Journeys, "travel not books", as Michel Foucault advises, are potentially, and dangerously, transformative, and qualities that modern tourism does not intentionally promote.
The world of Paul Gauguin, the artist, not the Cruise Line, shows us is a lost world, a dream as well as a reality shaped by the collision of ways of living already made impossible and a modernity shaped by colonial interests and capitalist exploitation. Traces of this interface are now overlaid by the smoothing techniques of a tourist industry as it creates its own version of a paradise lost.
Today, it is possible to sail on a cruise liner named after the artist, and "enjoy" an experience that frames the present in an exotic set of consumable ideas, impressions and commodities that are part and parcel of the conditions and power relations of the condition we call "globalisation" now.
Visit Paul Gauguin Cruises
Paul Gauguin Cruises is a cruise line owned by Beachcomber Croisieres Limited with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Paul Gauguin Cruises operates the luxury cruise ship, the Paul Gauguin, to Tahiti, French Polynesia and the South Pacific.
However, the "exotic" experiences offered by Paul Gauguin Cruises do not, in any way, reflect upon or address the existential questions set out by Gauguin in his art created during 1897 in Tahiti. And why would they? And why should they? Culture is their business!
But "Culture is Our Business" too!
Primitivism, tourism and even the work of Gauguin are concerns for Westerners. What do Tahitians think of the painter and of his work? According to Tahitian writer Chantal Spitz, they are not interested in the painter. His work, which in no way concerns the present of the Tahitians and which has no relationship with their past, leaves them indifferent, or causes a degree of irritation.
Gauguin ‘had no particular influence on our people. He is only one among numerous Western voices who robbed us of our expression’, she stated at a conference held in Papeete to commemorate the centenary of the death of the painter, stirring up a commotion among certain European academics.
Gauguin was a colonialist and a European artist. As a settler, Gauguin is no more responsible than another. As an artist and producer of discourse, he cannot be exonerated so easily: his work plays a major role in the perpetuation of misunderstandings between the West and Tahitians, due to the myths that they uphold. Reducing Tahiti to ‘the island of Gauguin’ diverts attention from the realities and the problems specific to Polynesia. However, Gauguin represented Eve and Mary as Tahitians; he celebrated Maori myths; he placed Polynesian artefacts in his work and recognized their artistic value. He deplored that ‘one does not seem to imagine in Europe that there has been either with the Maoris of New Zealand, or in the Marquesas a very advanced art of decoration’ and that ‘the administration has not for an instant thought of creating a museum of all Oceanic art in Tahiti, though it would have been easy’.Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography
Jean-François Staszak University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Jean-François Staszak's article, quoted above, begins with a methodology that is instructive. The article advocates an articulation of cultural geography and art history, and in this perspective focuses on the analysis of the primitivist movement and particularly on Gauguin’s work and personal itinerary.
Globalisation - before the word!
Using the log books of shipping over the centuries and translating this data using 21st century computing capability has led to a contemporary mapping of maritime history able to show the globalisation of trade flows goes back hundreds of years.
18th Century shipping mapped using 21st Century technology
Taking these cues, the personal itinerary and the larger scale of patterns of movement, and trying to find a manageable way to set out the modern historical backstory of globalisation, Paul Gauguin's personal itinerary is juxtaposed with Joseph Conrad, under the banner of the title of a painting by Gauguin:
What Are We
Where Are We Going
Gauguin inscribed the original French title in the upper left corner: D'où Venons Nous Que Sommes Nous Où Allons Nous. The inscription the artist wrote on his canvas has no question mark, no dash, and all words are capitalised.
In the upper right corner he signed and dated the painting: P. Gauguin / 1897. The painting was created in Tahiti, and is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
"A people who oppresses others cannot be free"
The French government, keen to present colonialism in a positive light, mounted the Paris Colonial Exhibition, "Exposition coloniale internationale", that was opened 6 May 1931 in the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris. This six-month long exhibition attempted to display the diverse cultures and immense resources of France's colonial possessions.
