Joan-Pau Rubiés

This book, first published in 2000, offers a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of how European travellers in India developed their perceptions of ethnic, political and religious diversity over three hundred years. It analyses the growth of novel historical and philosophical concerns, from the early and rare examples of medieval travellers such as Marco Polo, through to the more sophisticated narratives of seventeenth-century observers - religious writers such as Jesuit missionaries, or independent antiquarians such as Pietro della Valle. The book's approach combines the detailed contextual analysis of individual narratives with an original long-term interpretation of the role of cross-cultural encounters in the European Renaissance. An extremely wide range of European sources is discussed, including the often neglected but extremely important Iberian and Italian sources. However, the book also discusses a number of non-European sources, Muslim and Hindu, thereby challenging simplistic interpretations of western 'orientalism'.

South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance

Manel Ollé

En 1950 Charles R. Boxer, antiguo espía británico y profesor de historia colonial portuguesa y holandesa, publicó un artículo donde describía un bello códice que él mismo había adquirido en una subasta. El hoy denominado Códice Boxer, creado bajo el gobierno de Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas (1590-1593) en la colonia española de Filipinas, es un documento absolutamente excepcional tanto por su contenido textual como por sus bellas ilustraciones en color, probablemente realizadas por un artista chino del parián de Manila. En sus páginas reúne veintidós jornadas, derroteros y, sobre todo, relaciones etnográficas de procedencia diversa, la mayoría escritos originalmente en castellano, y otros traducidos del portugués o del chino. Entre textos e imágenes, ofrece información sobre los pueblos nativos de Guam y Filipinas, el sudeste asiático (Borney, Maluku, Java, Aceh, Patani, Siam, Nueva Guinea), las costas de Champa y Vietnam, el norte de Formosa (Taiwán), Japón y China. El Códice, sin embargo, plantea innumerables interrogantes acerca de su autoría, su cronología precisa, sus finalidades y su carácter culturalmente híbrido. El presente libro reúne, por primera vez, diversos estudios con el objetivo de dar respuesta a todas estas cuestiones.

Códice Boxer, El. Etnografía colonial e hibridismo cultural en las islas Filipinas

Joan-Pau Rubiés brings together here eleven studies published between 1991 and 2005 that illuminate the impact of travel writing on the transformation of early modern European culture towards the concerns of the Enlightenment. The studies include both general discussions and the contextual analysis of particular texts and debates, ranging form the earliest ethnographies produced by merchants travelling to Asia with Vasco da Gama, to the writings of Jesuit missionaries researching idolatry in India and China, or thinkers like Hugo Grotius seeking to explain the origin of the American Indians.

Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology

Travellers and Cosmographers

From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous waves of conquest and devastation) was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. From a a global perspective what is most distinctive of Europe is the genre's long-term impact rather than its mere empirical potential, or its ethnocentrism (all of which can also be found in China and in Islamic cultures). Hence what needs emphasizing is the multiplication of original writings over time, their increased circulation, and their authoritative status as a 'scientific' discourse. The empirical bent was more characteristic of travel accounts than of theological disputations - in fact, the less elaborate the theological discourse, the stronger the ethnographic impulse (although many travel writers were clerics). This anthology of classic articles in the history of medieval ethnographies illustrates this theme with reference to the contexts and genres of travel writing, the transformation of enduring myths (ranging from oriental marvels to the virtuous ascetics of India or Prester John), the practical expression of particular encounters from the Mongols to the Atlantic, and the various attempts to explain cultural differences, either through the concept of barbarism, or through geography and climate.

Joan-Pau Rubiés

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