Oldal 51 [51]
OCR
48 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 beings, 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 selection 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 socalled 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 certain 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 eighteenth century and working in a pavilion (Plate III, middle section; in the earlynineteenth-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 depictions 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 eighteenth 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.