The scale was enormous. It is estimated that from 7 to 9 million visitors came from over the world. The French government brought people from the colonies to Paris and had them create native arts and crafts and perform in grandly scaled reproductions of their native architectural styles such as huts or temples. Other nations participated in the event, including The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The art of Gauguin was represented in the Pavillon des Establissements Francais deL'Oceanie, and for good reason as far as the organisers of the exposition were concerned.
Gauguin did not display Polynesian savagery; he only celebrated the beauty of the people and cultural wealth. This was in no way original concerning Tahitians, and in particular the women. The daughter of the ‘Nouvelle-Cythère’ and of the Garden of Eden, conforming to Western canons of beauty (particularly feminine), the vahine was from the moment of her ‘discovery’ placed very high in the hierarchy of the peoples, unlike the ‘Negro woman’, who stood right at the bottom of the aesthetic and anthropological scale of‘races’. By painting magnificent Tahitian women, Gauguin only strengthened the flattering stereotypes that were already well established. Gauguin consolidated Western representations of Tahiti by giving them a magnificent expression, largely distributed thanks to the rapid success of his painting. Tahiti and Tahitian men and women as depicted by Gauguin do not contradict the colonial imagination, which is why his pictures were exhibited at the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931 (8 million visitors), in the Oceania Pavilion.
Along with souvenirs and the works of Loti and Segalen, the pavilion contained Gauguin’s works: two pictures, a wooden panel, a monotype, at least five engravings, the palette of the painter and three letters. The ‘primitive’ art of the Marquesas Islands was represented by various objects of ‘the prehistoric period’, i.e. before the 1842 annexation: some small tikis ‘in human bone’ show the ‘innumerable and pitiless gods’ who claim ‘human victims that were never refused to them’.
So, to understand the logic of this exhibition, let’s turn to the statement that the curator made to the Figaro.
“This Polynesian exhibition is placed under the sign of Loti and that of Gauguin, in the form of a tribute to each of them. Who else revealed to the over-evolved and complicated Westerners we have become, the simple and charming soul, the noble plastic beauty of a race that is slowly dying and of which the memory will last into the future only through the incomparable talent of Pierre Loti, the magnificent lyricism of Victor Ségalen and the genius of Paul Gauguin (...). It is the very memory of this silence that the traveller should bring back with him today from these islands where there lived a race of which, in 1774, Cook, estimating it at one hundred thousand individuals, thought that it was the most beautiful of the Pacific, perhaps the most beautiful of all peoples. Forty years after Cook, Dumont d’Urville calculated that they were reduced to twenty thousand souls; today, one hardly finds two thousand. A race condemned without appeal, a race that is dying; but some astonishing objects of art, carefully guarded in our collections, the pictures of Gauguin, the poetry of Ségalen and the novel of Loti will preserve for us the imperishable memory of its perfect and calm beauty."
(J.-C. Paulme, assistant curator in charge of Oceania at the Colonial Exhibition in 1931).
Polynesian art, even if it is ‘astonishing’ and associated with a barbaric cult, is recognized as having undeniable value, as the Polynesian ‘race’ itself, whose foremost merit is its beauty. But this art and this ‘race’ are disappearing and even condemned to disappear. The European artists that have depicted them have not only produced good works of art, they also have the merit of saving from oblivion the Polynesian civilisation and people. This argument refers to one of the alleged justifications of the colonial enterprise: to save degenerating people, help them to recover their lost glory. In this perspective, it is logical to use the works of artists who pay tribute to this past and have accomplished a work of archaeologists, of prehistorians (since colonization marks the entry of these people into history). The direct or indirect responsibility of colonization, celebrated by the exhibition, for the disappearance of the culture and of the Polynesian people is obviously not touched upon.
