Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationCentre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages (CRLV)
Voyage en Suisse, en Lombardie et en Piémont, 1834 (CRLV)
I have worked on Arctic exploration for over a decade and have been feeling lately that it’s time for a change. I like exploration too much to leave it as a field of study (as is probably obvious from this blog), so I have been digging into the literature on another love of mine, mountains, specifically the role of mountains in the work of nineteenth-century scientists.
I don’t have any method for starting new research projects. I have a “if time, pursue this” file, but most of these ideas feel stale by the time I get back to them. So I usually set off into the literature much the way less-than-smart dogs take to being off the leash: running around sniffing randomly until they find something good, chasing it till it runs out, then running some more until they something else. I pursue this approach until I find food. Methodological rigor comes later, usually about the time I need to apply for a grant.
In any event, I was in my dog phase a few months ago, when I started to realize something about the secondary literature on mountains. There are some divisions I expected to find according to discipline (lots of material in art history, for example, not that much in the history of science). But there were also some divisions I didn’t expect, namely differences according to nationality. In particular, it seemed to me that French scholarship on the intellectual history of mountains was very well developed whereas Anglo-American literature was still getting off the ground.
How much do we miss by not wading into the literature of other languages, other countries? It depends upon the research question obviously. But in my case, it’s something I need to do. I can read French, with effort, fingers gripped to the side of my desk. This too must change. I have been on the lookout in the last few weeks for serious exploration blogs or sites outside of the U.S and the U.K.
One of the best that I’ve found is the Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages (CRLV). This site has been around for a while, offers an impressive, searchable bibliography of primary literature on exploration (by author and location), a list of CRLV publications, schedule of conferences, and series of conference podcasts, some of which have abstracts and transcripts. Impressive.
I’ve been happy to note more traffic here from other countries, particularly Scandinavia. If you think I should be aware of exploration-related sites, please drop me a line.
The Explorer Type
The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich
What are historians doing when “doing history”? If asked, few of us would say that we “chronicle” the past. Not that there is anything wrong with chronicling. This is certainly part of the historical craft, but if I had to wager, I’d bet most of us would use different verbs: analyze, interpret, and revise would top the list. Put differently, if we were forced to become football announcers, we would shun the position of play-by-play. We would all want to be color commentators. As much as we respect the Al Michaelses and Bob Costases of the world, we would want to be John Madden.
John Madden
Madden lets others chronicle the game. He is there to give the viewer his cogent analysis, to link the events on the field to other games, the locker room, the ocean of football statistics. The paradox of analysis is that it leads to infinitely greater shades of difference. The deeper the comparison, the more events seem unique and incomparable. Tears in his eyes, the Patriots fan wants to place Tom Brady on Mt Olympus for breaking every passing record since Odysseus threw a stick in the eye of Cyclops, but the clear-eyed color commentator says “Not so fast. The game has changed. Quarterbacks throw more now than they used to. Plus, hitting a giant in the eye with a stick is not technically a pass.”
Odysseus with stick
Brady with football
So, too, the historian, who is on his game when showing how complicated the past is, suddenly gets gun-shy when making broad comparisons or generalizations. There are good reasons for the post-modern reluctance to do this, but let’s admit it, it’s also unsatisfying. As Peter Galison pointed out in the most recent issue of Isis (see Will Thomas’s post on this at Ether Wave Propaganda), there is a tension between the rigorous need for being true to the small event, the “micro-history,” and the drama of the big picture, the sweeping generalization, and the magisterial narrative.
Is there still a place for generalizations in history? Can one be sweeping and rigorous at the same time? Can we take off our post-modern shoes for a few hours and sink our toes into the soft muck of the “big picture” without messing up the house? I don’t know. Let’s try. I spend most of my time writing about complexity, specifically, how complicated explorers are and how they reflect the unique conditions of their cultural moment. This is a relatively easy point to argue. Explorers were (and are) a diverse bunch. There were the erudite explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, military explorers such as James Cook and John Fremont, journalist-explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley and Walter Wellman, and the explorers who “go native” such as Charles Hall.
