The Evolution of England's First Encounters

In the late 16th century, England was yet to become Great Britain, the colossal colonial power ruling the seas and the place from which curious and fortune-seeking citizens spread themselves around the world to document its contents and exploit its richness.

The beginning of the first colony for the English came late compared to Spain and Portugal. Finally, in 1588, after many failed attempts and numerous journeys of discovery, mathematician and scientist (as it was known at the time) Thomas Harriot visited the North American coast and authored “A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,” in which he describes nearly every detail of potential interest to the establishment of English colonies, somehow avoiding any detailed physical description of the native Indians he encountered. Under the heading “Of the nature and manners of the people,” Harriot does discuss the Indian’s clothes, houses, farms, cultural practices, and also adding “In respect of us they are a people poore, and for want of skill and judgment in the knowledge of use of things” (25).

Harriot finds the natives wanting “in respect of” the English, but he never holds them to be any less human than Europeans or other civilized peoples. In fact, he thinks that they will be compliant to English goals of establishing plantations, finally making some headway in the New World when Spain and other nations were already stuffing their monarchical coffers with gold and silver. Harriot, to borrow a phrase from our modern empire system, sought a “kinder and gentler” exploitation of the New World and its human inhabitants that would shame England’s rivals and bring honor home.

Fast-forward to 1845, with Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle,” and one can see how both science and fortune seeking had changed the relationship between the English and the New World inhabitants. England was now Great Britain, flexing its dominance of the seas with brute force, and foraying to still more distant and remote locations to inspect the fauna and peoples with a scientific rigor Harriot could not imagine nor comprehend. Landing in Tierra Del Fuego, Darwin, unlike Harriot, writes detailed descriptions of the people he encounters, and finds no need to curtail his biting judgments of appearance and habits. The English no longer needed to sell the virtues of colonization and the ease with which it could be accomplished.

A Hibiscus on Bourbon Street

I have been in New Orleans, and though tardy in my posts, my travels revealed a pleasant hibiscus growing in our courtyard rental on Bourbon St, emerging only after a violent thunderstorm; my indoor variety seems barren, woody, naked, and ashamed compared to this dynamic beauty in its sub-tropical home!

The Evolution of the Beagle

Click the thumbnail to navigate visually

A Dear Darwin Memo

Reading the birth or racism abetted by science made keeps me thinking about a class (Todd Butler’s TransAtlantic Lit. ) looking at early English voyages to the New World. We read a Thomas Harriot’s quasi-scientific book written about 1590 about a trip to an area they were calling “Virginia,” which is raising some issues when confronted with the themes and historical patterns we have read about in this class. What I’m talking about is how the scientific (curious and serious) and economic purposes (plantations, transplanting exotic species in Europe) gets fused with the cultural milieu, and ultimately forces those same headlong pursuits to a showdown over Christian genesis and teleology. Thomas Harriot and many others portrayed the Indians of Roanoke Virginia as the children before the Fall, and the book that resulted does attempt an admirable scientific bent, with descriptions of villages, plants, the social and other practices of the Roanoke Indians as well. Overall, it is a poorly funded venture and a naturalist/economic expose. It is practically an advertisement. The book with engravings (modeled by fairly accurate naturalistic drawings by a guy named John White?) softened the features of nearly everything. The villages were pristine and orderly, the Indians were transformed into Greeks, with unnatural poses and long curling locks about their Europeanized faces. It is remarkable, and it appears to be both the need to show the English that it was safe to venture to the Northern portions of the Americas (above the cannibals the Spanish encountered), and it spoke to the belief in the one-time creation of the Bible. At what point did the Biblical, or Golden Age, Inhabitant of the New World become a racialized being?
Somehow it would be fun to connect the early views of the new world peoples with the formation we start to see crystallizing in Darwin. I’m not sure how much Darwin draws upon Blumenbach, but it does seem that his “truth” of evolutionary processes did help spread that scientific glaze over racial identity. The idea of progress is a strong feature of linear European ways and calendars. Who can deny that things have progressed in so much that Cook, Humboldt, or Darwin could easily see the technological and cultural differences (better!) that clearly showed the new world peoples (new to Europeans that is) to be in the early stages of becoming more European. Darwin, unlike so many others came to see and record (he was not seller of wares and travel brochures) but he did manage to somehow build a scientific fiefdom to scrape the cream off the luscious lands he encountered with his brutally eloquent theory. The persistence of Social Darwinism might be the touchstone to how the economic, scientific, and teleological join forces to make something as forcefully true as Darwin’s theory something equally false, and forcefully so.

The Palouse Tourist

Dear ________

I’ll confess I stopped skimming Lucy Lippard’s article “The Tourist At Home,” after this part:
“Tourism is the apotheosis of looking around, which is the root of regional arts as well as how we know where we are. Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around” (13).