Jean-François Staszak University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Note:
The reference to Pierre Loti is important, as it was Le Mariage de Loti, 1880, the autobiographical novel by French author Pierre Loti, that would have partly influenced Gauguin's original plan to visit Tahiti. The novel describes Loti's romantic liaison with an exotic Tahitian girl named Rarahu. It is the basis for the 1883 opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes.
‘Do not visit the Colonial Exhibition’
ordered a tract of 1931 signed by the Surrealists, Breton, Eluard, Aragon, etc.
The Truth about the Colonies was a counter-exhibition organised that same
year by the CGTU and the surrealists, and received 5000 visitors. Along with rooms dedicated to the USSR and presenting the atrocities of the colonial conquests and the first movements of liberation, three sections were devoted
to ‘Negro’, Oceanic and American art (‘redskin’). Collections of primitive art belonging to Breton, Eluard, Tzara, Aragon and to some wealthy Parisian merchants were on display.
The mobilization of the surrealists and the use of the ‘art of colonized countries’ in one of the first anti-colonialist demonstrations show that primitivism is deeply involved with the political history of France and of her colonies.
The Surrealist Map of the World first appeared anonymously in a special issue of the Belgian periodical Variétés, in 1929.
Denis Wood suggests that Éluard likely made the map. In 1924 he had toured Southeast Asia and parts of Indochina, where he encountered appalling colonial violence committed by Dutch and French powers. Wood explains that:
“Éluard had recorded his route on a map, Les Cinq Parties du Monde, Planisphère, Comprenant toutes les Possessions Coloniales, a classic of the era that displayed, on a Mercator projection, English colonial possessions in yellow, French in pink, Dutch in orange, Italian in mauve, and so on”
Wood, Denis, with John Fels and John Krygier. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: The Guilford Press, 2010.
The Surrealists were good at identifying cultural, political, psychological and ideological precedents, and they were seriously critical of colonialism in general, and French colonialism in particular.
Lynn Palermo's paper on L’Exposition Anticoloniale asks the question whether it was a political or aesthetic protest?
L’Exposition Anticoloniale - Political or Aesthetic Protest?This paper provides a useful account of these differing methods in these two distinct curatorial approaches. A key element of Aragon's method was juxtaposition and humour. The conclusion of this paper summarizes the argument thus:
LYNN E. PALERMO
Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA, USA
In response to the 1931 Paris Exposition Coloniale, André Thirion and
Louis Aragon organised the Exposition Anti-impérialiste in an attempt
to bring about collaboration between Communists and Surrealists on political activity under the auspices of the Communist Party. However, tensions arose immediately, often as personal spats. Thirion’s section of the exhibition adhered to the didactic method favoured by the Party. In contrast, Aragon’s section, ostensibly dealing with the cultural impact of colonialism, reveals a distinctly surrealist approach with its irreverent tone and rich ambiguity. In this paper, I argue that the conflict between Aragon and Thirion was rooted in their respective notions of revolution, and therefore politics, resulting in an Exposition Anti-impérialiste containing two fundamentally different (even opposing) protests to French colonialism. Aragon’s section of the exposition also reveals his commitment to surrealist ideals, even as he was moving toward his break with André Breton.
In light of Aragon’s political and creative turmoil in the early 1930s, his section of the Exposition Anti-impérialiste dealing with the cultural and religious implications of colonialism can be seen as one of his attempts to bring together surrealist and communist concerns, and straddle their different – and profoundly conflicting – values and goals. His integration of aesthetics and politics was a mise-en-scène of surrealist political action.
