Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

By Stephen Greenblatt

A masterwork of history and cultural studies, Marvelous Possessions is a brilliant meditation on the interconnected ways in which Europeans of the Age of Discovery represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, particularly in the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation. Much more than simply a collection of the odd and exotic, Marvelous Possessions is both a highly original extension of Greenblatt’s thinking on a subject that has permeated his career and a thrilling tale of wandering, kidnapping, and go-betweens—of daring improvisation, betrayal, and violence. Reaching back to the ancient Greeks, forward to the present, and, in his new preface, even to fantastical meetings between humans and aliens in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Greenblatt would have us ask: How is it possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder—for tolerant recognition of cultural difference—from being poisoned?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226525181

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is The Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Two of his publications, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and Representing the English Renaissance (of which he is the editor) are available in paperback from California. His most recent book is Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991).

Book preview

MARVELOUS

POSSESSIONS

The Wonder of the New World

With a New Preface

STEPHEN GREENBLATT

The Clarendon Lectures (Oxford University) and

The Carpenter Lectures (University of Chicago) 1988

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

To

Natalie Zemon Davis

and

Robert Pinsky

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

Oxford University Press, Oxford

© 1991 by Stephen Greenblatt

All rights reserved. Published in 1991.

Paperback edition 1992

New edition published 2017 by the University of Chicago Press

Preface © 2017 by Stephen Greenblatt

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

ISBN: 978-0-226-52504-4 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-226-52518-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.728/chicago/9780226525181.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Greenblatt, Stephen, 1943– author.

Title: Marvelous possessions : the wonder of the New World : with a new preface / Stephen Greenblatt.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | The Clarendon Lectures (Oxford University) and The Carpenter Lectures (University of Chicago) 1988. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028655 | ISBN 9780226525044 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226525181 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: America—Discovery and exploration. | America—Description and travel. | Marvelous, The—Social aspects. | Wonder—Social aspects. | Travel in literature.

Classification: LCC E121 .G74 2017 | DDC 970.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028655

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface: Plunder and Wonder

Acknowledgments

1  Introduction

2  From the Dome of the Rock to the Rim of the World

3  Marvelous Possessions

4  Kidnapping Language

5  The Go-Between

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

Plates

1  A Jerusalem-centered world

2  The marvels of the East

3  Signs of possession

4  The Spanish 'thirst' for gold quenched

5  The gift of trifles

6  The gift of necessities

7  and 8 The European display of the natives

9  Skirmish between Englishmen and Eskimos

10 Travel as folly

Text Illustrations

Musical notation of a Tupinamba song

Communication and cultural difference

The go-between

The Tupinambas of coastal Brazil

Indians fleeing the approach of Columbus’s ships

Cultural hybridity

Preface

Plunder and Wonder

Marvelous Possessions is a book about the most extraordinary cross-cultural encounter in history. Before Columbus’s landfall in 1492 there had been innumerable other encounters, including some (such as the arrival of Homo sapiens into the lands of the Neanderthal) that must have been even more remarkable. For the most part, however, these events left few or no traces. But the shock waves caused by the European discovery, as they experienced it, of an entirely New World were recorded in a highly developed, durable representational technology. Hence in addition to the predictable array of wild rumors hardening into myths and legends, there were logbooks, diaries, memoranda, diplomatic dispatches, broadsides, depositions, chronicles, poems, plays, woodcuts, watercolors, paintings, and a host of other modes of registering, amplifying, and analyzing the experience. To these were added some comparable traces—all the more precious for being so few—of the way in which the encounter was processed by those whose lands were invaded, whose gods were overturned, and whose societies were ultimately destroyed by armed men who arrived without warning from across the sea.

