In Light of Another's Word. Shirin A. Khanmohamadi
is intrinsic to claims to authenticity and authority in the major ethnographic works of the medieval period. In formal or “scientific” ethnography, “the subjectivity of the author is separated from the objective referent of the text.”17 The removal of the traces of the looking, recording ethnographer is effected to “conform to the norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject,” for according to scientific discourse, the “position of speech is that of an observer fixed on the edge of a space, looking in and/or down upon what is other.”18 This “objectivity” effect, as an array of critical anthropologists have argued, is afforded at the cost of the objectification of those being gazed at;19 or as Jean-Paul Sartre noted more generally of the modern gaze in the 1950s, “objectification is the telos of the look.”20
The poetics of the dialogic ethnographies of In Light of Another’s Word are, by contrast, marked by rather different features. First, they exhibit a subjective approach to knowing the other, advancing a subjective view of social knowledge apprehension through the notion that accuracy is best achieved through multifocality, the accrual of ever more incomplete, “partial” (incomplete, subjective) perspectives on an object. This open-ended approach to representational truth is found in other foundational medieval representational disciplines, namely historiography and painting, which, as we will see, were close enough to the emerging field of ethnography to serve as an explicit model for some of its practitioners and implicit intellectual backdrop for all. What the medieval recourse to multiple perspectives in representational disciplines guaranteed was a more ambiguous, open-ended, and less coherent view of truth than any unifocal model allows, including and especially that of the modern ocular regime since the Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective.21 Rather than a gaze that aims for singular objectivity or totality in presenting knowledge about others, these writers repeatedly disclose the subjectivity and incompleteness of their gazes on others, implicitly or explicitly inviting the inclusion of other perspectives. Second, the ethnographies of this study are composed “deictically” (from deiknonei, to show), always referring back to the body of the speaker, and including information about the spatial and temporal relation of the speaker to his objects of description.22 They are thus, third, fundamentally relational or dialogic, plotting the subject-author’s relation to his objects, and, intersubjectively, theirs to him. Last, unlike modern ethnography, which emerged in the heyday of European empires when ethnographers cast inevitably complicit “imperial eyes” on native Asians and Africans and their customs, European ethnography before empire is characterized by more fluid, complex and unpredictable relations between Latin Christian subjects and their religious and cultural others,23 and its gazes are likewise often more fluid and open-ended than the modern, fixed gaze of Orientalism and imperialism.24 These differences of the medieval ethnographic gaze, when reinserted into the history of the Western gaze in relation to which they are rarely considered, complicate the conjoining of all Western techniques of visualization with the impulse to objectify, a critique forged by prominent cultural critics like Johannes Fabian and Edward Said.25 Through intersubjective and dialogic gazing, the visual poetics of medieval ethnography offers an alternative story of the production of social knowledge in the West.
A range of studies of medieval vision and optics describe the differences of the premodern visual paradigm from modern, scientific ocular regimes in contexts outside ethnography and intercultural encounter. Suzannah Biernoff’s study of optics, for instance, argues that in the medieval visual paradigm, truth could not be and was not distanced from the viewing body because of a number of features distinguishing medieval vision from the modern, including the lack of separation between viewer and objects and the synthesis of scientific and religious thought.26 Similarly, ancient and medieval optics’ extramission theory—whereby the subject’s apprehension of an object depends on an emission of some sort of activating radiation from the subject on the object, and thus a relationship between subject and object—has interested intellectual historians like Martin Jay as evidence of intersubjective understanding and a participatory view of subject-object relation in the medieval period.27 And in medieval literary criticism, scholars have argued for an intersubjectivity manifest in medieval courtly literature through the blurring of subject-object boundaries in amatory gazes.28 In describing the operation of the premodern ethnographic gaze, I extend existing scholarship on the visual poetics of the gaze to a context addressed by neither critics of ethnographic form, who rarely focus on the premodern period, nor critics of medieval visual culture, who have not focused on ethnography or intercultural encounter. At the same time, I advance recent studies of premodern travel and encounter into the realm of poetics.
My first chapter, “Conquest, Conversion, Crusade, Salvation: The Discourse of Anthropology and Its Uses in the Medieval Period,” surveys the sources of medieval ethnographic ideas regarding religious and ethnic difference found in the book. The chapter traces the discourse of medieval anthropology as it emerged to meet the challenges of human religious and cultural difference in five distinctive realms in the late medieval period: the conquest of the twelfth-century colonial fringe, the advancement of thirteenth-century missions to Asia, the theorization of non-Christian rights and responsibilities abroad, efforts to know the proximate Muslim enemy, and the theorization of the salvation of virtuous, primitive non-Christians. Each of these realms of anthropological activity was not only central to the overall development of anthropological thinking in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries but also serves as background to the particular chapters on medieval ethnography that follow.
I then turn to the dialogic ethnography of medieval Europe. Chapter 2, “Subjective Beginnings: Autoethnography and the Partial Gazes of Gerald of Wales,” plots the doubled voice of Gerald’s novel Descriptio Kambraie, a description of Welsh mores at once from a colonial, Anglo-Norman perspective underwritten by twelfth-century evolutionary anthropology and from the perspective of Wales’s own mythic traditions of resistance and redemption. I show how the Descriptio’s rhetorical duality is typical of “autoethnography,” ethnographic self-description that selectively appropriates colonialist representations in order to intervene in them. I argue that part of Gerald’s intervention in colonial processes is the very act of writing the Descriptio itself, an act of “salvage anthropology” aimed at preserving a snapshot of contemporary Welsh manners and customs under increasing colonial infringement and Anglo-Norman acculturation. I close by considering the visual poetics of Gerald’s gaze in the Descriptio, tracing the sources of his bifocality both in the representational disciplines of historiography and painting and in his own ethnic hybridity. The specificities of Gerald’s ethnic hybridity apart, Gerald’s insistence on the subjectivity, incompleteness, and partiality of medieval ethnographic description initiates a thread that runs through the whole of this study.
Chapter 3, “Writing Ethnography ‘In the Eyes of the Other’: William of Rubruck’s Mission to Mongolia,” is devoted to Friar William of Rubruck’s record of Mongolian customs, the Itinerarium, written during his stay in that empire from 1253 to 1255. The chapter on the whole demonstrates how Christian universalism, which would become synonymous with a lack of receptivity to cultural difference in later eras, in fact features a great self-extension toward the other in late medieval practice. I first show how William eschews readily available European discourses of Mongol barbarism and demonization in favor of a representation of reasonable Mongol customs. I then show how the salvation aim structures William’s representations, not only its profoundly detailed observations of Mongol life but also his depiction of his own religious and cultural difference from the viewpoint of his would-be converts. For contemporary preaching manuals predicated the preacher’s success abroad on the disorienting and counterintuitive ability to externalize his own Christian viewpoints and to “see as other,” as non-Christians see, a skill over which William shows mastery at the great interreligious debate at Caracorum. What is born of such ability to “see as other” is a dialogic ethnography composed as much in light of the other’s gaze as one’s own.
Chapter 4, “Casting a ‘Sideways Glance’ at the Crusades: The