French Explorers Research Articles

Last Remnants of the French Wild West: Remembering “Colorado” (1990)

Few settings are as quintessentially American as the Wild West. In games, the myth of the American frontier is the myth of American expansion. This myth explores, sometimes with enthusiasm, at other times with a tinge of regret, the conquest of the “wilderness” with its Native inhabitants and wildlife, and its replacement by “civilization” represented by settlers and railroads. Yet, European expansion on the frontier is not exclusively an Anglo-American story. It was the French explorers, traders, and trappers that first set out westward (and southward) along the rivers from Canada and the Great Lakes. The French experience of the frontier was radically different: for them, with the limited resources of their soon-to-be-sold colonial empire, the wilderness was effectively untameable, its Native inhabitants unconquerable: it was thus a place of permanent danger, where one might, with equal probability, eke out a living, earn a fortune, or simply perish. Only once has the French West appeared in a digital game, in Silmarils’s Colorado (1990). This paper examines Colorado as an artefact of French game development in the 16-bit era, as a unique depiction of the forgotten French West, and, finally, as a 2D predecessor of today’s sprawling 3D open-world games.

A Frenchman in the Solitudes of the Mexican Southeast: Désiré Charnay’s use of Landscapes and Emotions in the Construction of his Exploration Narrative and Identity

This article examines travel writings by Désiré Charnay, a French explorer better known for his work in the fields of archeology and photography than for his literary production. The article examines Charnay’s writings about southeastern Mexico, published during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly his descriptions of the jungle, the mountains, the plains, the ancient ruins, along with accounts of his own perils and adventures. Charnay’s descriptions not only of nature but also himself—he fashioned himself as a kind of explorer-hero—were influenced by Romanticism.

Richard Browne’s Portraits of Aboriginal Australians: Analysing the Evidence

Richard Browne (c. 1776–1824) was the most prolific artist working in Sydney in the 1810s and early 1820s to depict Aboriginal people, known for producing sets of Awabakal, Worimi and other individuals in a range of poses. This article reappraises his idiosyncratic and often criticised portraits through an intensive re-analysis of his oeuvre. For this, all examples held in Australian institutions and known private collections were examined, and information collated from auction and provenance records. This analysis has resulted in a revised tally of around one hundred individual watercolours, significantly more than previously realised. Inscriptions, papers and watermarks were compiled and compared, providing evidence of Browne’s working methods. Recently emerged examples of his art strengthen knowledge of his market, including French explorers and Wesleyan missionaries. For the first time, a list of the individuals he named and painted has been compiled, to aid future research by Aboriginal communities.

"The Crafty Contrivance of the Illinois": Indigenous Informants, French Manet8a , and the Myth of the Missouri River

Abstract: This article examines early relations between the Illinois nations and French explorers, traders, and missionaries in the late seventeenth century. Following their encounter in the Pays des Illinois (Illinois Country), French newcomers came to believe that the Missouri River possessed an abundance of flora, fauna, fertile soil, and easily cut through the heart of North America to the Pacific Ocean. This was no accident. The Illinois deliberately withheld, emphasized, manipulated, and conveyed details concerning their western geography to French missionaries and fur traders, whose novel technologies, trade goods, and spiritual power they sought to secure for themselves. By articulating a carefully crafted "myth of the Missouri," the Illinois sought to direct French commerce and proselytization toward themselves and their allies up the Missouri River, like the Osage and Missouria, rather than to see French manet8a (other-than-human power) in the form of trade goods and Christian prayer fall into the hands of their enemies on the lower Mississippi. The Illinois strategy to attract French alliance, commerce, and spiritual power ( manet8a ) may have contributed to the century-long European and Euro-American belief in an expedient Missouri River route from the American Midwest to the Pacific Ocean. By arguing that the Illinois confederacy shaped European newcomers' understanding and perceptions of North America to further their own economic, political, and spiritual goals, this article contributes to the historiography regarding the role played by rumors, falsehoods, and fabrications in early colonial encounters as well as in the European and later Euro-American misunderstanding of the American Midwest's geography.

