The Construction of Otherness in British and American Explorations of the Amur Region
Until the second half of the 19th century, the region to the north of China, also known as Manchuria, was relatively unknown in the West. In the wake of the political events after the First Opium War (1839-1842), Europeans began to spread information about the region in Western publications. Scienti...
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| Xuất bản năm: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/angles, |
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| Tác giả chính: | |
| Định dạng: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Ngôn ngữ: | Anglais |
| Được phát hành: |
Angles
2025
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| Những chủ đề: | |
| Truy cập trực tuyến: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Tóm tắt: | Until the second half of the 19th century, the region to the north of China, also known as Manchuria, was relatively unknown in the West. In the wake of the political events after the First Opium War (1839-1842), Europeans began to spread information about the region in Western publications. Scientific and military explorations grew exponentially at the same time as the techniques for disseminating knowledge. This led to the development of an imaginary Manchurian Far East which circulated in Europe and the United States and aroused the curiosity of explorers. In this article, I look at the publications of three English-speaking travellers who visited northern Manchuria in the late nineteenth century: the 1860 book by Thomas Witlam Atkinson, an English explorer who travelled on the River Amur between 1847 and 1853; the 1888 book by Henry Evan Murchison James, a British civil servant in India, who travelled to Manchuria in 1886-1887; the photographs of the American William Henry Jackson, taken between 1894 and 1896 as a member of and photographer for the World’s Transportation Commission. The aim of this article is to study the way in which these three explorers described the hunting practices of the Tunguso-Manchu populations of the Amur region and used them to give meaning to this new territory. To understand the rhetoric of othering at work, I propose to look at the perceptions and representations of hunting practices in terms of what it tells us about how populations were classified, how territories were mapped and how places were represented. |
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