Oldal 59 [59]
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56 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), historical, 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 local 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, westernized encounter with the Other. We should know more about how it has been “domesticated” — i.e. naturalized and easternized—in the different east-central European 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, AldershotBurlington. 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 originally 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.