The technique of creating astonishing juxtapositions, as in the case of combining hand-crafted ‘primitive’ sculpture with Western industrial kitsch was, of course, an established surrealist device conceived to reveal and destabilise idées reçues. But what also fundamentally distinguished his section of the Exposition Anticoloniale is that visitors were prodded into questioning societal assumptions and the status quo, without being provided with clear answers or solutions; whereas Thirion’s sections posited Soviet-style expansion as the answer to colonialism, and engagement in the Communist Party as appropriate action for individuals who wished to change the social order. It is clear from the various written accounts of the Exposition Anticoloniale that visitors reacted to Aragon’s exhibit differently than to the other sections – as something provocative, humorous, even refreshing. The ambiguous structure of his display pushed the mind open to new possibilities, performing the type of psychological revolution that the Surrealists sought as an essential stage preceding social and political revolution. An exhibit of this style, though presented in the context of communist propaganda, effectively avoided serving that specific cause because it proposed no concrete solution to the problem of colonialism. Consequently, Aragon avoided using art to any partisan agenda, whether republican France with its promotion of imperialism, or the Communist Party with its sanction of socialist realism. In fact, given the nature of Aragon’s exhibit, the Marxist quote, ‘Un peuple qui en opprime d’autres ne saurait être libre’, which hung in the background, also takes on multiple meanings, especially as Aragon was being pulled in so many directions. In that period of his life, the slogan could have been referring to imperialism, the Communist Party, or even André Breton, for his efforts to maintain control over his group of Surrealists. The lack of clarity, however, is significant in that it reveals to what extent Aragon was still invested in the surrealist vision of revolution, even as he gravitated toward commitment to the Communist Party.
In this sense, the Exposition Anticoloniale as a whole seems to have been at odds with itself: effectively, it contained two separate exhibitions, with the cultural/religious display reflecting surrealist revolutionary values, and Thirion’s political exhibits adhering to the Party line on political and social revolution. It appears, then, that the friction between Thirion and Aragon during the Exposition Anticoloniale stemmed from larger, irreconcilable differences between the collectivist and ultimately conformist – but often efficient – political revolt espoused by the Communist Party, and the individualist, irreverent, psychological revolution envisioned by the Surrealists with their joie de vivre and unfocused political activity. Part of Aragon’s goal was undoubtedly to expose theFrench republic’s complicity in harnessing aesthetics and the arts to construct cultural ‘hierarchies’ that would support colonial policy. And, as Blake, Norindr and others have noted, the Surrealists were not above indulging in a certain amount of unexamined exoticism. But by mounting an exhibition replete with ambiguities, and therefore explicitly not contributing to the communist didactics employed in Thirion’s sections, Aragon equally demonstrated a refusal to allow surrealism to become the servant of the Communist Party – or any political movement. The exhibition’s additional anti-religious layer may have provided other common political ground for Surrealists and Communists, but Aragon’s protest against the church’s stranglehold on the creative mind – precisely the type of colonialism which the Surrealists found most repugnant – also opened the door to provocative parallels with the Communist Party’s authoritative approach. Perhaps these are all reasons why, like Aragon, we might term his cultural display ‘l’essentiel’ of the Exposition Anti-impérialiste.
Globalisation of cultures - now!
Returning to Jean-François Staszak's Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography his reference to the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, France, brings this page back to the globalisation of cultures NOW!
Following the tradition of French presidents building museums as monuments to their time in office, following Presidents Georges Pompidou and Centre Georges Pompidou; Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and the Musée d'Orsay; François Mitterrand's Grand Louvre, the project for a new museum celebrating the arts of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania was brought to completion by President Jacques Chirac.
A number of French intellectuals and scientists, including André Malraux, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, had called for a single and important museum in Paris dedicated to the arts and cultures of non-European societies, drawing upon the large collections gathered by French explorers, missionaries and ethnologists.
A proposal for such a museum had been made by the ethnologist and art collector Jacques Kerchache in a 1990 manifesto in the newspaper Libération, called "The masterpieces of the entire world are born free and equal." The manifesto was signed by three hundred artists, writers, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians. Kerchache brought the idea to the attention of Jacques Chirac, then Mayor of Paris, and became his advisor. Chirac was elected president of France in 1995, and in the following year announced the creation of a new museum combining the collections of two different museums:
- the 25,000 objects of the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (The MAAO or National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania), which had originally been created for the Colonial Exposition of 1931, and then remade in 1961 by André Malraux, the Minister of Culture under President Charles DeGaulle, into a museum dedicated the cultures of the overseas possessions of France;
- the collections of the laboratory of ethnology of Musée de l'Homme ("Museum of Man"), created for the Paris Exposition of 1937, which contained 250,000 objects.
