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Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
of Europe; so it is worth noticing how many of their well-known classical universal
concepts about humankind and the development of human societies, especially the
ideas of progress and evolution, they shared or, one might also argue, contained
and preceded. Natural history and ethnology/anthropology, western and eastern
Europe, and the first and the second half of the nineteenth century were connected
more closely to one another than was ordinarily thought.
I have attempted to show in this paper how “visual encounters with alterity” are
inscribed in a multitude of sociocultural-geographical (regional and local), histori¬
cal, philosophical, power and gender-related, cultural-political, and so on, contexts
that, on one hand, penetrate those encounters and the medium through which they
are represented and, on the other hand, generate particular readings of them that
may not be implied in the relevant texts and images. Exploring the ways of the lo¬
cal appropriations of Raff’s schoolbook is (would be) the most revealing part of the
story. In east-central Europe it would necessitate a broader international cooperation
that could attempt to shed light on the cultural variations of those appropriations.
Raff has provided the children of Europe, and North America, with a biased, west¬
ernized encounter with the Other. We should know more about how it has been
“domesticated” — i.e. naturalized and easternized—in the different east-central Eu¬
ropean countries and contexts.”
References
Agassiz, L. 1848, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae. A General Catalogue of All Books, Tracts and
Memoirs on Zoology and Geology, vol. 1, London.
Ballantyne, T. (ed.) 2004, Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific, Aldershot¬
Burlington.
Barker, F., P. Hulme, M. Iversen (eds.) 1994, Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, Manchester-New
York.
Blanckaert, C. 2004, Géographie et anthropologie: une rencontre nécessaire (XVIII-XIX® siècle),
Ethnologie française, vol. 34, pp. 661-669.
Blumenbach, J. F., 2005, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Elibron Classics
Replica Edition.
Bohls, E. A., I. Duncan (eds.) 2005, Travel Writing 1700-1830. An Anthology, Oxford.
Buffon, G. L. 1835, Le nouveau Buffon de la jeunesse. Histoire naturelle des animaux, des vegetaux et des
minéraux, Tome I, Paris.
Cafiizares-Esguerra, J. 2006, Nature, Empire and Nation. Explorations of the History of Science in the
Iberian World, Stanford.
3 An exciting aspect of such a domestication is how one of William Blake's etchings (published origi¬
nally in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of
Surinam, London 1796) has found its way to the printing house of Kassa (Kogice, today’s Slovakia)
during the 1830s. See Sz. Kristéf 2011: 329-332.