Why a Different World is Possible: Review of The Dawn of Everything

Why a Different World is Possible:Review of The Dawn of Everything James Martel (bio) David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane, 2021. 704 pp. $18.59 (hc). ISBN 978-0374157357. The Dawn of Everything is a huge, sprawling and deeply ambitious book. Its central thesis is that our current forms of political and economic organization, characterized by hierarchy, state violence and economic exploitation, rather than being the inevitable result of historical forces, are in fact a horrible and accidental phenomenon. Much of this book is devoted to revisiting historical [End Page 403] and prehistorical cases normally used to "prove" that human history has tended towards what I would call archism (the authors do not use this word), our current system of hierarchy and top-down violence. They show that, on the contrary, the vast majority of human history has been marked by high levels of egalitarianism and human freedom, which I would call anarchism (the authors do not use that term either; more on that soon). For me the great upshot of this book is that we are not doomed to archism in all of its awful forms (liberalism, fascism, capitalism etc., etc.) and that a different future, if the human race can survive this present and ongoing debacle, is not only possible, but probable. The two authors of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber (sadly now deceased) and David Wengrow, survey a vast number of cases, making claims using their respective fields of inquiry: anthropology and archeology. Even their way of writing evinces what I would call an anarchist methodology that permeates and structures this book. Usually, academics are trained to have a thesis and then to use a few (usually three) case studies to "prove" that thesis. This is, almost by definition, a very top-down, and indeed archist approach to scholarship (I was trained this way, as I suspect were most of those reading this). The authors here do something different. They allow a huge number of cases to make their claim via their very diversity and incommensurability (which also explains the heft of the book, at over 700 pages). Here, the variety of the cases is their claim: namely that human beings throughout our history have engaged in endlessly diverse forms of organization, some much more violent than others. Some of these practices entail the same horrors as archism itself, including slavery and endless warfare. The variety recounted in the book does not therefore advance a singular difference between archism and everything else; rather it suggests that archism is just one of an infinite number of possibilities, neither fated nor particularly desirable (in fact it is one of the least desirable forms because it holds virtually all of the negative features and very few of the positive ones). Very often, the authors will show how a situation seemingly parallel to archist forms is nothing of the kind. For example, they speak several times of the case of the Great Sun, the formal leader of the Natchez people, who lived in the territory which is now called Louisiana. In the presence of the Great Sun, people had to wail and tremble and do whatever he said. Yet, his power was restricted to his own village, the Great Village. Elsewhere, people (we can't really call them subjects in this sense) were free to do as they pleased. As a result, the Natchez people went to the Great Village as little as possible and often lived at a distance. When French explorers arrived, they automatically connected the Great Sun to their own king, Louis XIV, the Sun King, but this analogy, as the authors show, is entirely misleading. In fact, the Great Sun is not analogous to French absolute monarchs at all, suggesting once again some of the infinite possible iterations of political life. One by one, the two Davids similarly take down other beliefs sustaining the idea of archism's inevitability. For example, when you actually look at the historical record, the notion that the "agricultural revolution" greatly diminished human freedom as people became less mobile and more vulnerable to stratification is entirely untrue. As the...

Decolonizing the Museum

This essay presents a decolonial analysis of the French painter François-Auguste Biard’s Le Pasteur Laestadius instruisant des Lapons (1840). A highlight at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (Northern Norway Art Museum) in Romsa/Tromsø, Biard’s work represents the pastor Lars Levi Laestadius (1800–1861) preaching to a group of Sámi people outside their goahtis in winter. Exhibited in 1841 at the Salon (1667–present) in Paris, the painting originates in sketches Biard did during his travels with the French expedition La Recherche to Scandinavia and Spitsbergen in 1839. Taking this centrepiece from Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum’s collections as a reference point, I discuss the original colonial context in which it was painted, with particular focus on Laestadius’s role in assisting the French explorers with the collecting of Sámi human remains in the name of science. I then make a leap in time to the museum’s acquisition of the work in 2002 and its subsequent display in Romsa. At that time, the painting represented the institution’s costliest acquisition, and substantial media coverage and fundraising were used to come up with the funding to secure it. Once in-house, Laestadius Teaching Laplanders was immediately presented in a “neutral” display as one of the museum’s most treasured works. My analysis applies decoloniality as a framework for acknowledging institutional blind spots, countering museum neutrality, and recognizing the interwoven complexities of Indigenous and settler coexistence. It aims to intervene in art museum practices to emphasize the ongoing need for healing from colonial trauma through reconciliation and reparation. By exposing the museum’s disregard for and implication in the colonial legacy of this work, I will insist on the ethical inability of neutrality in museum displays and the inherent need to “unhighlight” Laestadius Teaching Laplanders and other art with similar problematic histories and contexts.