The first venture of the new museum was the opening of a new gallery within the Louvre Museum, in the Pavillon des Sessions, dedicated to what were called the arts premiers, the "first arts". The new section met immediate resistance; traditionalists felt that this kind of art did not belong in Louvre, while many ethnologists felt that it risked splitting the collections into two parts, with the best objects going to the Louvre.
Jean-François Staszak takes this up further in Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography.
In 1924 the first book devoted to primitive art was published. The exhibitions of the Trocadero Museum in the 1930s showed objects of tribal art. This entry of primitive art into the history of art owes a lot to the cubists, to the fauves and to Gauguin’s followers since 1906. In spite of the limited and ambiguous character of what the primitivists borrowed from ‘Negro’ or Oceanic art, it is them who, in the eyes of the public, transformed the savage into an artist. The wood sculptures of Gauguin, that he considered ‘ultra savage’, owed little to Polynesia, but they did contribute to Polynesian and African artefacts’ being considered as works of art. The consequences were considerable: the capacity to create works of art is among the criteria differentiating human beings and animals. The view of the West on ‘primitive’ people changed because these were recognized as just as able of producing masterpieces as Westerners (or even more likely to do so, according to some primitivists). However, the entry of ‘primitive’ arts into the Louvre (2000 exhibition), which proposes viewing them from a purely aesthetic point of view, devoid of all ethnological considerations (for example in reference to their ritual use) continues to give rise to debate. Not that anyone denies their aesthetic value, but some fear that integrating them into the history of Western art and evaluating them on Western criteria may be succumbing (again) to Eurocentrism. The phrase ‘Negro’ art is no longer used, but those of ‘primitive art’ and ‘first arts’ remain highly controversial, as was shown by the polemic around the name to be given to the Quai Branly museum in Paris. This new institution is to receive objects from the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and from the Musée de l’Homme. Artistic and museological issues still have political implications, of which President Jacques Chirac was fully aware when advocating the admission of ‘first arts’ into the Louvre and the creation of the museum of the Quai Branly.
The (then) French head of state, an amateur of ‘first’ arts, is also the political leader who has come closest to making amends for France’s colonial past.
“For a long time, indeed, the non-Western arts, those which were in a way outside the Indo-European crucible from which our own cultures have arisen, entered our collections, alas in painful circumstances, in a context of colonialism. This was, for Europe, a time of conquest and of economic expansion, but it was also, for the colonized countries, a time of humiliation and of suffering, described by Jean-Paul Sartre as a ‘gigantic nightmare’. Gradually, during the second half of the 20th century, we have constructed new relationships with these countries, step by step, on the basis of understanding, mutual respect, dialogue and exchange. Little by little, the West has taken the measure of the cultural dimension of these civilizations, in all its diversity, complexity and richness, a dimension long disregarded because of arrogance and ethnocentrism. The time had come to give greater visibility to these new relations, placed under the sign of recognition, sharing and fraternity. That is why I have wished that the first arts find in the year 2000 their place in the museums of France".
President J. Chirac, inaugurating the ‘Pavillon des sessions’ and its 'first art" collection, Louvre museum, April 13th 2000).
The Musée du quai Branly
The question remains concerning the use and meaning of these objects, either in aesthetic terms, or the potential understandings that might, or might not occur, that include the ways of life that produced these objects. There is a problem generally with the institution of the museum though, especially museums that aestheticise the production of stuff that comes from "ways of living", a problem that relates to globalisation now, and the 'backstory". . .
. . . what we often find in museums of this kind are artefacts produced by "ways of living" that have been made impossible by colonialism, by capitalism, and deformed and distorted by commodity fetishism.
