Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
that any one thing is said to represent is less a function of a thing's physical
properties and more a function of a society's classification systems.
Timothy Mitchell's (1988) book
Colonising Egypt
is one of several fine
studies that make this point in compelling detail. A contribution to cultural
history, it aims to make plain the particular and peculiar worldview of late
nineteenth-century colonists from France and Britain when encountering
non-Western peoples. Mitchell recounts a visit by four Egyptians to the
World Exhibition held in Paris in 1889. In the late nineteenth century,
such exhibitions were major events and a means for different countries to
showcase their distinctive contributions (cultural, technological, etc.) to the
wealth of nations. At the Paris Expo, the Egyptian visitors encountered a
life-size model of a winding street in old Cairo. The street was realistic in
almost every detail, thus a piece of 'real Cairo' was evoked by way of a full-
scale reproduction. Later, when the Egyptians visited Stockholm they found
themselves stared at in much the same way as the model street was stared at
by the Europeans visiting the Expo. They were objects of curiosity because
they were so visibly different in appearance to west Europeans.
Mitchell's argument was two-fold. First, he suggested that even before the
twentieth century, Europeans were accustomed to supposing that specifics
'stood for' larger realities. The street model, he maintained, not only referred
viewers to the 'real Cairo' by virtue of its apparent realism; less obviously, it
conjured up something much bigger, namely 'the Orient'. As Edward Said
(1978) showed in his celebrated study of nineteenth-century British and
French colonial thinking, the Orient was not so much a large geographi-
cal region as a very simplistic European idea that was taken for granted as
a general depiction of that region. It cast 'the Orient' as Europe's Other:
an extended space of disorder, irrationality, darkness, libidinal energy and
uncleanliness that was at once attractive and repellent. This is a case of what
semiologist Roland Barthes once called
connotative reference
(in contrast
to literal, 'denotative' or 'indexical' reference). In light of this, Mitchell's sec-
ond point was far more radical and unsettling than his first. If a European
left the Paris Expo and visited the 'real Cairo' they would not, he insisted,
be any nearer to the Orient - except in a purely locational sense. Instead,
'Outside the exhibition
...
...
only further models and
representations of the real' (Mitchell, 1988: 12). The 'reality effect' of the
Parisian model, Mitchell suggested, is that it created the illusion of a dis-
tinction between the copy and the real thing, when in fact
the latter was
interpreted by visitors in the very same imaginative terms as the former
.This,then,is
a peculiar form of metonym in which the process of signification is, despite
appearances, purely circular.
We can, it seems to me, talk in analogous terms about a
nature effect
.
Though we're often not conscious of it, when we describe specific things,
processes, sites or regions as natural - genes, giant pandas, volcanoes, melt-
ing sea ice, Antarctica, the Himalayas, or polar bears, for instance - we
immediately connect them to something conceived as being much larger
one encountered
