seem to have been designed to provide the readers/viewers with particular visual
patterns of the peoples of the world as well as the surrounding flora and fauna. A
number of significant, what may be called, visual strategies of Othering functioned
in the construction of those patterns. Let us see those that concerned human be¬
ings, that is, the different peoples.
Raff’s geographical pictures reveal a certain Eurocentric approach in its rather
western European manifestation. This kind of bias is perceptible both in the selec¬
tion of the people represented as well as in the ways in which they are depicted. As
for non-European peoples, there are two scenes that can be called “Asian.” One
shows a sitting Chinese character picking leaves from a tea bush and another scene
depicts an east-Indian island native of dark skin climbing upon a fruit tree (Plate
I, lower section [ills. 14 and 8a]). There are two “African” scenes. One shows a so¬
called Hottentot family of dark skin in the foreground of a landscape;!! they wear
only breechcloths, headbands, and some jewelry, and the viewer can also see their
village made of simple huts (Plate XIV [ill. 11]). In the other scene one sees a rather
simplified figure of an unidentifiable African native of black skin sitting on the
back of a camel (Plate X, middle section [ill. 12]). There are two American scenes,
too. One depicts a Central American slave of dark skin carrying a bunch of sugar
canes, with a simple hut in the background, while the other picture (at least from
the early-nineteenth-century editions on) shows a North American Indian woman
wearing nothing but a short skirt and a necklace and carrying a piece of basketry.
She has another, bigger basket of fish at her feet (Plate IT, upper section [ill. 7a]).
The logic that is recognizable in this representation of “less developed” and
“more developed” societies shown from the different continents—that is, that cer¬
tain societies are shown as less developed while others are shown as more developed—is
valid also for the representation of Europe. The image of silkworm breeding—two
women and a young boy wearing standard European-style clothes of the late eigh¬
teenth century and working in a pavilion (Plate III, middle section; in the early¬
nineteenth-century editions they are to be found inside of an ordinary house [ills. 3
and 3a])—depicts the world of “home” for the readers/viewers, the most familiar
scene with which the latter were expected to identify. Apart from that we find depic¬
tions of two non-western European peoples: the Lapp (Sami) people representing
the “North” (Plate IX, lower section [ill. 9]), and the Poles representing the “East”
(Plate VIII, middle section [ill. 10]). From the direction of the imagined home of
!! The term “Hottentot” was applied loosely to South African indigenous peoples during the eigh¬
teenth and nineteenth centuries. It referred more precisely to the Khoikhoi people. Raff’s schoolbook
used this term in a general sense, it did not give any indication of which of those peoples it aimed to
represent.