The model for this kind of museum, and an experience that is strangely familiar, is not another museum, it is the Parisian department store Le Bon Marché.
The quotes below are from a chapter in The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett:
The Impact of Industrial Capitalism on Public Life
The rise of the department store, mundane a subject as it may seem, is in fact in capsule form the very paradigm of how the public realm as an active interchange gave way in people's lives to an experience of publicness more intense and less sociable. (p141)
In 1852, Aristide Boucicault opened a small retail store in Paris called Bon Marche. The store was based on three novel ideas. The mark up on each irem would be small, but the volume of goods sold large. The prices of goods would be fixed, and plainly marked. Anyone could enter his shop and browse around, without feeling an obligation to buy. (p 141)
The principle of a fixed price for retail goods was not entirely original with him. (p. 141-2)
But Boucicault was the first to apply the idea to a full range of retail goods. In a market where retail prices float, sellers and buyers go through all kinds of theatrics to up or lower the price.(p 142)In the latter decades of the 19th Century, department-store owners began to work on the spectacle character of their enterprises in quite deliberate ways. Plate-glass windows were inserted on the ground floors of the stores and the arrangement of goods in them was made on the basis of what was most unusual in the store, not what was most common. The window decorations themselves became more and more fantastic and elaborate.
Haggling and its attendant rituals are the most ordinary instances of everyday theatre in a a city, and of the public man as actor. (p 142)
The end of the line of production and distribution in society without fixed prices is posturing, jockeying for position, the ability to notice chinks in an opponents armour. The stylized interplay weaves the buyer and the seller together socially; not to participate actively is to risk losing money. (p 142)
Boucicault's fixed-price system lowered the risk of not playing a role. His notion of free entrance made passivity into a norm. (p. 142)
The stimulation produced by jumbling dissimilar objects together the retail owners reinforced by the continual search for the exotic "nouveautés" to put on sale in the midst of the most prosaic wares. Strange goods, the export of the colonized states, are useful, says Bertrand Gille, not only as articles of trade in them selves. they accustom the buyer to the notion that he will find in the store what he did not expect and thus be willing to leave the store with merchandise he did not enter in search of. Volume, that is to say, was achieved in the retail trade through an act of disorientation: the stimulation to buy resulted from the temporary well of strangeness, of mystification that the objects acquired. (p 144)
By stimulating the buyer to invest objects with personal meaning, above and beyond their utility, there arose a code of belief which made mass retail commerce profitable. the new code of belief in trade was a sign of a larger change in the sense of the public realm: the investment of personal feeling and passive observation were being joined; to be out in public was at once a personal and a passive experience. (p 145)
Karl Marx had an apt phrase for the psychology of consumption itself: he called it "commodity fetishism." In Capital he wrote that every manufactured object under modern capitalism becomes a "social hieroglyphic"; by that he meant that inequities in the relations of owner and worker producing this object could be disguised. Attention could be diverted from the social conditions under which the objects were made to the objects themselves, if the goods could acquire a mystery, a meaning, a set of associations which had nothing to do with their use. (p 145)
Boucicault and other store owners were creating that meaning. By mystifying the use of items in their stores, giving a dress "status" by showing a picture of the Duchesse de X wearing it, or making a pot "attractive" by placing it in a replica of a moorish harem in the store window, these retailers diverted buyers, first, from thinking about how or even how well the objects were made, and second, about their own role as buyers. The goods were all. (p. 145)
But why did commodity fetishism work? That question begins to raise the matter of the relationship between capitalism and public culture. The capitalist order had the power to throw the materials of appearance into a permanently problematical, permanently "mystifying" state, to use Marx's term. (p 145)
Exposition? and a collection of Departments?
Where was Conrad going?