Still, I was wondering if there was something to this idea of an “explorer type.” This is certainly not a new idea. The literature of exploration and adventure is filled with talk of explorers exhibiting common personality traits (usually including some mixture of restlessness, curiosity, tolerance for danger and discomfort, etc). This doesn’t hold a lot of water for me, since I feel that these traits are often tacked on to the people who go out exploring ex post facto. “Well if he lost his toes to frost-bite, he must have been brave.” But what if we looked at the “explorer-type” as a cultural category rather than as a personality profile? Are there people who represent a kind of explorer figure across different professions or disciplines?
I few days ago I was reading Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin. In it Lewin describes the role of Louis Leakey within the field of paleoanthropology:
Although Leakey had highly respectable credentials — a degree in anthropology from Cambridge University, England and a fellowship in one of its most reverend colleges — he was more explorer than scientist. He loved to be out in the field, discovering new sites and returning to established ones…and he was irked by the conservative ways of the scientific establishment. He never held an academic post, and indeed became scornful of bookish armchair scholars… Perhaps this distance from academia freed him of the normal establishment constraints, for his claims were often a source of consternation among his colleagues in universities. When he said to Richard [his son] that day in September, “They won’t believe you,” he was pointedly echoing his own experience, and vicariously relishing the prospect of a fight.
Louis Leakey, bad boy of British paleoanthropology
As I read this, I thought how similar it sounded to explorers such as Robert Peary, who put together his expeditions with private funds, and enjoyed a self-defined distance from the academic community. He would collaborate with the academy, but he never hitched his wagon to their horse. He found independent routes to money and power, just like Leakey did. What about Carl Sagan? Beloved by the public for his popularization of Cosmos, Sagan was sniffed at within his own field. Or Roy Chapman Andrews who led expeditions into Mongolia on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, became a celebrated public figure, but was always something of an outsider to the Academy. Or William Beebe who scraped together funds from different sources to organize deep-sea expeditions in his bathysphere?
I don’t know how much meat is on this particular bone, but I thought I’d give it a gnaw. It certainly makes a better meal than saying “it’s complicated.”
What We Fear
Historians partying like it’s 1959
Take twenty historians, put them in a backyard with grill, add beer, mix gently. Let sit. After an hour, you should have a simmering party, spiced by political commentary, outrageous jokes, and loud (if obscure) arguments. Maybe someone will throw a football. Why is it, then, that these zany, fun-loving, opinionated people take off their party hats when they sit down to write articles? What power does the written word have that it can drain the blood out of the most interesting of authors? It was as if we all took a minor in Bland at grad school. (No, not you dear reader, I’m talking about the others). Place some of the blame on inclusive language, the specialized vocabulary we use to speak to our peers (though I should say, it usually sounds boring to them as well). Place the rest of the blame on fear. Graduate students, the young sea turtles of the Academy, hatch by the thousands and run for the water, desperate to remain unnoticed until they mature enough to go on the market. Get off the beach! You may be eaten by your thesis committee. Once hired, the danger is over, but alas, the damage is done, the behavior learned. The newly minted academic passes on the instinct of Bland to the new generation.
Done with prelims, thesis ahead
Not that fear goes away once hired. There are other dangers. Try this experiment at your next encounter with a historian. (It will be most effective at a conference talk). “How does your work shape your views of (insert current issue) ? A sheen of sweat will appear on his brow. His buttocks will tighten. His mouth will open and close like a trout on the dock. What is the subject of his fear? Historians are schooled to judge past and present as separate entities, related entities of course, but separate. They are first cousins, if you will, who talk nicely to each other but should never marry. To read the past through the lens of the present is to violate a sacred rule of the historiography, brought down to us by British historian Herbert Butterfield, who said Thou Shall Not Commit Whig History.