Monuments to Midwestern Pioneer Mothers and Native Women

Monuments to Midwestern Pioneer Mothers and Native Women Cynthia C. Prescott (bio) Local sculptor John K. Daniels's 1936 monument for Minneapolis, Minnesota's new Pioneer Park bore striking similarities in style and meaning to other early midwestern pioneer monuments. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. John K. Daniels, Pioneers Monument, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as of March 2013. Photo by author. [End Page 21] Figurative sculptures honored Euro-American settler men's hard work hewing farms out of the wilderness, accompanied by a self-sacrificing "pioneer mother" symbolizing the arrival of White Christian culture on the frontier. A bas relief on the reverse of the monument nodded to French settlement of the region by depicting Native American men—but no women—welcoming French explorers to their homelands. While dozens of monuments erected across the United States by women's clubs in the early twentieth century emphasized women's roles carrying White "civilization" westward, Daniels's placing of his pioneer mother figure in a supporting role was typical of many midwestern monuments. Most midwestern statues glorified White men for conquering the wilderness that Native men yielded, portrayed White settler women as supporting players to their men, and erased Native women's presence from the region altogether. This essay will argue that in contrast to better-known monuments in the Far West, which largely featured "cowboys and Indians" memories of the Old West or solo pioneer mothers embodying Euro-American civilization, most midwestern monuments erected between the 1890s and 1930s emphasized the process of U.S. westward expansion or White homemaking.1 Midwestern pioneer monuments, which outnumbered those in the Far West, celebrated the family values long associated in popular memory with America's supposed rural heartland. Monuments erected in the Midwest early in the twentieth century—like Minneapolis's 1936 Pioneers Monument—tended to emphasize White settler men's hard work establishing new farms and communities. Midwestern pioneer mothers typically appeared as self-sacrificing supporting characters—again like the female figure in Minneapolis's Pioneers—emphasizing pioneer men's good intentions. Contemporaneous monuments erected in former Spanish and Mexican territories (including California, Arizona, and Texas) grappled in various ways with the persistence of Indigenous and Spanish-speaking populations. A few in the Midwest portrayed Native men yielding to White male explorers or settlers prior to the arrival of White women, or hinted at European immigrant influences, but most ignored non-Anglo-American residents. Native women appeared only rarely as symbols of Indigenous acquiescence to White manhood. Recent decades have seen a resurgence in interest in public statuary throughout the United States. Midwestern communities are once again erecting monuments to the region's nineteenth-century residents. But instead of passive, self-sacrificing White mothers standing by their men, [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Dale Lamphere, Dignity of Earth and Sky, Chamberlain, South Dakota, as of October 2021. "Woman standing near tall Dignity statue on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River off Interstate 90 near Chamberlain, South Dakota." Photo by Glenn Nagel/Alamy Stock Photo. twenty-first-century pioneer monuments portray more active and vibrant female characters. Moreover, some Midwesterners are vocally challenging the racial implications of earlier imagery. Calls for more inclusive monuments have begun to bear fruit. In 2016, Chamberlain, South Dakota, erected Dignity of Earth & Sky, a sculpture of a solo Native American woman. Far from yielding or disappearing in [End Page 23] the face of White settlement, the Native woman stands proudly, actively displaying a star quilt representing Lakota and Dakota culture that adapted and responded to Euro-American influences. While not as imposing as Chamberlain's fifty-foot-tall Dignity, other midwestern communities have also begun to honor both Native and White women as community leaders. Early midwestern pioneer monuments erased the region's Indigenous, Métis, and other non-Anglo populations to an even greater extent than did those installed in the Far West. Most midwestern frontier-themed monuments depict middle-class White family values made possible by masculine persistence and maternal sacrifice. But, like western pioneer monuments, midwestern monuments have grown more diverse and inclusive in recent decades. Monuments to European immigrant groups portray their subjects as...

