The collection of the world: Accounts of voyages from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The considerable recent interest in re publishing accounts of voyages of discovery, from Christopher Columbus to Livingstone, can perhaps be explained by a certain lull in French anthropological production, and by the crisis in third world literature. For reasons as much ethical as epistemolog ical, anthropology has never laid claim to this considerable body of literature as its pre? history. It has, on the other hand, drawn data from it, and has sometimes singled out pre? cursors. Levi-Strauss has called the Histoire dun voyage fait en la terre de Bresil by Jean de Lery [1] an anthropologist's breviary [2], and other anthropologists have acknowledged the importance of Lafitau, or the "great ethnographer" Bernardino de Sahagun. But any singling out of observations or authors means consigning to oblivion the con? siderable body of accounts of voyages which was published in major European languages between the 16th and 18th centuries. These accounts did not constitute a literary genre, as they did in the 19th century; rather, an ensemble regulated by a multiplicity of disciplines ? astronomy, the maritime and military arts, natural history, theology, law, and a totality of strategic practices governed by economic, political, and religious considera? tions they constituted not a genre but a cultural formation, that is, an area of culture, of knowledge, and the practices which struc? ture and are supported by it. Implying and contributing to a critical relativism, these accounts exercise some of the functions of our human sciences, while they might also be com? pared to a body of knowledge such as sovietol? ogy because of its submersions in economic and political considerations. The ensemble of these travel accounts described the planet as it was then known, but could no longer be confused with the compendia of cosmographic knowledge produced by the Middle Ages. In the case of these compendia, scholarship consisted essentially in systematising. With the voyages of discovery, the voyage itself constituted a scientific institution and praxis. The voyage is not a means of gaining access to the terrain of possible knowledge; but it supports, generates and assembles knowledge as the locus for systematic deductions, for celestial and marine observations, for taking samples of flora, fauna and humanity. The activity of writing describes and chronicles this taking of samples in a detailed manner; the written account publicly attests it as a notary's act. The captain, the ship's doctor, the priest and the notary, the intermediaries and then the Daniel Defert is Professor at the University of Paris, Vincenne.