Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856-59

Wisnicki, Adrian S.

doi:10.2979/vic.2008.51.1.103

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…2A recent study of the way in which African informants are acknowledged or deleted from early cartographic representations in Africa is discussed in considerable detail in Wisnicki, “Charting the Frontier.”…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conversations along the Mbwemkuru: Foreign Itinerants and Local Agents in German East Africa

Larson¹

2022

Itinerario

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The underlying theme of this essay is how intelligence was gathered and expertise dispersed in an emerging colonial environment in Africa, and how that knowledge was captured, credited and distributed between local Africans and (largely) itinerant Europeans. It sets that discussion within a more recent debate on the mechanics of European exploration during the wider nineteenth century. The expanded population of Europeans (officials, merchants, missionaries) that arrived in the later part of that century to consolidate the colonial enterprise in German East Africa often moved with initial uncertainty through the landscape, triggering a demand for topographical knowledge to become commodified and commercialised, to become less dependent on the knowledge of individuals. This demand fuelled the production of an innovative series of standardised grid maps. At a time when slavery was still legal, when the local workforce was increasingly discussed in colonial circles in terms of unskilled plantation labour, our essay explores two case studies that demonstrate how certain African experts came to exert key technical and management influence within long-term scientific and commercial projects unfolding in the southeast corner of what is today Tanzania. The matter of water flows through this essay, and does so with deliberate intent.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conversations along the Mbwemkuru: Foreign Itinerants and Local Agents in German East Africa

Larson¹

2022

Itinerario

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“…European explorers in many different parts of the world relied heavily on the physical labor of porters, pilots, guides and translators, as well as various forms of indigenous knowledge, including but not confined to oral testimony (Burnett, 2002;Camerini, 1996;Chrétien, 2005;Fogel-Chance, 2002;Hansen, 1999;Raffles, 2002;Raj, 2006;Simpson, 1975;Wisnicki, 2008). Yet in writing for a metropolitan audience, explorers often failed to acknowledge the extent of their dependence on others in print, with indigenous agency all too often "lost in translation."…”

Section: Form and Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Driver

2017

Mobilities of Knowledge

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This paper is concerned with two things that depend, essentially, on the spatial mobility of knowledge.1 First there is geographical exploration, a process of knowledge-making involving the translation of ideas, people, and things across space in a two-way movement between known and unknown territory. This is, as is clear from much historical and contemporary research, an uneven process in which certain things get translated more readily than others. There is, so to speak, a politics, as well as a physics, of knowledge transfer. The second is public exhibition, a project designed to disseminate knowledge (in the case I will discuss, knowledge of exploration) to a wider audience, a process sometimes described in higher education under the bureaucratic rubric of "knowledge transfer." The idea linking these two things is simple enough, but deserving of further elaboration in many different ways, as the contributions to this volume attest. The thing transferred-the knowledge explorers brought home, the knowledge imparted through an exhibition-is transformed in the course of its translation. Space, like language, is not a neutral surface over which knowledge travels, or an empty container into which we can pour our learning; it enters into and shapes that knowledge in significant ways

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“…The Hidden Histories of Exploration exhibition set out to encourage a more inclusive history of exploration, in which the contributions of a wider range of people were recognised and valued than has traditionally been the case. European explorers in many different parts of the world relied heavily on the physical labour of porters, pilots, guides and translators, as well as various forms of indigenous knowledge, including but not confined to oral testimony (Burnett 2002; Camerini 1996; Chrétien 2005; Fogel‐Chance 2002; Hansen 1999; Raffles 2002; Raj 2006; Simpson 1975; Wisnicki 2008). Yet in writing for a metropolitan audience, explorers often failed to acknowledge the extent of their dependence on others in print: all too often indigenous agency was lost in translation.…”

Section: Form and Content: Looking Naming And Situatingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition

Driver¹

2012

Trans Inst British Geog

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This paper addresses the potential of public exhibitions to challenge long taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the history of exploration and geography. The Hidden Histories of Exploration exhibition, originally held in 2009, was based on historical research in the Royal Geographical Society’s extensive collections, including manuscripts, books, maps and atlases, artefacts, artworks, photography and film. The exhibition was designed to reveal the agency of indigenous peoples and intermediaries in the history of exploration, as reflected especially in the recruitment of guides, interpreters, porters and pilots. By highlighting and to some extent celebrating the role of such individuals, it sought to prompt questions about what is made visible and what is obscured in standard narratives of exploration, especially when seen from a metropolitan perspective. However, the relationship between research and exhibition was by no means one‐way, as is implied by the language of ‘dissemination’ and ‘output’: the process of bringing the exhibition into being raised questions about the structure of the archives on which the exhibition depended, as well as prompting further reflection on the biographical mode in which the work of recovery of ‘hidden histories’ is often conceived in the heritage sector. Particular attention is devoted to the impact of collaboration with designers on the presentation and interpretation of materials in the exhibition. The paper focuses on three design strategies reflected in the exhibition space: ‘role reversal’ (celebrating the role of intermediaries and presenting the explorers as dependent); ‘juxtaposition’ (emphasising the importance of partnership and the co‐production of geographical knowledge); and ‘re‐scaling’ (transforming anonymous archival fragments into documents of a truly human history).

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Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856-59

Cited by 11 publications

References 13 publications

Conversations along the Mbwemkuru: Foreign Itinerants and Local Agents in German East Africa

Conversations along the Mbwemkuru: Foreign Itinerants and Local Agents in German East Africa

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition

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