The collective responses to these momentous occurrences were hardly the same among the invaded as among the invaders. And even within each group there was a wide range of feelings, conjoined with divergent theories and strategies. But virtually all parties to the encounter shared the same initial, involuntary emotion: an intense wonder. This wonder in its first moments preceded comprehension. It provided no guidance on whether to approach or to flee. It was not a form of judgment. And it seems therefore to offer no handhold for history or theory. But it is here, on this foundational experience, that my book attempts to dwell long enough to find clues to help explain why the events unfolded the way they did and how the actors explained to themselves what they were doing.

Our principal modern technology for the experience of wonder—both for its arousal and for the exploration of its effects—is film, and it is therefore no coincidence that so many noteworthy movies have taken as their subject one or another moment in the epochal history of reconnaissance, conquest, and colonization. These range from Gérard Bourgeois’s 1916 and Márton Garas’s 1923 silent films on Columbus to such modern quasi-ethnographic masterpieces as Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Brazil, 1971), Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Germany, 1972), and Nicholás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca (Mexico, 1991). Even when the subject is not directly drawn from this history, the deep structure of many commercially and critically successful movie plots remains shaped by it, if only by the dream of an escape from its most tragic consequences. In Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example, a series of UFO sightings in various parts of the globe gives way to a full-scale alien landing in Wyoming. Converging on the site of the giant spacecraft, whose technology far exceeds anything humans have achieved, are large numbers of soldiers and scientists, representatives of our two principal institutions designed for soberly confronting eruptions of the incomprehensible. But Spielberg focuses on very different figures, an electrical lineman in Indiana and a single mother and her three-year-old son who have been touched by an overwhelming, uncontrollable experience of wonder.

The film’s plot turns on a central event in the New World encounter: kidnapping. As Marvelous Possessions explores in detail, invaders repeatedly seized natives, sometimes treacherously ambushing them, sometimes laying hold of them in the midst of gift exchanges, sometimes exploiting their curiosity by luring them too close to the ships. Carefully observing their captives, the Europeans studied their technology, displayed them to compatriots at home, and above all taught them languages so that, if they survived a return voyage, they could serve as interpreters.

Something of the same strategy appears to be at work in Close Encounters: the space aliens have evidently been abducting earthlings for some time, taking an entire World War II fighter squadron, the crew of a freighter, the three-year-old child of the single mother, assorted animals, and the like. But, where the consequences of colonial kidnappings were almost always catastrophic for the victims—who were for the most part seized against their will and who generally died very quickly of European diseases—the film is deeply reassuring. Not only do we watch the aliens’ enormous mothership disgorge everyone who had been earlier taken, in perfect health and, strangely, unaged, but we see that the electrical lineman and others who are chosen to be among the next group to accompany the aliens into space are proud and eager to go. They feel they are about to embark on a great adventure, whose beneficence is at least implied by the successful establishment of communication between humans and aliens, based on a five-note tonal phrase. Wonder, purged of fear, gives way to something like ecstasy.

A more recent film, Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villeneuve), takes the transformation of wonder into the dream of redemption further: the terror that the aliens with their spectacularly advanced technology have aroused is assuaged when a gifted linguistics professor succeeds in deciphering their immensely complex graphic symbols. She grasps, at the moment when the fate of the world is hanging in the balance, that a message that had at first ominously seemed to refer to a weapon in fact refers to a tool: the aliens have come to assist and unite humankind, not to destroy it.

These and similar science fiction fantasies all play off against H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel War of the Worlds and the many adaptations and spinoffs that it inspired and continues to inspire. (These range from Orson Wells’s famous 1938 radio drama, which caused a nationwide panic, to Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds, to Roland Emmerich’s ongoing—and ghastly—Independence Day film series.) In Wells’s dark vision, a technologically sophisticated invasion force from Mars lands in various locations in England. The wonder that the strange cylinders initially arouse gives way to horror when the aliens systematically use their devastating weapons against the humans who have naively believed themselves to be secure in their own homeland and culture. Ruthlessly setting about to destroy any opposition, the Martians clearly intend to appropriate the planet and all of its resources for themselves. They are coldly indifferent to the suffering that they inflict upon creatures whom they regard as mere fodder. Indeed, to his horror, Wells’s narrator sees that the invaders literally feed upon the humans that they capture by sucking their blood.

