Luciana Martins

A naturalist's vision of the tropics: Charles Darwin and the Brazilian landscape

This paper considers how European voyagers both engaged with and reconstructed the tropical landscapes they encountered. By examining visions of the Brazilian landscape produced by Charles Darwin during his Beagle voyage, the paper aims to explore the complex interaction between prior knowledge, aesthetic convention and the experience of travelling in the construction of his geographical imagination. While the resulting images necessarily shared a set of scientific and aesthetic codes integral to the visual culture of nineteenth-century Europe, as well as being evidence of Britains global imperial project, they were more than simply an “expression” of these wider historical realities. Darwins visual impressions were shaped through a constant process of negotiation between translocated images: brought by his minds eye, found in the landscapes presented to his body, and tracked over. The very materiality of Darwins vision contains traces of his spatial and embodied practices.

Illusions of power: vision, technology and the geographical exploration of the Amazon, 1924–1925

In 1924, the American explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice submitted a paper to the Geographical Review describing plans for his seventh expedition to the Amazon, a region he had first explored in 1901 (Figure 1). Hamilton Rice’s seventh – and most ambitious – expedition to the Amazon was not only equipped with the latest surveying technology, including a purpose-built hydroplane equipped for aerial photography; it was also the first to attempt radio communication in the tropics on a short-wave system. Following in the footsteps of European pioneers, such as Humboldt, Bates and Schomburgk, Hamilton Rice aimed to reach the headwaters of the Rio Branco, in what is today the state of Roraima, on Brazil’s frontier with Venezuela. Isaiah Bowman, editor of the Geographical Review and director of the American Geographical Society, was an enthusiastic supporter of the expedition. As he wrote in response to Rice:

GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATION AND THE ELUSIVE MAPPING OF AMAZONIA

Abstract. In this article I reexamine Alexander Hamilton Rices seventh expedition to Amazonia (1924–1925) in order to highlight the ways in which the image of the modern explorer was constructed through various technologies of visualization, including maps, still photography, and film. The Rice expedition was equipped with the latest surveying instruments, among them a hydroplane especially adapted for taking aerial photographs, and it was the first to attempt shortwave radio communication in the Tropics. However, the expeditions efforts to reach the headwaters of the Rio Branco ended in failure. I investigate Rices heavy investment in making a visual record of the expedition in the context of his academic ambitions. Despite his influence in learned societies in the United States and Europe, his questionable reputation within academic circles was difficult to overcome: His reliance on publicity to enhance his academic career had adverse consequences. The retelling of Rices tale here also sheds light on the role of indigenous local knowledge and agency in the history of exploration. All the modern surveying technology employed notwithstanding, local support remained crucial for Amazonian exploration.

Paradoxes of modernity: imperial Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821

Abstract This paper examines the spatial dynamics of urbanism in Rio de Janeiro during the early nineteenth century. Conventional narratives of modernisation fail to capture the complexities of this moment, between 1808 and 1821, when the city replaced Lisbon as the capital of the Portuguese empire. The position of colony and metropolis were inverted, Portuguese absolutism was bolstered by British liberalism, and a market-economy arose alongside the expansion of slavery. As the newly-created imperial capital, Rio felt the effects of these various transformations: the physical boundaries of the city rapidly expanded, its economy diversified and the cultural life of the city was re-shaped. Our aim in this paper is to understand this particular moment of urban transformation as a product of the intersection of global networks of trade, slavery and industrial capitalism. Rather than depicting the historical geography of the city as a passive space for European conquest and expansion, we consider the extent to which its urban dynamics were shaped by a distinct local geography of globalisation. In particular, we examine the interrelated spatialities that are part and parcel of the modernising process.

Navigating in tropical waters: British maritime views of Rio de Janeiro

This paper considers how the experience of travelling around the globe helped to shape the geographical imagination of British seamen in the early nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on graphic images of Rio de Janeiro produced by a Royal Navy midshipman (later lieutenant), Charles William Browne. More generally, the paper examines the place of the Brazilian harbour in the Royal Navys strategic and logistical planning; the increasingly significant role of coastal views, plans and charts in improving and enlarging British geographical knowledge; and the production and circulation of iconic images of hybrid tropical landscapes by British seamen.

An Ontological Approach to Creating an Andean Weaving Knowledge Base

Andean textiles are products of one of the richest, oldest and continuous weaving traditions in the world. Understanding the knowledge and practice of textile production as a form of cultural heritage is particularly relevant in the Andean context due to erosion of clothing traditions, reuse of traditional textiles on commodities targeted at the tourism market, and loss of knowledge embedded in textile production. “Weaving Communities of Practice” was a pilot project that aimed to create a knowledge base of Andean weaving designed to contribute to curatorial practice and heritage policy. The research team gathered data on the chain of activities, instruments, resources, peoples, places and knowledge involved in the production of textiles, relating to over 700 textile samples. A major part of the project has been the modelling and representation of the knowledge of domain experts and information about the textile objects themselves in the form of an OWL ontology, and the development of a suite of search facilities to be supported by the ontology. This paper describes the research challenges faced in developing the ontology and search facilities, the methodology adopted, the design and implementation of the system, and the design and outcomes of a user evaluation of the system undertaken with a group of domain experts.

‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss published an article on Caduveo body painting in the first number of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton and cover by Max Ernst. In the article, Lévi-Strauss uses the photographs of the Caduveo women taken during his fieldtrip in 1935–36, together with drawings of facial designs collected to reflect on their ‘strong originality’, which ‘evokes a very ancient culture, and one full of preciosities’. Amongst these illustrations, there is an engraving taken from Guido Boggiani’s book, I Caduvei, published in 1895. Boggiani, an Italian landscape painter who visited South America in 1887–93, was captivated by the Caduveo graphic art, which he sketched in detail. In 1896 he returned, travelling to Paraguay, this time equipped with a new tool to help his ethnographic research: a photographic camera. Over a period of five years, Boggiani completed more than 400 photographs on glass gelatin plates of various sizes. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boggiani, the originality of the Caduveo graphic art remained enigmatic, evoking a very ancient culture; it was a topic to which he would return in several of his most influential works. In this article, I focus on the visual images (engraved, drawn, photographed and filmed) that depict the body painting of the Caduveo people in central Brazil by Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss in order to explore the ways in which they enabled an ephemeral art – delicate arabesques painted on skin – to be studied as archaeological vestiges. In the process, I trace the aesthetic sensibility of Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss that provided them with the imaginative tools to do so.

Skin, paper, tiles: A cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art:

This article focuses on the global traffic in images relating to Kadiwéu culture in South America, analysing the extent to which they are entangled in the group’s continuing sense of presence. It begins with Kadiwéu designs as they appeared in the sketchbook of the artist–explorer Guido Boggiani in the late 19th century. It then explores the mapping of Kadiwéu territory and the practices and protocols informing a politics of land rights, cultural property and economic survival, looking in particular at the commissioning of Kadiwéu designs for a housing estate and an associated exhibition in Berlin early in the 21st century. By developing a cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art that considers the transnational networks across different times and spaces, including the case of a transcultural history of copyright, the article seeks to contribute to the ongoing re-thinking of the colonial visual archive and its afterlife.

Book Review: Blessed Anastácia: women, race, and Christianity in Brazil

aspects of the national ethos. At the same time, however, the book inadvertently serves to illustrate one of the very basic limitations of the constructionist approach. In one of the most provocative passages of the book, N. Stargardt observes that ‘most scholars who have taken up ideas such as the ‘‘invention of tradition’’ or ‘‘imagined communities’’ have done so within discrete national units, thereby subtly reinstating at the centre what they claim to be so keen to displace’ (p. 23). With only a few exceptions, this holds entirely true for the essays collected in Imagining nations. The unrelenting preoccupation of most contributors with a single national example and the consistent absence of some comparative referential framework do indeed have the curious but unmistakable effect of enhancing an impression of national distinctiveness and uniqueness, and affirming thereby one of the principal tenets of those who imagined the nation in the first place. This particular critique must be deployed carefully, however, and it is useful not so much for faulting the essays delivered here as for indicating possible fruitful paths for future research. To pick but one example: having considered how British national space was defined and organized through a ‘culture of cartography’, would the logical next step not be to invert and broaden the approach, looking now at cartography and mapping per se as a practice and a mechanism for constructing national spaces – and through this nationhood itself – in the modern period? This would immediately establish links across the ‘classical’ European nations such as France, Germany and Russia, and it would link to more recent examples of nation-building as well, beginning with postcolonial North America and extending eventually over much of the globe. All nations, after all, map themselves, and it is probably fair to assume that this activity has always and everywhere been meaningful in terms of the articulation of national identity. In response to the question ‘how were nations invented?’ Imagining nations provides much valuable material. The question now should become: how can we generalize about the processes of construction across national experiences, and what further insight may be gained thereby into the condition of nationhood?

Book Review: Empire’s nature: Mark Catesby’s New World vision

a sense that class positions are the generators of cultural positions and cultural institutions rather than being formed through them. There is no room here for Pierre Bourdieu, and little sense of publics structured or fractured along other social dimensions, such as gender and race. To pursue his themes Taylor’s method involves an unravelling of the connections between the making of gallery spaces, the art on display, the intentions of art professionals, philanthropists and politicians, and broader questions of economic, political and social power. What he has provided, therefore, is a history which redescribes these important social spaces and expertly differentiates them in terms of form and purpose. It is a shame, therefore, that despite the book’s title the analysis effectively ends in 1972. This means foregoing the opportunity to examine in the same detail important changes in the 1980s and 1990s – the sponsorship of huge and prestigious exhibitions and extensions by private companies, competition between public and private collections, and, perhaps most importantly, the rise to prominence of the gallery shop and its constitution of new publics through the direct consumption of artworks in the age of their serial mechanical reproduction onto T-shirts, mugs, notebooks, postcards, calendars, cushions and more. At the end, however, despite careful scrutiny of what visual, statistical and textual evidence there is, the gallery-goer and his or her motivations remain as mysterious as ever. While ‘the public’ is brought into existence in a variety of ways for a range of purposes and composed and fragmented as arts bureaucracies, curators and patrons imagine and reimagine their social and cultural roles, members of the public are only fleetingly glimpsed and imperfectly understood. This gulf between rhetorical publics and people who look at pictures is beautifully revealed in a Mass Observation report from the Tate Gallery in December 1938 (p. 172): ‘Two women (about 30 years) entered 11.14. A: bareheaded, black overcoat, coloured silk scarf. B: black hat with veil, astrakhan coat, both upper class . . . At 11.18 /2 A goes into room 23, B looks at 3468, 3842, and 4923, then follows A . . . Both look at 4239 (20 seconds) and Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell (on loan) 15 seconds, The Rock of Gibraltar by Charles Conder 15 seconds. Enter room 21, 11.26, but before leaving look back at 4239 and A says “. . . whopping great flower . . .”