Oldal 52 [52]
OCR
Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy the reader, both the Lapps and the Polish look like close aliens or inner Others in the same continent. In the Lapp scene (Plate IX, lower section [ill. 9]), two men are shown in the foreground of a “Nordic” landscape; one is standing, wearing elaborate fur clothes and holding a stick in his hand, while the other is sitting, a whip in his hand, in a triangle-shaped sleigh (the pudka of the Sami people) pulled by a reindeer. The Poles (Plate VIII, middle section [ill. 10]) are shown as two men in the forest: a younger and an older musician wearing peculiar clothes, long coats tied with a belt on their waists, playing trumpet-like musical instruments and having a big bear dance to the music. While the Lapp scene (together with its detailed textual description of the life of those reindeer keepers) was presented as an “accurate” ethnographical demonstration of those people living close to nature,'” and the funny, joyful Polish scene—likewise putting its main characters out in nature—might contain an anecdote or tale belonging to it,'* both people were presented as strangers in a Europe imagined, as it seems to have been, somewhere from its more industrialized, western corner. This corner has not, however, been defined any more closely. The general Western gaze of Raff's schoolbook seems to have been founded on, and supported by, the use of a number of different, identifiable iconographical strategies of Othering present in the images. These visual strategies of representation were drawn upon in order to construct a visual Them as different from a—similarly constructed—visual Us. Although these strategies are well distinguishable from one another, they are present in the pictures rather simultaneously. Two, three, or more of them interpenetrate each another in the individual images. The first of such visual strategies is simplification and uniformization, that is, reducing the representation of the people (mostly of non-European indigenous people) to some basic features like dark skin and (almost) nakedness, wearing simple clothes like loin-cloths, short skirts, and so forth. The second strategy is stereotypization and commonplacing, that is, assigning certain activities to or features thought/proposed to be dominant 12 ‘The text relating to the reindeer—just like other passages in Raff's schoolbook—provides kind of a micro-ethnographical profile. It describes in detail how the geographical region looks like where the Lapps live, what sort of animals they raise, what a reindeer is like, and how those people make use of every part of the animal. The figure of the Lapp appears as commonplace in eighteenth century books of natural history. One finds striking similarities between Raff's profile of those Nordic people and, for example, that of Buffon in their attempt at describing meticulously the specificities of it as an alien culture. The different editions of Buffon focused not only on the various uses of the reindeer but also the peculiar shape and know-how of the pu/ka well into the nineteenth century (e.g., Buffon 1835: 73-78). Lapland had a special importance for Linnaeus himself. He took a journey there in 1732, published on its flora (Flora Lapponica 1737) and, in general, considered the Lapps an exotic, happy people, not less than “our teacher” (Koerner 1999: 56-81). 13° Bear-dancing was a common visual stereotype attached to the eastern Slavic peoples in general in the age; one would associate it also with the Russians. The presence of this image in Raff's schoolbook testifies again to its cultural bias and generalizing-uniformizing efforts. It also singles out one of the printed media—illustrated schoolbooks—in which such visual stereotypes of ethnicity circulated all over Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 49