War of the Worlds repeatedly likens the human condition under the Martian heel to the fate of the animals whom we hunt and consume, but it is built still more on the history of colonialism, the legacy of the encounter that lies at the heart of Marvelous Possessions. Wells’s novel is the heir to a powerful critique that began already in the sixteenth century with Las Casas and Montaigne and found eloquent voices in the Enlightenment. A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither, wrote Swift in Gulliver’s Travels:

. . . at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.

Wells’s more sinister version of this miserable story is resolved with a neat plot twist: though all the humans’ massive weaponry is to no avail, the invaders are destroyed by microbes, slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared. There is a grim wit to this resolution, since in the case of the European invasion of the New World, it was the natives who succumbed in vast numbers to diseases brought from the Old World. The reversal of the way things actually occurred allows Wells to save our species, even as his novel relentlessly exposes, via the Martians, the cruelty of the colonial project.

As an allegory of the New World encounter, the problem with this account, from my perspective, is not its grimness and its cynicism—it is difficult to exaggerate the ghastliness of the fate inflicted on the inhabitants of the Americas—but rather its total reduction of the Europeans to inhuman monsters. To be sure, the armed adventurers from Europe were far closer to the Martians of War of the Worlds than to Arrival’s otherworldly philanthropists. They should be good servants, Columbus wrote in his first diary entry about the natives he had encountered, adding two days later that all of them can be taken to Castile or held captive in this same island; because with 50 men all of them could be held in subjection and can be made to do whatever one might wish. But what most struck me in the travel accounts of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not their fathomless cruelty and greed—which I had entirely expected—but their recurrent, intense expressions of wonder. Marvelous Possessions set out to understand the relationship between the emotion of wonder and the project of taking possession of lands and peoples.

There is no inherent link between plunder and wonder. On the contrary, a powerful sense of the marvelous can be associated with an awareness of all that eludes one’s firm grasp, all that one does not and cannot possess. In the course of my career I have paid most of my scholarly attention to the Renaissance, but it is the medieval Mandeville’s Travels, the great fourteenth-century depiction of restless voyaging, that is the ethical hero of my book. For though Mandeville sets out with the dream of regaining possession of the sacred sites in Jerusalem—a dream that has caused so much misery and bloodshed into the present—he veers instead into the enterprise of circling the globe. There is much that the traveler sees, in the course of his wanderings, that dismays him, but his overwhelming feeling is wonder at the variety of human customs and an unsettling awareness of all that we share with those who seem least like us. These perceptions—of profound differences and of hidden links—produce a kind of spiritual modesty: We know not whom God loves and whom He hates. Mandeville is, as I put it, the knight of non-possession.

Columbus took Mandeville’s Travels with him on his first voyage, and it is possible to detect the influence of this work on the admiral’s perceptions of the New World. But with the admiral’s Diaries we enter into a different conceptual universe, one in which the experience of wonder is transformed from an agent of tolerance into the servant of limitless, uncontrollable appetite. How this transformation occurs—not in Columbus alone, but also in many Renaissance accounts of travel and exploration—is the central theme of my book, which is structured around the radical opposition of two forms of the marvelous. The first, embodied in Mandeville, registers the astonishment of discovering affinities with what appears to be absolute otherness; the second, embodied in Columbus and Cortés, registers the astonishment of wielding an absolute power over the lives of others.

A remark attributed to Cortés by Bernal Díaz del Castillo epitomizes the process in which I am most interested. To the Aztec ruler Moctezuma Cortés explained:

how we are all brothers, sons of one father and one mother who were called Adam and Eve, and how such a brother as our great Emperor, grieving for the perdition of so many souls, such as those which their idols were leading to Hell, where they burn in living flames, had sent us, so that after what he [Montezuma] had now heard he would put a stop to it and they would no longer adore these Idols or sacrifice Indian men and women to them, for we were all brethren.

