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Penn Faculty Mellon Research Fellows
2006–2007
Project
An Ethnographer in Disguise: Comparing
Self and Other in Mughal India
Aditya Behl
Associate Professor & Chair, South Asia Studies, Penn
Travel writing is sometimes excoriated for not providing a systematic
account of the journey of discovery undertaken, the voyage towards
the other that is also a reckoning of the self. The distance physically
traveled seems to be inversely proportional to the degree of self-awareness,
as in the grand colonial narratives of the discovery of the ‘Orient,’
and directly linked to the idea that the ‘Other’ lies
there as a blank slate or a tablet to be inscribed with the narrative
of the traveler’s voyage. The problem is more acute for lands that
have complex histories of travel and self-representation themselves,
which have to be ‘forgotten’ to allow the visitor his or her unique
experience. Yet these societies often contain historical agents who
take up the task of social definition, and travel can be fundamentally
implicated in the process. A case in point is a fascinating document
from 17th-century Mughal India, a Zoroastrian encyclopedia of religions
entitled the Dabistan-i-Mazahib (The School of Religions). The author,
Mubad Shah, held a double identity: one Muslim (public) and one Zoroastrian
(secret), a common protective camouflage adopted to gather ethnographic
information while avoiding persecution. A study of his strategies
of interpretation—naming, describing, classifying, judging,
translating, anthologizing, and polemicizing—should allow us
to displace simplistic notions of religious tolerance as characteristic
of the Mughal period, showing how hierarchies of judgment, taxonomy,
and exclusion coexist uneasily with a surface ecumenicism that has
too easily been accepted by modern historians of religion.
Project
Travels in Nature: Camping Out in America
Phoebe Kropp
Assistant Professor, History, Penn
Whether by necessity or pleasure, many kinds of American travelers
have camped out. Migrants on the Overland Trail, soldiers in encampments,
itinerants without lodging, and many others have found themselves
sleeping in tents or under stars out of necessity. Beginning in the
late 19th century, camping as a form of travel grew to be a popular
leisure pursuit, changing from an elite holiday to a broadly shared
cultural taste and state-sponsored activity enjoyed by millions of
Americans every summer. The rise of leisure camping incorporated shifting
conceptions and confluences of nature and culture, consumption and
technology, gender and the family, and travel and tourism in the United
States. What do those relationships mean? Why, for example, have cars
become the ideal conduit to untrammeled wilderness? Why has specialized
gear become necessary to experience nature? And, why has renting a
government-owned picnic table and plot of ground become the basis
for an excursion into freedom? Do travel experiences reinforce or
challenge conceptions of nation, family, and nature? Why are some
forms of tourism encouraged, even subsidized by the state? For this
book project, Prof. Kropp will address these questions, examining
campers as both historical actors in creating camping as a social
activity and economy, and as narrators by inscribing the experience
with both personal and cultural meaning.
Project
Travels of a Bookcase: Boudewijn Büch,
Literature, Trauma, and the World
Simon Richter
Associate Professor & Chair, German, Penn
Boudewijn Büch (1948–2002) is little known outside of Dutch-language
circles. This is unfortunate for an author, poet, and travel journalist
whose work warrants comparison with that of W.G. Sebald, the German-British
novelist of travel, memory, and trauma. Rarely have memory, literature,
personal and national trauma been so obsessively and idiosyncratically
mapped onto cultural and physical geography as in the neo-baroque
cosmos of Boudewijn Büch. Who was this unique traveler who thought
of himself as a “boekenkast op reis,” a bookcase on the road? Obsessed
with Goethe, Buch’s proclivities are baroque in spirit in manner.
His is a life lived allegorically, a continual mapping of a small
terrain of trauma and pain onto literature and the world. He lives
in the wound. His travels in literature and in geographical/historical
space are conducted metonymically and relate to the body, in fragments
and decomposed. At a time when travel, memory, trauma, and the book
are guiding concepts for study in the humanities, Boudewijn Büch deserves
a place at the table.
Project
“Come Back Home”: Regional Travels, Global
Encounters, and Local Nostalgias in Bahamian Popular Musics
Timothy Rommen
Assistant Professor, Music, Penn
Bahamian popular musics provide a unique opportunity to think about
questions of travel. The interposition of the Bahamas between North
America and the rest of the Caribbean, the nation’s colonial and postcolonial
histories, and the increasing economic dependency on tourism over
the course of the twentieth century have all contributed to interesting
patterns of travel. In the Bahamian context, travel is a multi-valent
concept that refers at once to physical travels, to musical migrations
and media flows, and to questions of time and nostalgia—all influenced
by a national identity subjected to major labor and educational migrations
and to people, sounds, media, and ideas from North America and Caribbean
neighbors. As part of a larger, book-length study on the popular music
of the Bahamas, Prof. Rommen will examine how the Bahamian popular
musical styles of rake-n-scrape, goombay, and junkanoo work out, address
and partially answer these questions of travel. Interconnected in
important ways, these three styles of music each illustrate distinct
aspects of the travel-related concerns with which Bahamians continue
to wrestle.
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