ASSESSING THE JEBALA REGION (N.W. ALGERIA) ANCIENT MOUNTAINOUS SETTLEMENTS' HISTORICAL AND ARCHEOLOGIC SIGNIFICANCE

Jebala (Tlemcen district -Algeria) is one of the historical and cultural regions very rich in traditional rural villages. The strategic location of this region, in the heart of the Traras Mountains, made it one of the leading destinations of many Berber and Arab tribes. Its historical importance was greatly influenced by constructing the historical cities of Ternana and Nedroma in the Jebala territory. This factor had greatly affected these cities, both historically and from an urban point of view. Later after the fall of Ternana in the third century of the Hegira (X century), the tribes living in the city for many years were dispersed all around the Jebala region in where they built several rural villages. They attracted the attention of the French explorer interested in the rural heritage of the Tlemcen surrounding areas. However, literature review about these villages is still very scarce. Thus, this article tries to fill the gap about these villages' historical and archeological importance. The study had explored the region and has identified and studied the Jebala Berber villages, which are four: Matila, El Ayoun, M'sifa and El Yacoubi zaouia.

Contribution of French explorers to the study of Middle Asian flora: the herbarium collections by Guillaume Capus (1857-1931)

Contribution des explorateurs français à l'étude de la flore de l'Asie Centrale: les collections d'herbier de Guillaume Capus (1857-1931). Les explorations de Guillaume Capus en Asie Centrale entre 1880 et 1887 ont notamment abouti à une collection remarquable de 3000 spécimens d'herbiers, toujours conservés dans l'Herbier de Paris (France). Les récoltes de sa première exploration ont été rapidement déterminées par un autre botaniste français, Adrien Franchet, dans ‘Plantes du Turkestan' publié en 1883-1884. Dans le cadre du projet de ‘Flore d'Ouzbékistan’ en cours, nous avons étudié exhaustivement la liste des plantes déterminées par Franchet, en dénombrant 1387 récoltes. D'abord, nous avons mis à jour la taxonomie pour toutes ces récoltes, et trouvé que les plantes récoltées par Capus représntent une diversité importante consistant en 87 familles, 375 genres, et 851 espèces (incluant 74 espèces nouvelles et 21 variétés décrites par Franchet). Ensuite, notre étude approfondie des herbiers d'Asie Centrale conduit à identifier sept nouveaux signalement d’espèces d’angiospermes pour trois pays d’Asie Centrale: Phlomoides agraria (Bunge) Adylov, Kamelin & Makhm. (Lamiaceae) pour le Kyrgyzstan, Picris strigosa M.Bieb. (Asteraceae) et Gentianella umbellata (M.Bieb.) Holub (Gentianaceae) pour l’Ouzbékistan, ainsi que Oxytropis tatarica Hook.f. & Thomson ex Bunge, Onobrychis arnacantha Bunge (Fabaceae), Pedicularis pycnantha Boiss. (Orobanchaceae) et Matthiola flavida Boiss. (Brassicaceae) pour le Tajikistan. Enfin, nous avons élucidé toutes les localités originales de récoltes visitées par Capus, nous les avons géoréférencées, et avons compilé une carte de densité des récoltes et de la richesse spécifique rassemblées par Capus, créant ainsi un gazetter du voyage botanqiue de Capus, prélude d’un gazetter d’Asie Centrale.

Museums and Renewed Relations: Choctaw-French Nations of the Eighteenth Century and Present

In a recent exhibit, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, and Bibliothèque Municipale de Versailles worked together to learn more about the museum’s royal Americas collection which features items from numerous Indigenous communities. Collected by French explorers during the eighteenth century and later displayed in royal curiosity cabinets, these items have not been seen by Choctaw communities since they left the continent. This collaboration has culminated in the “La Curiosité d’un Prince” exhibit, which features a room curated by Choctaw Nation. This article shows how a joint initiative to study the collection gave voice to the relationships and material histories inherent in the items. Reflecting on this less-known historical period, this collaboration has reinvigorated Choctaw-French relations and allowed Choctaw Nation to showcase the richness and complexity of its sovereignty—which is often narrowly understood through its relationship with the United States. By providing an example of true collaboration that has spurred new research and writing on both the cultural and political knowledge contained in the objects held in France, we demonstrate the potential for relationships and knowledge inherent in museum collections to act as a platform for new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty.