As usual, a tangle of convenient lies tumbles seemingly effortlessly from Cortés’s mouth: his was hardly an evangelical enterprise. His purpose was better captured by a still more cynical remark attributed to him: I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can be cured only with gold.

But there is no reason to doubt that Cortés genuinely believed that all humans descended from Adam and Eve and that in consequence the Spanish and the Aztecs were brethren. It is this sense of brotherhood that enables him to make sense of experiences that were utterly astonishing and to survive through cunning (as well as luck) in a fantastically dangerous situation. Leader of a band of ruthless soldiers sustained by faith in a priestly cult of a mutilated god whose blood sacrifice promised success, Cortés was addressing the leader of an aggressive, militarized kingdom sustained by a weirdly similar faith. Of course, the Aztec religion—its images smeared with the blood of actual sacrifices—seemed to the Spanish like the demonic antithesis of their own Catholic religion of love. And yet the sense of a secret sharing helped them to maneuver their way through the vertiginous maze of bad faith, betrayal, and lies.

According to Bernal Díaz, Cortés delivered his little sermon about Adam and Eve though our interpreters Doña Marina and Aguilar. The keys to successfully maneuvering through the maze, as Marvelous Possessions explores at length, were the go-betweens. It was they who forged the crucial links, made sense of the baffling signals, told the strategic falsehoods, and helped to deploy what my book calls the great representational machine. That machine was important in reconnaissance, communication, and the imposition of meanings, both in the course of the actual encounter and in depicting that encounter to the rulers, the investors, and the general public at home. It drew upon a wide range of emotions: longing, desire, fear, mad greed, rage, confusion, uncertainty, disorientation, disgust, curiosity, and, above all, wonder.

Much of my book centers on the way in which wonder was yoked to possession—to an unappeasable desire for more gold, more territory, more slaves. But always hidden within this wonder was something beyond naked appetite, something glimpsed in Herodotus, in Mandeville’s Travels, and in Montaigne, something even Cortés’s deep cynicism could not entirely poison: the dream of gift-giving, the thrilling apprehension of ways of being other than one’s own, the intimation of brotherhood. The story that Marvelous Possessions tells is for the most part a tragic one, but it returns again and again to aspects of our existence that keep us from despair: curiosity, magnanimity, generosity, self-criticism, the will to experiment, the dream of justice.

Stephen Greenblatt, 2017

Acknowledgments

As befits a study of travel writing, this book owes its existence to exotic realms beyond the borders of California: specifically, to Oxford University, where I delivered versions of these chapters as the Clarendon Lectures, and to the University of Chicago, where I gave them as the Carpenter Lectures. Both visits were for me wonderful occasions, memorable for the extraordinary kindness and generosity of my hosts. How could the visits have been anything but wonderful? Thanks to the Dean and Students of Christ Church, I spent two splendid weeks in rooms that looked out on the Meadow. Chicago in January is not quite as green and mild as Oxford in May, but it has more than ample compensations, including La Grande Jatte and one of the best blues clubs I have ever set foot in.

And the people in both places! Among the many to whom I owe substantial debts of gratitude, let me mention only a few: in Oxford, Julia Briggs, Christopher Butler, John Carey, Stephen Gill, Malcolm Godden, Dennis Kay, Don McKenzie, David Norbrook, Nigel Smith, John Walsh; in Chicago, Leonard Barkan, Camille Bennett, David Bevington, James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, Philippe Desan, Bernadette Fort, Christopher Herbert, W.J. T. Mitchell, Janel Mueller, Michael Murrin, Carol Rose, Richard Strier, Pauline Turner Strong, and Frank Thomas. I would like to give special thanks to Kim Scott Walwyn of the Oxford University Press and to Alan Thomas of the University of Chicago Press for their encouragement, attentiveness, and patience. Patricia Williams generously added her own wise editorial counsel.

