Un-Telling Expeditions

The expedition—as a knowledge practice and social organisation—was a fundamental way in which Europeans sought to understand the new and unknown for much of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For historians, published expeditionary narratives are challenging sources to work with: not only were they often aimed at stoking imperial designs or titillating European readers (with exotic stories of heroic adventures, cannibalism and sorcery), but they also provided an account of fieldwork that was often too clean, too focussed on European agents, and all too optimistic about the capacity of their methodologies to guarantee access to knowledge of different places and peoples. This panel seeks to decentre expedition narratives by examining the actual practices of scientific expeditions—from the practice of notetaking to the mobilisation of colonial infrastructures and the complex appropriation of Indigenous knowledges. It is these everyday practices and larger structures that shaped and leant authority to the knowledge produced as much as appeals to normative theories in narratives written after-the-fact. The three papers in this session focus on German and Dutch expeditions to British India, South-East Asia and the South Pacific from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. To throw fresh light on expeditionary science in a non-European settings, these case studies provide new perspectives on expeditionary practices by focusing on less well-known figures, drawing on original archival research, and making use of non-Western sources where available.