Prophet Butterfield
What about those who would read the present though the lens of the past? This has more credibility, especially among politicians and subscribers to Readers Digest. They liberally quote author George Santayana who said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” While historians don’t exactly shudder at this pronouncement, it still makes them twitchy because it implies that there is some kind of formulaic or structuralist feature to history that allows it to keep repeating itself. In history departments today, this kind of thinking is bad. Historians are happy to admit that big forces are at work in history, but they get queasy saying things are predictable or pre-ordained. For them this sounds too much like the prophetic history of the Left Behind series (or, secular visions such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series). Historians like to think that the world contains its own capricious qualities that cannot be fully known, a Heisenberg uncertainty principle of human culture. In our literature, this is called “contingency.” In history departments, this is a good word like “organic,” “fresh-baked” and “locally produced.”
I can speak so flippantly about this because it happened to me. After giving a talk about the “Theory of the Open Polar Sea” to a public audience at the Explorers’ Club in New York City last year, some one had the nerve to ask me what I thought we should be doing about about global warming in the Arctic. I made trout-like motions for a minute or so, then forced out some mumbling explanation about why, as a historian of the nineteenth century, I had no business wading into the present. The audience was silent. So I tried again, this time with some tepid position about environmental policy.
Robinson considers the present
It made me realize that if I am really a historian interested in engaging the public (and I am), it is not enough to engage people on my terms. It meant taking their questions and approaches seriously, being willing to step outside the comfort zone of “disciplinary thinking.” So I have started writing more about current events using, when I can, the context of the past as a starting point. The History News Network just published my first editorial on exploration and U.S. space policy.
Please read it and let me know what you think.
http://hnn.us/articles/51386.html
Digital Archive: Strange Maps
NASA map of astronaut routes over the Moon, superimposed over soccer field
Blogs are living things. They have their own cycles of growth, promiscuity, maturity, and senescence. Some rise above the tangled bank to reach the sunlight of popularity. Most crowd against each other in fits of collective navel-gazing. They soon decline in daily hits (the holy measurement of blog vigor) and die quietly in the shadows of the over-committed author. Given this instability, do blogs have the staying power to be archives?
Thomas Jefferson’s proposal for dividing territories into ten states
Certainly not. While the political blog DailyKos may outrank the Library of Congress in daily web traffic, I am confident that L of C will still be hosting their Lewis and Clark materials in 2020. I don’t know what DailyKos will be doing (running a small country near Seattle perhaps). In short, blogs are not archives. Now that this is established, let me announce an amazing blog archive: Strange Maps. It is weird, historical, and snappy. If its mondo collection of bizarre maps is not exactly comprehensive, it is far-reaching in scope.
Not all of these maps have to do with exploration of course. So why feature Strange Maps here? A few weeks ago I wrote a post in which scholars weighed in on the various meanings of exploration. William Goetzmann and others view it as a process of continual re-discovery rather than a single moment of impressive flag-planting. In this spirit, Strange Maps is a place which discovers and rediscovers information about the world and projects these ideas in space. Perhaps this is an abstract and delirious way to describe the site – so to get a better idea, visit it yourself.
Dutch map showing the oceans of Mars
Reading the Map
Jerusalem World Map, Heinrich Bunting, 1581 (courtesy of the Osher Map Library)
For the last two weeks, we’ve been on a long road trip: from Connecticut to Ohio, Illinois, upstate Michigan, and back to CT. As journeys go, it was not perhaps as impressive as, say, Scott’s trek to the South Pole. He ate pemmican, we ate cheetos. He drove sledges, we drove an Odyssey. His party suffered from scurvy, ours sunburn. Yet we achieved our own kind of glory: 2600 miles, 50 hours in a minivan, with two adults, two children, and one toddler, aged 1.5. No one perished from strangulation or defenestration, none were committed to asylums, none have talked to the press. Victory is ours.