History is like therapy for the present: it makes us talk about its parents. Because the term "globalization" was popularized in the 1980's, it's easy to assume that most of the things associated with it date from then or later: an interdependent economy, open borders,ethnically diverse and networked populations, international institutions and standards, shared cultural reference points. But it was in Conrad's youth, not mine, that "three great achievements of the present," as Walt Whitman called them, transformed the speed and range of global connections: "In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,/The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,/The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires." Conrad docked alongside the oceangoing steamers that transported emigrants from Europe and Asia on a scale never seen before or since. He cruised over the transoceanic telegraph cables that zapped news, for the frst time in history, faster than people. Between voyages he made his home in London, the center of a global financial market that was more integrated during his lifetime than it would be again until the 1980's.Pages 6-7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
Conrad wouldn't have known the word "globalization", but with his journey from the provinces of imperial Russia across the high seas to the British home counties, he embodied it. He channeled his global perspective into fiction based overwhelmingly on personal experience and real incidents. Henry James perfectly described Conrad's gift: "No-one has known - for intellectual use - the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached." That's why a map of Conrad's written world looks so different from that of his contemporaries. Conrad has often been compared to Rudyard Kipling, the informal poet laureate of the British Empire, whose fiction took place in the parts of the world that were colored red on maps, to show British rule. But Conrad didn't set a single novel in a British colony, and even the fiction he placed in Britain or on British ships generally featured non-British characters. Conrad cast his net across Europe, Africa, South America and the Indian Ocean. then he wandered through the holes. He took his readers to the places "beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines," onto the sailing ships that crept alongside the swift steamers, and among the "human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world."Page 7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
These lines of communication, these networks, are part of what it takes to "stitch the world together". Perhaps it is in these flows of things and information that the essence of "modernity" emerges. And as Rudyard Kipling said:
Transportation is civilisation!The shipping records of the past can now be used to produce a moving image of the flows of goods, people and information, as well as monitoring the patterns of trade in our age of containerisation.
The British Empire vanished long ago, and not many people read Kipling anymore. But Conrad's world shimmers beneath the surface of our own. Today Internet cables run along the seafloor beside the old telegraph wires. Conrad's characters whisper in the ears of new generations of antiglobalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists. And there is no better emblem of globalization today than the containership, which has made transport so cheap that it's more efficient to catch a fish in Scotland, send it to China to be filleted, then send it back to Europe for sale, than it is to hire laborers in situ. Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea, which makes ships and sailors more central to the world economy than ever before.Pages 7-9, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
Three videos . . .
A year of ships
To quote Ben Schmidt
A looped visualization of all the voyages in the Climatological database for the world's oceans (http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/) as if they occurred in the same year, to show seasonal patterns in ship movements and predominant shipping lanes from 1750 to 1850. More info at http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/....
Global ship traffic seen from space - FleetMon Satellite AIS and FleetMon Explorer
To quote FleetMonCom
A week of ship traffic on the seven seas, seen from space. Get a glimpse of the vibrant lanes of goods transport that link the continents.
The vessel movements were captured using newest terrestrial and space-borne AIS technology from FleetMon and its partner Luxspace. The records cover the world's merchant fleet with some 100.000s of cargo ships, tankers, ferries, cruise ships, yachts and tugs. FleetMon provides advanced fleet monitoring services, software APIs, reports and analyses of maritime traffic data. The inset shows live monitoring with the FleetMon Explorer software.
Video Shows All Roads, Air, and Shipping Routes on the Entire Planet
To quote baric82
See more on: Science News
Scientists are thinking about starting a new geological era: the Anthropocene, the period of geological, environmental and biological transformation of the planet by humans. Cities, towns, shipping routes, global roads and air networks are all changing Earth. This video shows the extent of this change.
The new era's name (anthropo- means human and -cene means new) refers to the effect of humans on Earth ecosystems, including the transformation of terrain and life all around us. This visualization of Earth-made by anthropologist Felix Pharand-Deschenes-shows this effect.
It's amazing and breathtaking, but also pretty scary. Enjoy it. Or not.The future of transportation?
The future of civilization?
The future of our planet?
Update: Return of looted art . . .
