Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Travel, Travel-Writing, Art, and the Production of Popular Ethnography in turn-of-the-century Austria"
Regina Bendix
Department of Folklore, University of Pennsylvania
rbendix@sas.upenn.edu
When Hugo Charlemont announced the completion of yet another drawing, he sent a collegial note to Professor Zeicssberg, the editor of the emerging twentyfourvolume work entitled The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image. When he wanted to stress his need for payment or even an advance, he wrote longer, self-depreciating or humorous accounts of his latest travels in the farthest reaches of Dalmatia or Bohemia to the edit the Crown Prince's Work (the name by which the volumes are still referred to). But his letters never saw publication; they were only just recently discovered along with piles of letters from the five hundred contributing scholarauthors and artists who participated in this scientifically conceived ethnography and its politically and aesthetically motivated popularization.
Since the publication of Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture (1986), cultural anthropologists vigorously acknowledge the narrative filter through which their disciplinary object is constructed. Much of the reflexive work on ethnography has focused on individual investigators and the ways in which their gaze and voice could empower or disempower those whom it described. Using the Crown Prince's Work as case in point, this paper will ask how a singular, "imperial" gaze could be constructed in a work authored by so many and such divergent participants. Using correspondence, editorial protocols, and the actually published texts as evidence, I will argue that the multiplicity of ethnic and class-based voices on travel and culture reside, purposely, in the discourses behind the published work, and that "literary" and "artistic" rather than "ethnographic" were the qualities that most participants and all editors aspired to. The political impact of the work ultimately was meant to reside in its poetics--the beauty of word and image combined.
Regina Bendix
University of Pennsylvania,
rbendix@sas.upenn.edu
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