Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women Ethnographers Toiling in the Fields of Sensational Science

Abstract

Recently, anthropologists Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins have studied representations in that respectable staple of the doctor's waiting room--the National Geographic. In Reading National Geographic, they persuasively argue the role of the magazine in constructing for Americans the ubiquitous category of the Other, and show cultural discriminations of difference grounded and conveyed in its representations of sexuality. In tone and style, the Notional Geographic's middle-brow intellectuality rejects, for example, the obvious prurience of overheated Hollywood constructions of frenzied sensuality in native dance and ritual in favor of representations for the cooler, and more 'adult' eye. No matter its pretensions: some time ago, Richard Pryor got to the heart of the matter; the National Geographic, he quipped, was the black man's Playboy (McMillen A10). For its white middle-class readers, the magazine intellectualized prurience and borrowed the unflappable scientizing eye of the professional to underwrite its status of popular respectability. At the same time, however, this collapse of the professional and the popular also suggests a continuum of concerns and representation embedded historically in the development of ethnography and anthropology. While the National Geographic is often taken as a mid-twentieth-century icon, its character has a longer, traceable lineage. This strain of 'prurient science'--managed as a matter of 'tone' in which fascination with the body of the Other is legitimized in service of enlightened knowledge (and superiority)--largely originates in the compelling nineteenth-century interest in sexualizing cultural difference. Nowhere is this charged mixture more evident, or more problematic, than in the self-constituted exemplar linking progressive knowledge and empire, Victorian Britain. More modest efforts at late-century empire building by the United States helped solidify an Anglo-American point of view in the professionalization of the emergent human sciences. However, as late entrants to the aims of empire, and under a British view of innate American gaucherie, Americans would struggle to overcome what was seen as a fit subservience in their professional contributions; yet their enthusiastic embrace of the British model would allow for some jostling for position within the hierarchy of a European tradition identified with the scientized eye. By the end of the century, Imperial Britain was nearing its peak, yet the nation's pride in its extensive empire was not free of anxieties, a circumstance grounding a curiously gendered paradox: justifying the venture as a civilizing mission--a mission long felt as woman's special moral province--Britain could point to vast reaches of the globe where now a woman might walk; at the same time, however, its domestic ideology had prompted Victorian England to restrict and thus 'protect' its women. With the fit between domestic and imperial ideology patently incoherent, women at the end of the century seized a new opportunity, however ambivalently extended, and the ranks of 'lady explorers' swelled. This new breed of traveler would see, and calmly report on what had been, in earlier missionaries' reticent ethnographies, tantalizingly omitted (but spotlighted) as 'practices too disgusting to mention.'(1) At the time when anthropology as a nascent discipline was forming itself, the coincident entree of women created a very public moment in which issues of gender, sexuality, and professionalization would intersect. It is this moment that I want to elaborate by looking, first, at the state of ethnographic study at the end of the century, and then, at the reception in England of two women travelers in the 1890s: an American, May French Sheldon, and England's Mary Kingsley.(2) One measure of women's new presence as explorers, especially given the sluggishness of institutions to acknowledge new realities, is the prolonged Royal Geographical Society debate in the 1890s over extending membership to notable women travelers. …