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IMC 2010: Sessions

Session 1118: Reflecting upon Foreigners: Appearance and Behaviour

Wednesday 14 July 2010, 11.15-12.45

Moderator/Chair:Felicitas Schmieder, Historisches Institut, FernUniversität Hagen
Paper 1118-a'The Invisible Body': Physiological Factors in Defining Levels of Humanity in 16th-Century Europe Following the Encounter with the Natives of the New World
(Language: English)
Alex Kerner, Tel Aviv University
Index terms: Anthropology, Gender Studies, Mentalities, Sexuality
Paper 1118-bOther Bodies before Race: On and off the Silk Route
(Language: English)
Kim M. Phillips, Department of History, University of Auckland
Index terms: Anthropology, Folk Studies, Geography and Settlement Studies
Paper 1118-cThe Image of the Bedouin in the Literature of the Western Travellers Who Visited Palestine in the Ottoman Era
(Language: English)
Muhammad Suwaed, Western Galilee Academic College, Akko
Index terms: Anthropology, Daily Life
Abstract

Paper -a:
It would not be exaggerated to regard Columbus's crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1492 as the climax in a long tradition of voyages of discovery that characterised the whole of the Middle Ages. Generally regarded as a typical Renaissance event, Columbus's trip was still basically dominated by a 'medieval mind setup'. One of the first things that drew the Europeans' attention when first meeting the American natives in 1492 were their bodily traits. The presence of naked, differently coloured human creatures was a shocking experience for the 16th-century Europeans. The cultural and social aspects of the natives' lifestyle are generally considered to have had a major impact on defining the natives' level of humanity. I argue that the Amerindians' bodily traits had an equally crucial role. The Europeans saw the natives as human creatures, which they strived to define as 'natural slaves'. Nevertheless, they saw them as 'ugly' when compared with the traditional 'ideal of beauty', and as 'feminine' when it came to the native human males. Thus the natives were instinctively doomed to be treated as inherently inferior to the strong, hairy, bearded, male, white, and handsome Europeans. This gendered construction of the natives had tremendous implications for future relations between the conquerors and the conquered.

Paper -b:
A number of travellers account of the routes to the distant 'East', that is east, south-east, south and central Asia, produced accounts of places visited and cultures encountered. One interesting feature about such descriptions from a modern perspective is that they make little recourse to standard tropes of Asian racial features that have become familiar to us. This paper examines a number of descriptions of the faces and bodies of Asian peoples in European travel narratives of the 13th to 15th centuries, especially in the narratives of John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck, Marco Polo, Riccold of Monte Croce, John of Monte Corvino, Jordanus of Sévérac, Hetoum of Armenia, Odoric of Pordenone, and Nicolò dei Conti. It queries whether any common bodily types can be identified, and finally discusses the circumstances under which medieval authors turned to discourses of monstrousness to account for oriental bodies.

Paper -c:
Palestine borders from both its sides from South and East of the desert, a region of natural subsistence of the Bedouins. Many regions within the country served in various periods as a convenient residence for groups of Bedouins, who penetrated to it from Syria, from Transjordan and from Egypt. The Bedouins penetrated chiefly into regions empty of population or into rural regions, in which there was no density of population, but in times of weakness of the central government they penetrated also into the rural and even urban settlement.

Down its history Palestine was exposed to Bedouin penetration, which threatened to dominate the settled region. Success or failure depended on a strong or weak quality of the central government. In all those periods when the central government showed lassitude the result was Bedouin conquest of the country. To the country's bad luck these periods were more numerous and more prolonged than the periods of stability and effective government. In the period of Ottoman government in Palestine and especially from the end of the 16th century onwards the Bedouins conquered the country and the most fertile parts of the country became grazing areas for Bedouins.

The Bedouins are already found in every corner within the country and thus when the European travellers came to Palestine to see the Holy Places of the Christians and to describe them they met with the Bedouins. They met with them in times of robbery and plunder which the Bedouins executed on the pilgrims, they met with them when they passed through their tribal territory and visited their tents, they met with them when they needed to hire them as guides and rent camels from them, or to employ several of them as guards. Those visitors and travellers who returned to Europe reported on their experience and there were such who published whole books on their voyages in the country. The proposed lecture came to describe the image of the Bedouin in Palestine as it was reflected in this literature.