{"title":"The recurring “discovery” of Hokkaido and the Ainu: three decades of nineteenth-century British travelogues","authors":"John L. Hennessey","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2200129","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"What is the explorer or scientist to do when rapid advances in technology, communi-cations, and transport leave few truly untouched regions for them to “ discover ” ? This article will explore the case of Europeans and Americans during the second half of the nineteenth century who sought to make a name for themselves by exploring Hokkaido and studying the Ainu, a people indigenous to the Okhotsk region in Northeast Asia. I will argue that despite appearances, a careful reading and comparison of published sources from this period reveals that the Ainu in fact were visited by a signi fi cant number of Westerners and that these “ explorers ” made extensive use of a pre-existing travel infrastructure which expanded over time. I will analyze the diverse strategies that these Westerners combined to sell their travelogues to a British reading public, including emphasizing and exaggerating their supposed “ discoveries, ” claiming important contributions to science, and employing humor and exoticism.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2200129","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
What is the explorer or scientist to do when rapid advances in technology, communi-cations, and transport leave few truly untouched regions for them to “ discover ” ? This article will explore the case of Europeans and Americans during the second half of the nineteenth century who sought to make a name for themselves by exploring Hokkaido and studying the Ainu, a people indigenous to the Okhotsk region in Northeast Asia. I will argue that despite appearances, a careful reading and comparison of published sources from this period reveals that the Ainu in fact were visited by a signi fi cant number of Westerners and that these “ explorers ” made extensive use of a pre-existing travel infrastructure which expanded over time. I will analyze the diverse strategies that these Westerners combined to sell their travelogues to a British reading public, including emphasizing and exaggerating their supposed “ discoveries, ” claiming important contributions to science, and employing humor and exoticism.
期刊介绍:
Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.