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Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy
resenting the majority of human beings—Us as well as Others—mostly as males
rather than females. This kind of representation may have corresponded to one of
the purposes of the schoolbook, namely, to address young boys rather than girls.
As I have already pinpointed elsewhere, in every translation of the schoolbook that
I could consult so far, the “Little Traveller” is represented as a boy, being referred
to with forms of masculinity—” Mein Sohn,” “Kleiner Mann," "édes Fiam," and
“Fiatskäim” (in Hungarian; Sz. Krist6f 2011: 319). It seems that natural history
as a science and travels of discovery as a social practice were expected and taught
to be overwhelmingly male activities in the age.” This is another feature that does
not seem to have changed throughout the time period and the different editions of
Raff’s schoolbook that I have studied. The North American Indian represented as
a woman (Plate XIII; in nineteenth-century editions Plate II) is a peculiar excep¬
tion, but it may go back to age-old iconographical conventions of representing the
continents.'* Male-ing the images may have been one of the means by which Raff
and the designers of the book expected, and incited, the young readers to identify
with the world presented in it. The schoolbook’s stress on men in the depicted arts,
activities of subsistence, industries, and sciences could, beyond being familiar for its
readers, also confirm the existing gender hierarchy for them. In this respect, as well
as in others, Raff's schoolbook contributed only to support the existing sociocultural
order of late feudalism.
One would come to a similar conclusion if one considers the sixth and appar¬
ently all-embracing visual strategy of representation that implies another important
layer of the intended messages of the schoolbook. I would call it hierarchization and/
or barbarization, that is, ordering and representing the groups of Others according
to the historical ideas that had been elaborated by the western European thinkers
of the Enlightenment. If one takes a look at the ensemble of the geographical images
of Raff, one soon realizes that it is more than—or something other than—geogra¬
phy that is represented in them." I would argue that the pictures refer to “stages,”
'7 Despite the contribution of so many important women to science during the eighteenth century
(Fara 2004; O’Brien 2009), elementary education was long penetrated by such a gendered image and
ideology of a scientist in western as well as eastern Europe.
'8 The American continent seems to have been represented historically rather by female allegorical
figures (see, e.g., McIntyre and Phillips 2007, 249, and Day 2010; for male figures see Stagl 1995:
162-170).
The representation of South America and the whole area of Oceania is entirely missing from the im¬
ages and so are important details even of the depicted parts ofthe world. The first German edition ofthe
schoolbook (Géttingen 1778) came out toward the end of James Cook’s three consecutive voyages in
the area (1768-1779) and one year before his death in Hawaii during the third journey. Was it too early
for the existing contemporary accounts of these voyages to Tahiti, New Zealand, New South Wales
(then Tonga), South America (Tierra del Fuego), and Hawaii to make their impact on the schoolbook’s
concept of geography? Cook’s Voyage Towards the South Pole was published in 1777 just like George
Forster's account, while Johann Reinhold Forster’s Observations came out in 1778 (Williams 2004).
And why did not some of the earlier travelogues on the Cook expedition (like those of Hawkesworth
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