Review: Angkor Wat: A Transcultural History of Heritage

Review: <i>Angkor Wat: A Transcultural History of Heritage</i>

Showcasing Emptiness? Voicing Redemption Through ‘Saharomania’ in the French Literary Imaginary

The Napoleonic campaigns paved the way for French metropolitan travellers, military officers and literary authors to roam the barren stretches of North African deserts. Initially, imperial expansion was what brought French explorers to these lands. As devoted adventurers, they were quick to predict the literary opportunities of showcasing emptiness in military, scientific and literary projections. At once empty and loaded with spiritual charge, the desert embodies the essence of mystical connotations, for those who master decrypting its unsettling silence. This article argues that this seemingly empty space is in fact the cradle of spiritual pursuits, deployed in Sèbe’s ‘Saharomania’ concept as a redemptive locus. Showcasing emptiness thus represented a challenge to the spread of the cult of Western materialism. This is illustrated in two ways: the vision of French authors (Saint-Exupéry, Ernest Psichari, Charles de Foucauld, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt) who, taken together, amount to the establishment of a French desert genealogy of ‘Saharomania’, and the ways in which it offers a different reading of the accompanying Orientalist understanding of such works, through the prism of the redemptive wisdom of the desert. While taking part in Said’s Western canon on the Orient, redemptive ‘Saharomania’ also participates in the wider definition of the ways in which the imaginary of emptiness fuelled the fin-de-siècle cult of the void. It is in light of the alterity of the desert that the concept of ‘Saharomania’, specific to France, can be read: because showcasing emptiness meant empowerment, the success of the inscription of bareness in the imaginary of the French metropolitan public, and also its literary inheritance, was necessary to celebrate the French national sentiment. Taking the demanding crossing of the desert to heart, often for nationalist pursuits, was necessary to triumph over the physically and mentally exhausting desert. However, this article argues, authors incline when faced with the grandeur of the Sahara Desert, and its emblematic nomad dwellers, amidst the journey of the conventional fate of loss in the sands, ultimately changing the initial motives of the crossing. Thus, rather than condemning the present French literary productions within the confines of the orientalist and exotic tropes, this article offers different but no less significant interrogations about how ‘Saharomania’ valorises the desert as a locus of the higher forms of humankind, particularly defying the cult of Western hollowness through articulating spiritual resonance in the realm of the void.

Jean Paulmier, Gonneville and Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of a Myth

The first mention of Gonneville’s land occurs in Abbé Jean Paulmier’s Mémoires of 1664 petitioning the Pope to approve a Christian mission to the as yet undiscovered Terres australes. Central to Paulmier’s argument was the extract from a document purporting to be the travel account of a sixteenth-century navigator, Gonneville. The extract details how the unknown land was discovered after the navigator’s ship L’Espoir had lost its way and landed in the fabled Terres australes, south-east of the Cape of Good Hope. His utopian account of the unknown land played an important role in French voyages of discovery during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After Cook’s refutation of the existence of a Great South Land, Gonneville’s land was identified in the nineteenth century as being in Brazil. Recent scholarship, however, has revealed that Gonneville and his story were probably invented by Paulmier. This article examines how and why the Gonneville story became part of the history of French exploration, then details the elements which led to its being discredited.

F.L. de Castelnau's collection of fishes from the Cape of Good Hope described by Pieter Bleeker.

