scholarly journals Image of Oriental Turkmen Female Travelees in the Nineteenth Century Western Travel Writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Ahmad Gholi ◽  
Masoud Ahmadi Mosaabad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Books ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Great Game ◽  
Cultural Baggage

One of crucial issues which Western travel writers in their journeys to the Orient specifically in the height of colonialism in the nineteenth has addressed is Oriental women. Entrapped and conditioned by their cultural baggage and operating on the basis of Orientalist discourse, they have mostly presented a reductive image of their Oriental female travelees as exotic, seductive, sensual, secluded, and suppressed, in lieu of entering into a cultural dialogue and painting their picture sympathetically and respectfully. To convey their lasciviousness, they have expatiated on Oriental harems and to display their oppression foregrounded their veil and ill-treatment by their allegedly insensitive and callus menfolks. In the same period in the context of the Great Game the politically oriented Western travel writers in particular the British ones set out on a voyage to Central Asia where they encountered ethnic Turkmen. Besides gathering intelligence, the travel writers devoted considerable pages to their Turkmen female travelees as well. But their images in these travel books have not been subject to rigorous scholarly scrutiny. In this regard, the current articles in two sections seeks to redress this neglect by shedding light on how these travel writers portrayed their Turkmen female travelees in seemingly unorientalist fashion in the first part and how explicitly in Orientalist tradition in the second part. 

Mistranslation of Three Cultural Signs: Rajm, Food, and Tayammum in Vambery’s Travels in Central Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 420
Author(s):  
Ahmad Gholi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Foreign Culture ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Cultural Baggage

Translation as a process of domesticating something alien is not restricted solely to linguistic domain; on the contrary, it can be extended to other arenas as well. For example, travel writing as an attempt to tame foreign culture and render it accessible for the audience in home culture, can be considered as a kind of cultural translation. When a travel writer enters into a new context (source culture), he encounters with signs which are radically different from those in his home culture. Hence, the travel writer is burdened to deforeignize hitherto unknown signs to render them familiar and consumable for his audience. Since the travel writer carries his cultural baggage which functions as a cultural filter, his cultural translation cannot be objective and free from cultural mistranslations, and as a result, the current article is going to focus on the cultural mistranslations in Arminius Vambery’s Travel to Central Asia. Thus, it argues that the travel writer in question in his journey to Central Asia which is a semi terra incognita in nineteenth century endeavors to translate the exotic aspects (foreign signs) of Central Asian culture; however, his cultural biases give rise to the cultural mistranslations in areas such as diet and religious punishment like stoning.

British Secret Service Activity in Khorassan, 1887–1908

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-675
Author(s):  
L. P. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
Service Activity ◽  
Great Game

When great powers quarrel their lesser neighbours are often worst affected. Cajoled and wooed, they are drawn into conflicts they would prefer to avoid. Such involvement may exacerbate internal weaknesses and end by damaging them long after the causes of the original dispute have faded. Nineteenth-century Iran became drawn into Anglo-Russian rivalries in Central Asia as each sought to secure her assistance. Spectators of the so-called ‘Great Game’ were not allowed: the boxes were part of the field of play.

Knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 177-216
Author(s):  
Jagjeet Lally
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information Asymmetry ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Great Game ◽  
Imperial Rivalry

Over the nineteenth century, imperial rivalry and fears over the security of India’s northern borders led to the steady accumulation of knowledge about caravan trade and the trading world. This chapter shows that the Indo-Afghan frontier and central Asia were of critical significance to the testing of scientific mapping and modern intelligence, ethnography and genealogy, making the spaces and networks of caravan trade fundamental to the finessing of the British Indian state’s technologies of power. Yet, the epistemic anxiety resulting from information asymmetry and the flows of mobile agents through this space—especially during the ‘Great Game’—precipitated schemes to sedentarise populations and transform them into cultivators and soldiers, in turn integrating western Punjab’s economy more deeply into that of the British Empire at the cost of connections into the Eurasian interior.

