Emily Gettis
Geog390: Professor Simpson
Reading Response Week 13
11.19.2020
Paul Carter, Chapters from The Road to Botany Bay
In the chapter “An Outline of Names” by Paul Carter, we are shown the different steps that occur in the Enlightenment era imperialist exploration, naming practices, and written experiences of James Cook and his entourage during their time sailing around Australia. This chapter presents information on how language and act of naming from the perspective of an explorer, Cook and the botanist Banks are focused on in this chapter, undermines the space itself by being self-serving and inaccurate. In a historical deep dive and deconstructing of history, Carter details the not so subtleties of how the perspectives of the explorer and the botanist influenced their specific reasoning for the rhetoric used to name places and flora. Carter places Cook as a seeker of horizons and focuses on how Cook afforded a place a name as a strategy to confirm his journey, reaffirm his ‘right’ to continue on with exploration, and—if I’m understanding Carter correctly—guarantee further explorations of Australia, although not necessarily by Cook. The explorer is oriented and given feedback only by distance and an expected arrival; the journey and the act of traveling creates the explorer, and Cook operated in that spatial realm in a way that is reinforced by the names he chose to bestow on geographic features. This spatial historical strategy is shown in contrast with the botanist, Banks, who gives names as a way to accumulate and erase particularities, a kind of scientific washing of differences.
A part of Carter’s
method I really enjoyed in this chapter is in this quote on page 24, “Primary
knowledge lay in the course of the exploration itself, not in the elaboration
of possible discoveries.” I think Carter later symbolically explains this claim
in this quote, “They [the given place names] assert no literal likeness but are
offspring of the paradoxical miniaturization of the magnified image in the
telescope; framed and isolated, such features are brought close, make homely,
domestic” on page 31. Carter's claims orient us historically and expose how language, intention, and the infusion of perspective create a spatial history that was produced. This production is connected to the colonialist erasure of the environment that Aborigines produced their life on, and made possible for the continued exploration of Australia. I found it particularly interesting that Carter stated that even renaming or reverting back to Aboriginal names of places would be hollow, and his style of presenting information using Linnaeus naming and classification by Banks next to Cooks naming and how other scholars perceived the work done by both. It is interesting to me how Carter brings up that in creating the knowledge from going through the historical text available to us about this exploration, we are also greatly stunted by it.
I liked reading these Carter essays to see similarities and differences to some of the essays we read on alaskan natives. I feel like the way these essays discuss spatial changes was different than the alaskan essays as I dont recall there being much discussion on what the effects were on the indigenous communities way of life as was discussed in the alaskan indigenous essays.
ReplyDeleteI initially had what I assume to be a similar thought when I began reading this text: "Aren't the names Cook chose arbitrary? Wasn't he a horrible person as well?". I'll be honest, I didn't know a lot about him. I appreciate the author addressed what we were all thinking, and really expounded upon how our subconscious, culture, and our experiences shape our perception of reality using these two vastly different men as case studies. I had some preconceptions about Cook, but I'm beginning to appreciate the pure fortitude and intelligence he had as an explorer, and I respect his attitude of cartography as pure exploration and observation - filling in the blank spaces on the map and opening our minds to the vast diversity and potential of humanity as a species. As a traveler, I too can understand this thirst to see beyond the horizon and see and experience things I can't yet understand.
ReplyDeleteExcellent differentiation between the Explorer and Discoverer here, Emily. You are right that Carter sees Cook engaging in a spatial history, a tracking of a personal journey that reveals history and a person's function in that history as part of the act of creating/naming. Domesticizing the place-name process is an interesting concept, and it is valuable to consider exactly how Carter approaches his own material, how he travels this history through the quotations and site-specific processes of the historical figures he studies. You are right to point out that Carter is implanting his practice of exploration/spatial history in this book.
ReplyDeleteThe practice of creating knowledge is no less impactful than creating a space, and Carter is very interested in the way we can use the vocabulary we have for studying language, Rhetoric, namely, as a way to think about our relationship to space itself. It is an incredible intervention in both of these fields and opens an entire kind of new realm of study. The implications are profound, and this critical geography has important lessons for what we think of as progressive or not. Carter places great importance on the power of language and advances keywords and lines of thought that help us to move our "studies" and interventions (in language, space, and politics) in new and creative directions. How can our projects implement these practices?