Yesterday, at the end of a particularly long leg, we found ourselves on Rte 80 in northern Ohio, looking for a meal that would please all and could be had fast. In other words, pizza. But where to look in the rolling cornfields of Ohio? We got off 80 and asked the toll booth attendant. She couldn’t think of any place that made pizza. What planet had we landed on? Michele and I consulted our road atlas, a misshapen, parchment-colored thing, to see if we could glean a site out of the black and red lines and place names.
After some debate, we decided upon the town of Sandusky, about eight miles off of the highway from the exit. While it might have been possible to find pizza closer, it seemed unlikely to us that these small, silo-dotted towns would produce a pie to satisfy our elitist, bourgie palate. Without knowing anything else about the town of Sandusky, I liked the name, it sounded old, Polish perhaps? If so, I would imagine that it was settled in the early- or mid-19th century. Old Midwestern towns, I knew, were often built small and compact to accommodate walking traffic. These towns, with main street and thick brick commercial buildings, are now favorites of urban renovation, of ice cream shops, restaurants, and gourmet pizza. Sandusky, is this you? Moreover, the town was right on Lake Erie, at a point very close to the Canadian coast due north of the city. I saw them in my mind: hungry Canadian tourists climbing off the boat to celebrate summer at their favorite waterfront pizzeria.
This was all a wild, sherlock-holmesian, stab in the dark. There was no evidence to back up this speculative conjuring from a 1996 Ohio road map. Yet in the end, we were right to head to Sandusky. It was indeed a place we imagined: an old city with downtown, sidewalks, old buildings, and waterfront. Local residents told me that it was struggling to become the renovated, gentrified place that sometimes take root in down-on-their-luck industrial towns. More importantly, we found our parlor, the “Mona Pizza” on the main street perpendicular to the waterfront.
Mona Pizza, with its “Welcome Bikers!” sign, was was not quite the bourgie place I had imagined. But it counted where it mattered, offering up a tasty, New-York-style, thin-crust pie in 20 minutes.
All of this got me thinking about maps. Historians of many stripes are savvy in how they read visual documents, from pictures, paintings, and illustrations to maps. However precisely surveyed, however carefully rendered, maps and landscape are subjective documents, painted with the hues of culture as well as pigment. A long look at one of the landscapes of Frederic Church, for example, tells a great deal about Church’s vision of the country and of the United States as an emerging empire.
Frederic Church, “Our Banner in the Sky,” 1863
Yet it seems from what I’ve read (and from the visual analysis that I’ve done myself) that much of this analysis is focused on the object. That is, the question most commonly asked is “How do the historical artifacts carry culture?” Reading the road map of Ohio, I realized that many of our decisions had to do with our own cultural baggage as viewers, of our knowledge of Midwestern towns, our study of American history, our snooty notions of good pizza. Put more broadly, the Sandusky experience made me wonder how the individual subject encounters the map. How does the subject shape the map’s reading? This is a difficult question to answer. We all bring different things to our interpretation of maps, documents, indeed, virtually everything we come into contact with.
But it brought me back to issues of exploration.
For many academics, especially in the humanities, the world is a place divided into those-who-do (them) and those-who-interpret-what-others-do (us). Generally, relations tend to fall apart on the subject of “experience.” In the eyes of explorers, for example, historians can never fully understand events in the field because they weren’t there themselves. Historians, on the other hand, point to the importance of this distance from the field – of the biases that naturally result from close involvement in a project – in portraying events even-handedly. As one of the chronicler-class rather than the doer class, my sympathies have always been with my academic posse in this debate.
But reading the map of Sandusky, I realized the importance of the viewers’ perspective in reading the map. And in terms of my work, I realized the great gulf that separates the experience of explorers (both western and indigenous) from those of us who seek to figure them out. How, for example, did Robert Peary’s experience of the ice cap, or the Greenland ice sheet, shape the way he viewed such places inscribed on paper? How did James Cook’s knowledge of Atlantic currents shape the way he read his sketchy maps of the Pacific? Looking at these same maps, what did Cook’s Tahitian guide Omai see rendered there?
Time to Eat the Dogs 