The Dutch ichthyologist Pieter Bleeker described 34 species, including a new genus and five new species from a collection of fishes sent to him from the Cape of Good Hope by the French explorer, naturalist and diplomat, F.L. de Castelnau in 1858. A careful search of the Naturalis collection in Leiden found almost all the specimens received by Bleeker from Castelnau, including hitherto unrecognised types. Based on examination of this collection and a critical translation of Bleeker's 1859 paper on the fishes of the Cape of Good Hope it has been possible to resolve the taxonomic status of Bleeker's genus Pagrichthys (Pagrichthys castelnaui Bleeker, 1859, type by monotypy), previously considered a synonym of Sparus Linnaeus, 1758 but here regarded as a synonym of Lithognathus Swainson, 1839. The identity of the various species described by Bleeker, and type status of his new species are clarified: Cantharus castelnaui Bleeker, 1859 is a synonym of Pachymetopon blochii (Valenciennes, 1830); Pagrichthys castelnaui Bleeker, 1859 is a synonym of Lithognathus lithognathus (Cuvier, 1829); Seriola capensis Bleeker, 1859 (not previously recognised as a valid species) is a synonym of Seriola lalandi Valenciennes, 1833; Clinus dubuis Bleeker, 1859 (based on a misspelling of Castelnau's ms name dubius) is a valid name, and a synonym of Clinus superciliosus (Linnaeus, 1758); and Clinus dorsalis Bleeker, 1859 is valid as Muraenoclinus dorsalis (Bleeker, 1859).

Mitochondrial DNA analysis of the putative skeletal remains of Sieur de Marle: Genetic support for anthropological assessment of biogeographic ancestry

In 1932, seven burials were discovered on a Texas plantation that was originally the site of a 17th-century Caddo Indian village. Of the seven excavated graves, one set of remains (an adult male) was notably buried in a manner inconsistent with traditional Caddoan burial practices and has long been purported to be the remains of Sieur de Marle (a member of the French explorer La Salle’s last expedition). Diary accounts of La Salle’s expedition scribe report that Sieur de Marle died along a river near an Indian village during a trek to Canada to find help for colonists left behind at the ill-fated Fort St. Louis. Additionally, two lead projectiles recovered from the grave were ballistically analyzed and determined to be consistent with ammunition used in 17th-century weaponry. In the 1980s, anthropologists requested access to the remains for study, but the skull was missing. Cranial measurements recorded in 1940 and 1962 (by two independent anthropologists) were used to investigate the ancestry of this individual; and the Giles-Elliot (G-E) discriminant function was calculated to be 18.1, within the Anglo-European range. Dietary isotope testing on non-cranial skeletal elements determined that this unknown male’s diet was rich in animal/marine protein sources, which differs appreciably from Caddo Indian populations of that time period. In order to genetically assess this individual’s biogeographic ancestry and to provide further support that this individual is of European descent, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing was performed using the Applied Biosystems™ Precision ID mtDNA Whole Genome Panel. mtDNA sequencing of multiple sections from two different long bones yielded compiled results consistent with either Haplogroup H or R, both predominantly European mtDNA haplogroups. Further anthropological calculations were conducted using cranial measurements, FORDISC™ software, and discriminant function analysis. Two-way, four-way, and multigroup discriminant function analyses further classify this set of unidentified remains as being White (European) in origin, with posterior probabilities of 0.999, 0.881 and 0.986, respectively. Combined with historical records of Sieur de Marle’s death, as well as overlays of historical and contemporary maps which demonstrate that the plantation site aligns with Joutel’s diary accounts of de Marle’s burial, these collective results support that these remains are of a European male and may possibly belong to this prominent member of La Salle’s expedition team.

Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage by Michael Falser

Reviewed by: Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage by Michael Falser Christoph Brumann Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritage By Michael Falser. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. Two volumes, almost 1,200 double-column pages, 1,400 illustrations, many in colour, and 4.7 kilograms—is a publication no less monumental than its subject matter, the world-famous Khmer temple in the largest archaeological park on earth. It focuses on the modern history of the site, starting with the rediscovery by French explorers of the gem presumably lost in the jungle (in fact, a place of lively Buddhist practice) from the 1860s on, and emphasizes the "transcultural" trajectory that turned Angkor into one of the most visited global tourist spots and a key playing field for archaeological and heritage diplomacy. In a largely chronological account, Michael Falser identifies a double movement: for one thing, Angkor travelled. Pillaged statues and building parts and large numbers of plaster casts were displayed in museum settings but also inspired reenactments in French universal and colonial exhibitions, culminating in a life-size copy of the central building complex going up in Paris in 1931. Not only did this buttress the eventually successful efforts to bring Siamese territory under the control of the Cambodian protectorate, converting the site into French patrimoine and key assignment of the mission civilisatrice; it also established a sanitised aesthetic standard that—as the second transfer described in the second volume—travelled back: a French-led archaeological apparatus dominated Angkor until well after independence in 1953 and the theme-park patterns of metropolitan display egged on a gradual shift from conservation to reconstruction at the site, often with controversial materials and techniques. The tumultuous two decades of short-lived republic, genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and Vietnamese occupation did not affect Angkor's fabric greatly, and identity politics centering on past Khmer greatness continued across the ideological spectrum, with the exiled but still UN-recognised Khmer Rouge spearheading calls for international protection. Rapid change at Angkor proper came only in the aftermath when a strong sense of emergency motivated an unseen deployment of the conservation teams of all nations and the rapid inscription on the World Heritage List as a site "in danger". Global mass visitation followed in the footsteps and according to Falser's resigned closing remarks, Angkor Park is now being "commodified to death into an archaeological theme park atmosphere" (vol. 2, p. 432). The horror of the modern tourist appears as a somewhat conventional final twist and (neo)colonial dispossession as a foregone conclusion—aren't most visitors from Asia now, not from the erstwhile colonisers; isn't Hun Sen's increasingly authoritarian regime quite adept in harnessing foreign knowhow and resources to one of its biggest cash cows, rather than being lorded over; and what was to be expected in an impoverished country whose educated population had been massacred, I could not help wondering. These quibbles are not to belittle a Herculean accomplishment: Falser has crafted an enormously thorough and detailed history of heritage at Angkor, a whole collection of books in just a single work. Many of the consulted archives and private collections, such as those of the École française d'Extrême-Orient, UNESCO or the Cambodian state, have never been critically examined but reveal a wealth of intricate and often surprising connections between Angkor and the world. We learn about the impact of plaster-cast technology on nineteenth-century French heritage debates; the colony-to-colony transmission of conservation philosophies between Dutch Indonesia and French Indochina, with the Parthenon serving as inspiration; Vann Molyvann's astonishing travels between architectural worlds; the special histories of the Indian, Japanese, or even Polish engagement with Angkor; the malleability of Khmer Rouge ideology concerning the famous site; the current proliferation of replicated Angkors large and small, all the way to a panoramic model sponsored by North Korea; and the many moments of cross-fertilisation between the various Angkor incarnations on Asian and European soil, to mention just some of the countless stops the transcultural journey makes. Falser is not only painstaking with his multilingual source material and skilled in choosing insightful maps, plans, pictures and photos but also...

“A Claim to Be Heard”: Voices of Ordinary People in BBC Radio Features

The BBC radio feature, originally influenced by the documentary film movement, combined music and sound with speech that at first was scripted, later recorded on location, along with ‘actuality’. This paper will ask ‘whose speech?’ A memorandum from BBC Director General, John Reith, in 1924, had insisted that “only those who have a claim to be heard above their fellows on any particular subject… should be put on the programme”. Nevertheless, from the 1930s onwards, there was a continuing effort on the part of more politically-minded producers to extend the range of voices heard on the air. The BBC’s North Region, where it was easier to escape Reith’s centralising control, led the way. Pioneering initiatives used the cumbersome recording apparatus of the time to reach into people’s homes and work-places to capture working class voices. After WW2 this example was followed in other regions, until, belatedly in the late 1950s, the BBC began to accept the use of portable recording. By this time a Europe-wide culture of radio feature-making had developed, influenced by the French exploration of musique concrete and the flourishing German Horspiel, and fostered by the Prix Italia and the International Features Workshop. British features producers contributed to this movement and won some success with highly-crafted, aesthetically innovative features. The paper concludes by examining examples of the voices heard in BBC radio features in the last decade of the 20th century.

Wood anatomy of historic French violin bows made of Pernambuco wood

Abstract Paubrasilia echinata is recognized as the best wood in the manufacture of high-quality bows for string instruments. The wood anatomy of five historic French violin bows of the 19th and 20th century made of Pernambuco wood were investigated in order to reveal the wood anatomic features of these historical bows, to determine which P. echinata morphotype (arruda, café or laranja) was used in their manufacture and to identify the state of origin of the wood. Five bow samples were compared to 33 P. echinata specimens from the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte. The wood anatomical features were compared by means of principal component analysis, which revealed the type of axial parenchyma and percentage of tissue to be the most important to sort specimens. The best wood anatomical features previously described for high-quality bows were corroborated here and the bows in general showed similar wood anatomical features. Based on wood anatomy we found that the violin bows were most similar to the samples from the arruda morphotype derived from the States of Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte by presenting scanty, unilateral and vasicentric axial parenchyma without confluences forming bands, higher percentage of fibres and lower percentage of axial parenchyma. We can therefore suggest that the historical French violin bows studied here were all made of the arruda morphotype from the Brazilian Northeast region helping explain the preference of the French explorers for this region.

Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover

Reviewed by: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover Katrina M. Phillips (bio) Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover University of Minnesota Press, 2021 "To live on the shore of Lake Superior," Linda LeGarde Grover writes, "is to live with orientation to water, sky, and forest" (p. 47). Gichigami Hearts, Grover's latest collection of stories, poems, and histories, is a beautiful homage to what is now known as the city of Duluth, Minnesota. Incorporated in 1857—a mere three years after the second Treaty of La Pointe ceded most Ojibwe lands in what is now northern Minnesota and a year before Minnesota became a state—the city takes its name from the French explorer Daniel Greysolon, the Sieur du Lhut, who had arrived in the region in the 1670s to set up fur trade routes. Nicknamed the Zenith City in 1868 by Thomas Foster, who started the city's first newspaper, its location at the nose of Lake Superior helped it rise to prominence first in industry and now, among other things, through tourism. The region's rich Ojibwe history is often obscured, even as its echoes reverberate through the names that dot the city's landscape. The city itself—along with the state of Minnesota—would not exist without the treaty cessions that forced Ojibwe people from their homelands onto smaller reservations, like the ones set forth in the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe. Duluth's oldest social club, for instance, takes its name from Gichigami, the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior. Known as Misaabekong (the place of the giants) or Onigamiising (the place of the small portage) [End Page 116] in Ojibwe, the area around Duluth is rooted in Ojibwe history and oral traditions (p. ix). Thus, it is interesting, as Grover muses, that Ojibwe place names are often derived from the physical characteristics of the region, while American place names often draw from a person's name (p. 4). Like Grover, I am an Ojibwe woman who grew up in the region. The book and the stories within it feel like a homecoming. I know the street names and neighborhood names, I remembered the names of some of the stores and restaurants she references, and I understand the deep meaning Grover places on the stories she tells here. Gichigami Hearts is unapologetically hyperlocal, but its reach is far beyond what are now the city limits. It is part history, part autobiography, part geography, and part ethnography, sharing stories of places and people that now might only exist in the collective memories of those who were there or who have since shared these stories. The book is comprised of four sections: "Point of Rocks," "Gichigami Hearts," "Rabbits in Wintertime," and "Traveling Song." In the first section, Grover intertwines stories from her childhood, her family history, and neighborhood histories into the history of the city's department stores, family-owned businesses, and gospel missions. The second section, "Gichigami Hearts," moves through more stories of Grover's relatives up in Chippewa City, coupled with her tellings of Ojibwe stories of the mishibizhiig (the underwater spirit beings of the lake). The stories in the end of this section turn toward the role of Ojibwe people in the tourist trade in northern Minnesota, the people whose handcrafts were sold in tourist stands along the highways that hug the North Shore. Grover places these crafters and entrepreneurs in the long history of Native trade and engagement with Europeans (and, later, Americans), seeking not to denigrate those who sold art to tourists but to understand why and how Ojibwe people participated in these industries. What she calls "the entrepreneurship of Indian stands," she contends, was more than "a crass sale of goods, the desperation of a people in need" (p. 75). Grover's careful intertwining in and out of these nuances creates a richly powerful story of Ojibwe resilience. Grover weaves Ojibwe history, the histories of treaties and repressive federal policies that aimed to eradicate and erase Native peoples, like allotment and termination, throughout the book. She unflinchingly shows what may have drawn Ojibwe and non-Native men to the missions in Duluth that...

French explorers' expeditions in Central Asia

This article highlights in detail the journey of the French explorer Henry Moser to Central Asia. In particular, the it reflects data on socio-economic and cultural life of the researcher in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva regions. It also focuses on the irrigation system of Turkestan region, provides a brief hindsight analysis of the irrigation system since ancient times - the end of the XIX century.