Freie Universität Berlin

Link to the handout in class

Link to background on Strabo’s Geography

Link to People Of Tracota, And Cynocephales, In ‘The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville’

Link to Purchas his Pilgrimage Or Relations of the World
List of travels:

• Jean de Léry (1536-1613) Histoire d’un voyage faict en terre de Brésil
• Guillaume Postel [1510-1581], De la Republique des Turcs, & là ou l’occasion s’offrera, des meurs & loy de tous Muhamedistes, par Guillaume Postel Cosmopolite (Poitiers: Enguilbert de Marnef, 1560).
• Jean Mocquet [1575-1616?], Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes orientales et occidentales faits par Jean Mocquet, Garde du Cabinet des Singularités du Roy, aux Tuileries
• Jean Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant (Paris: Louis Bilaine, 1664) attributed to François Pétis de la Croix;
• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier [1605-1689], Les Six Voyages…en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes, pendant l’espace de quarante ans, 2 vols (Paris: Gervais Clouzier & Claude Barbin, 1676).
• François Bernier [1620-1668], Histoire de la derniere Revolution des Estats du Grand Mogol (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1671) and Suite des Memoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’Empire du Grand Mogol (The Hague: Chez Arnout Leers, 1671).

Rory Stewart, COOL UNDER FIRE, INTELLGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2011

And yet it is not a depressing place. I first saw it at the beginning of 2002. I had walked from Herat to Kabul that winter. I had seen hundreds of pickaxe-wielding villagers, directed by Pakistani traders, uncovering, looting and destroying the ancient city of the Turquoise Mountain, the lost Afghan capital of the Middle Ages. The Taliban had just blown up two monumental Buddhas that had stood, carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamiyan Valley, since the sixth century. I found new craters, left by looters, on mountain ridges at 11,000 feet. In this country of isolated hamlets, the life expectancy was 37, literacy rates in the south were 8%, and archaeological looting had become a common occupation, along with heroin production and mercenary fighting.

Central Kabul seemed like one extended security checkpoint. You were stopped by men who ripped car doors open and pointed their rifles at passengers. You found roads narrowing suddenly into tunnels of sandbags, or closed altogether by concrete blast walls. You were pushed off the street by armoured vehicles with blaring sirens, by embassy convoys, by militias in pick-up trucks.

Lecture-cum-Seminar series of the project “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship”.

The complete schedule can be viewed at https://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/fileadmin/pdf/LcS-winter2011-12.pdf

We would like to invite you to the first lecture and seminar in this series:

BODHISATTVA KAR
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta / Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam
“EMPIRE AND ETYMONS: THE PHILOLOGICAL PROBLEMATIC OF NATIONALISMS IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA
October 27, 2011
Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, room J 23/16
16:00-17:00 (Lecture only)

You can see the abstract https://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/bodhisattva-kar.html

This lecture critically explores the philological path of negotiating the riddle of origin in a bourgeois empire. Focusing particularly on the strange attraction to the etymological thought of a wide range of nineteenth and early twentieth‐century nationalists in South Asia, it tries to understand how in the analytical unit of the etymon were condensed various nationalisms’ (mutually conflicting) struggles with the arbitrary, endorsements of the familial and concerns regarding the originary. At one level, this helps us to identify the discursive trade‐offs between the imperial economies of filiation, the changing grammatical cultures and the emergent territorial nationalisms in the colonies. At another, this also allows us to approach the disciplinary history of philology at its popular, and seemingly undisciplinable, frontier. While most of the historical materials used in this particular lecture come from the eastern and north‐ eastern regions of British South Asia, its analytical claim extends across the usual divide between metropolitan Europe and the colonial peripheries. Indeed, it is a central contention of this lecture that in the period under discussion, etymology functioned not simply as an axis of vertical temporality connecting the original and the existent, but also as a critical principle of ordering the spatial extents of such circulatory structures as nations or empires. In the seminar part of the event, an attempt will be made to re‐inspect some of these points through a close reading of William Jones’s canonical 1792 text “ The Ninth Anniversary Discourse, on the Origin and Families of Nations”, while critically responding to a number of conceptual and methodological challenges inaugurated by R. Howard Bloch’s 1983 work Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages.

Bodhisattva Kar is Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. His immediate area of specialization is the north‐eastern frontier of British India, and in his work he tries to bring economic and cultural histories into conversation. A PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University of India, Kar has taught and held fellowships at El Colegio de Mexico (Mexico City), Oxford Brookes University (Oxford), Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsterdam). He has just finished a book manuscript titled Accumulation of the Primitive: The North‐Eastern Frontier of British India, 1790s ‐1930s, and is now working simultaneously on two book projects provisionally called “Some Histories of the Social: Essays in Spatial Politics” and “Fantastic Histories of the Naga Hills.” He has also recently co‐edited a volume of essays called “New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices” with Partha Chatterjee and Tapat i Guha‐Thakurta which is scheduled to be published in 2012.

John Speke, the greatest Victorian explorer? by William Boyd, in TLS, 5 Oct 2011

Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley and Baker were all notable outsiders, driven by their own egos, demons and motives. And Africa acted as a potent catalyst. Solitude, strangeness, danger and the lure of great fame and wealth (not to be forgotten) propelled these men to test themselves to the limits. And at the same time, in stark contrast, were the unending displays of petty bickering, petulance and self-regard that went on among these brave explorers.