Here is a little test: What kind of birds hang out in your neighborhood? What is the last varmint (defined as anything furry and pesky that some people like to shoot) you have seen scampering around? How high is the Palouse River that runs through downtown Pullman, and how many feet must the river rise before it floods the Subway parking lot?

O.K, I’ll accept just about any bird or critter you mention, and I’ll give credit if you know that the river well above its normal level.

I don’t know if you have ever thought why people smoke (not including the addictive part), but in searching for an answer to why people smoked cigarettes, one old roommate suggested it had to do with breathing, which is something everyone does (kinda like “live free or at least breath, or die” as a motto for life’s license plates) but not very deeply or with much conscious effort. Just as smoking gave people permission to breath deeply and with conscious effort (something this roommate thought was important to one’s physical and spiritual health) looking around and taking in the visuals of one’s environment is deeply seated human activity that too often requires special locations and lots of time set aside. We are tourists because we need to breathe, that is, we need to know what the birds look like, how the trees arrange themselves, the pitch of the sky, the color of the rivers, the scum in the gutters, the smell of urine in an alley—we can’t just take in these sights sounds and smells when we get two weeks off, or go to an academic conference.

For example, the human penchant to gawk and marvel at the natural world is now perverted (like smoking and breathing) into an unnatural alliance. Wrong! Remember what Frank Sinatra said about “love and marriage” –“can’t have one without the other” but that is too easily laid to waste. Surely we can look around without Birkenstocks and Nikons, or even return tickets. What would happen if people started to breath in the sights around them, even if they think there is nothing worth looking at?

I know when I do travel, I find the birds to be more exotic than they really are. The birds are supposed to be more colorful in tropical places, but I am shocked at how exotic regular brown birds can be when you give them a good look. The patterns on a few Warblers inspired me to get out my binoculars the other day, which I often use to gaze out my windows at the birds milling about the low shrubs and empty lots near my house. I am amazed at how the blue tints in Magpies wings can be so rich and varied, sometimes shimmering metallic rays of grey and white. I swear, if I ran into one of these big loud Magpies for the first time in another state or country, I’d be sure to think of them as exotic. In fact, I have begun to see my environs as exactly that—exotic, colorful, rich—as if I was a tourist in my own town. I often wonder what real tourist see when they come to Pullman, and pick out things to do that tourist might find amusing or edifying. I went to Kamiak Butte because its too close for locals to visit, and the same for the Boyer Park on the Snake river, both not an hour away, but full of people from places very far.


It is easy for me to talk about looking around where one lives, well, because I don’t get around all that much. Above 40 years of age, I thought by now I would have spanned the globe (my childhood visions globe trotting await my second childhood, which is coming soon!).

I sing the corporate body electric

This photo comes from this site, and explains:
"An ad placed at the Johannesburg International Airport to greet arriving and departing passengers. It’s a world first, a 5000 m2 billboard which required 1000 liters of paint and 9 separate permits from different regulatory authorities."

“Place” is a word that (corporate trademark reference alert), like the Yellow Pages ad says, “gets used”-- a lot. Sometimes “location” is the primary meaning:
“Is this the place?” “I need directions to your place.”


But usually there is some tinge of “judgment,” approval or disapproval:
“What kind of place are you running here?” “I love that place!” “This place is a dump” “There’s no place like home.” "Is this the place to put an ad?"


In addition to location and judgments, place is always tied to “relationships” between oneself and others, and one’s environment--relationships like:
“I don’t belong in this god-forsaken place.” “How the F#@% did I get in this place” “I can’t seem to find my place” “Everyone deserves a place at the table”


Edward Relph’s critical look at corporate colonization of the world’s airports claims that corporate culture has spawned clones to replace real places. These black holes of place only partake of “placelessness,” undeserving of a full place at the table (of course, puns always get a place).

The sense of the loss of “authenticity” reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of modern photography in the industrial age, which he thought stole a bit of the allure from the real thing (say, the Virgin Mary or a Tomato Soup can), making reality less magical than it would be otherwise, and reducing all substance to the mere similitude of a photograph. Pierre Bourdieu (yes, another French theorist gets a place at the theory table) is more positive, seeing the ability of specific “locations” with their peoples and traditions to create a sense of authenticity, to give or withhold approval, and to build and maintain relationships in concert with their own notions of place-ness.

I’m not sure any of this matters too much in the airport bar, so of course
“Save me a place”

Collection Inspired Narrative: Truth or (Con)Sequence?

A plausible or pleasing narrative can be pieced together with complimentary components, say, a sequence of events, which anchors the collection spatially and temporally. What if the "neatness" of sequential ordering inspires "veracity-light," less truth, but more (in the words of Colbert) "truthiness"?

I like true stories to end happily (despite my love of suffering as an art form), so I've inserted the last photo to show that my children survived the loss of their favorite car (the youngest was crying also about her crayons that had melted into the back seat upholstery), even though the picture was actually taken before we knew the car was toast.