To Desert and Steppe

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Fagan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Taklimakan Desert ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Army Officer ◽  
Political Agent ◽  
Area North ◽  
Great Game ◽  
The Silk Road

The vast reaches of central Asia are redolent with history, with stirring tales of Marco Polo’s epic journeys and all the romance of the Silk Road, an arduous caravan route that connected Asia and the West for hundreds of years. The archaeology of both central Asia and the Silk Road has yet to reveal all their secrets, for the area presents formidable obstacles for even the most experienced researchers and travelers. A century ago, the obstacles were even more severe—no rail lines, no roads beyond caravan tracks and horse trails, and endemic political instability, to say nothing of harsh deserts and high mountain passes. Despite these obstacles, Afghanistan, Tibet, and other countries along the Silk Road were the arena for what became known in the nineteenth century as the “great game,” the hide-and-seek struggle between Russia and Britain for control of a strategically vital area north of British India. Here, archaeological travel was in the hands of explorers and truly dedicated scientists, and certainly was not the domain of tourists. The logistics and enormous distances ensured that anyone traveling in central Asia vanished from civilization for months, and more often for years. During the nineteenth century, the occasional British army officer and political agent, and also French and German travelers, ventured widely through the region, although their concerns were predominantly military and strategic rather than scientific. The great game culminated in Colonel Francis Younghusband’s military and diplomatic expedition for Britain into Tibet in 1904, prompted by rumors that Russia had its eye on the country. After Younghusband’s return to India and because of his account of the fascinating, mountainous regions to the north, the rugged terrain that formed India’s northern frontier became a place where solitary young officers went exploring, hunting, or climbing mountains for sport. During this period, only a handful of travelers penetrated central Asia with scientific objectives, among them the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who traveled via Russia and the Pamirs to China in 1893–1897. He nearly died crossing the western Taklimakan Desert in the Tarim Basin to reach the Khotan River. This huge basin was a melting pot of different religions and cultures, a bridge for silk caravans between East and West.

scholarly journals Music Hall, Jigs and Strippers: English Low-Brow Music in French Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-414
Author(s):  
Hannah Scott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Jules Valles ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
Textual Form

Abstract It is a commonplace to remark that nineteenth-century England was a land without music. Yet French travel writers in the fin de siècle remark again and again on their astonishing, low-brow musical encounters in the nation’s capital. The present article examines such experiences in the writing of Jules Vallès and Hector France, as they turn their steps away from the refinement of Covent Garden to seek out more esoteric musical experiences in the music halls, tawdry bars, minor theatres and strip joints of London. These texts present an intriguing and ambivalent textual form to the reader. Though being based on – and structured as – travel anecdotes, they no less insistently reach beyond the anecdotal experience to extrapolate overarching conclusions about the English and their character relative to France. Yet in doing so, their texts reveal inconsistencies and contradictions as they try to reconcile these strange musical experiences with the stereotypes of Englishness that had solidified over the generations; these alien musical experiences resist conceptualization and challenge the tropes that had for so long underwritten French ideas of the English Other.

The Wild Horse (Equus prjevalskii, Poliakoff)

1904 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 460-468
Author(s):  
J. C. Ewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Wild Horse

In the time of Pallas and Pennant, as in the days of Oppian and Pliny, it was commonly believed true wild horses were to be met with not only in Central Asia, but also in Europe and Africa. But ere the middle of the nineteenth century was reached, naturalists were beginning to question the existence of genuine wild horses; and somewhat later, the conclusion was arrived at that the horse had long “ceased to exist in a state of nature.”

scholarly journals Pleasure and Instruction: Generic Conventions in Emma Hart Willard’s 
Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Rutkowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
New Type ◽  
Distinguishing Features

The purpose of the present paper is to analyse epistolary and descriptive conventions in Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) by Emma Willard. The article argues that Willard attempts to combine the standards of 18th-century travelogue with its emphasis on instruction with a new type of autobiographical travel narrative which puts the persona of a traveller in the foreground. In this respect, Willard’s Journal and Travels, for all its didacticism, testifies to an increasing value attached to subjective experience, which was to become one of the distinguishing features of nineteenth-century travel writing.

scholarly journals ‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
Geological Map ◽  
Humphry Davy

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.

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