to re-imagine themselves (Fulford, Lee and
Kitson, 2004).
Evocations such as these contributed mas-
sively to the generation of globalimaginative
geographies (Gregory, 1994). Thus the
americas, in one way or another, were con-
structed according to European predilections
(Harley, 1990; Mason, 1990; Greenblatt,
1991); later, the Pacific was re-composed as
a coherent geographical entity (MacLeod and
Rehbock, 1994) – as was ‘darkestafrica’
(Brantlinger, 1985) – as these toponymic
labels were brought into cultural currency.
The same can also be said of the tropical
world – a conceptual space that came into
being courtesy of the conjoined forces of
geographical exploration, colonial administra-
tion and tropical medicine (Arnold, 1996b;
Livingstone, 1999; Stepan, 2001). Moreover,
exploration and exhibition frequently went
hand in hand, as in the case of Egypt, which
found its people and places enframed, ordered
and exhibited to suit European curiosity
(Mitchell, 1988).
Space does not permit further elucidation
of such motifs in other regions. Suffice to note
that in the African context, according to the
Comaroffs (1991, p. 313), European coloniza-
tion ‘was often less a directly coercive conquest
than a persuasive attempt to colonize con-
sciousness, to remake people by redefining the
taken-for-granted surfaces of their everyday
worlds’.Yetheretoothetemptationtowards
‘monolithizing’ the encounter must be resisted:
the moral significance of African environments
became a source of endless debate about the
effects of a tropicalclimateon white constitu-
tion and the connections between black racial
character, biological make-up andphysical
geography (Livingstone, 1991). In South
America, it was Humboldt’s ‘interweaving of
visual and emotive language’ that contributed
so powerfully towards what Pratt (1992) calls
the ‘ideological reinvention’ of ‘Ame ́rica’ – a
re-imagining so vivid and so vital that
Humboldt’s writings provided founding
visions forboth the older elites of northern
Europeandthe newer independent elites of
Spanish America.
If these machinations, however tangled
their genealogies, satisfied a European sense
of superiority through constituting the periph-
eral regions of the globe in its own terms,
those self-same arenas were soon to become
pivotal laboratories for scrutiny into human
prehistory. In this way, the threat that resided
in ‘alien’ human natures could be rendered
benign if thoseracesturned out to be the
persistent remnants of earlier phases in
the story of human evolution. Just as earlier
Scottish and French enlightenment
thinkers, such as Smith, Ferguson and
Buffon, regularly crafted their image of the
bestial or noble savage into evolutionary
schemes depicting a transition from barbarism
to civilization, so early-twentieth-century
students of human archaeology used ‘the
peoples defined as living at the uttermost ends
of the imperial world as examples of living
prehistory’ (Gamble, 1992, p. 713: see also
primitivism). Thereby their identities
remained engulfed within the imperatives of
Western scientific scrutiny. They also
remained subordinated in the cartographic
representations that invariably accompanied
the exploratory process. Whether in their use
as military tools, in their advocacy of colonial
promotion, in their marginal decorations, in
their systems of hierarchical classification or
in their imposition of a regulative geometry
that bore little reference to indigenous
peoples, maps became the conductors of
imperial power and Western ideology (see
cartography, history of).
Imperial readings of exploration, however,
can serve to obscure as much as they reveal
when presented with monolithic tenacity.
Treatingethnicityas simply the invention
of missionary activity, colonial officialdom or
early anthropology, for example, is insuffi-
ciently flexible to take the measure of explor-
ation encounters. Such scenarios are not
sufficiently subtle to discern the complex role
of the missionary movement – to take one
activity too easily typecast as the servant
of cultural imperialism – in emerging senses
of nationhood. Thus we are only beginning
to appreciate how, in the African context, a
missionary passion to render indigenous lan-
guages into written form (for the purpose of
Bible translation) provided mother tongue
cultures with a vernacular literacy that in turn
cultivated nascent senses of nationhood.
Through translation, written languages were
created and a vocabulary for national self-
consciousness fostered (see Sanneh, 1990;
Hastings, 1997).
The history and geography of ‘exploration’,
then, turns out to be far from antiquarian
chronology. Rather, it focuses centrally on
theidentityof people, the wielding of power
and the construction of knowledge; and it is
precisely because these are entangled in such
complex and intricate ways that their elucida-
tion is of crucial importance to the future
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