There are many other places and other people with whom this book is linked: Inga Clendinnen and Greg Dening in Melbourne, Guido Fink in Bologna, Salvatore Camporeale and Louise Clubb in Florence, Wolfgang Iser and Jürgen Schlaeger in Konstanz, Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, François Hartog, Louis Marin, and Tzvetan Todorov in Paris. I started to make a list of the others, closer to home, but when I filled several pages with names and had still not come to an end, I decided to abandon the attempt. The friends and colleagues who have been so generous with their time and their learning already know, I hope, what they mean to me. I must, however, at least thank by name those who have read and offered criticisms of the whole manuscript: Paul Alpers, Oliver Arnold, Sacvan Bercovitch, Homi Bhabha, Catherine Gallagher, Steven Knapp, Thomas Laqueur, Robert Pinsky, and David Quint. Rolena Adorno, Svetlana Alpers, Alfred Arteaga, Howard Bloch, Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, Theodore Cachey, Natalie Zemon Davis, Joel Fineman, Philip Fisher, Frank Grady, Ellen Greenblatt, Roland Greene, T. Walter Herbert, Jr., Jeffrey Knapp, David Lloyd, Laurent Mayali, Louis Montrose, Michael Palencia-Roth, José Rabasa, Michael Rogin, David Harris Sacks, Elaine Scarry, Candace Slater, Randolph Starn, Wendy Steiner, and Janet Whatley all read substantial chunks and made valuable suggestions. My research assistants, Lianna Farber, Paula Findlen, Lisa Freinkel, Wendy Ruppel, Eve Sanders, and Elizabeth Young, helped me get some control over voluminous materials that were always threatening to spin off into irremediable confusion. I also benefited greatly from the expertise of librarians at the University of California, Oxford University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library, the Warburg Institute, and the Newberry Library. And, of course, the University of California, Berkeley, has as usual provided not only generous support but also an immensely exciting intellectual network.

There is another place and set of people with whom this book is linked both directly and indirectly. I first drafted the chapters on Mandeville and Columbus as lectures to be given on separate occasions in Israel, the first at a conference on 'Landscape, Artifact, Text' at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, the second at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Once again I want to acknowledge the hospitality, friendship, and intellectual generosity of many people, including Sharon Baris, Daniel Boyarin, Harold Fisch, Elizabeth Freund, David Heyd, Milly Heyd, Zvi Jegendorf, Ruth Nevo, and Ellen Spolsky. But I also want to acknowledge something else: the original destination of these two lectures is not a neutral fact. It never is, I suppose, for the situation or occasion of one's discourse always manages to shape its meanings, however careful, objective, and truthful one tries to be. At the end of one of my lectures in Chicago, a student challenged me to account for my own position. How can I avoid the implication, she asked, that I have situated myself at a very safe distance from the Europeans about whom I write, a distance secured by means of a sardonic smile that protects me from implication in the discursive practices I am describing? The answer is that I do not claim such protection nor do I imagine myself situated at a safe distance. On the contrary, I have tried in these chapters, not without pain, to register within the very texture of my scholarship a critique of the Zionism in which I was raised and to which I continue to feel, in the midst of deep moral and political reservations, a complex bond. The critique centers on the dream of the national possession of the Dome of the Rock and on the use of the discourse of wonder to supplement legally flawed territorial claims. The bond centers on the spiritual, historical, and psychological legacy of uprooting and genocide. Neither the critique nor the bond constitute the meaning of this book—which is, after all, about other times and other places—but their pressure makes itself felt, along with the question I am still struggling to resolve: how is it possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder from being poisoned?

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

When I was a child, my favorite books were The Arabian Nights and Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels. The appeal of the former, even in what I assume was a grotesquely reduced version, lay in the primal power of storytelling. Some years ago, in the Djeema EI Fnah in Marrakesh, I joined the charmed circle of listeners seated on the ground around the professional story-teller and attended uncomprehendingly to his long tale. In the peculiar reverie that comes with listening to a language one does not understand, hearing it as an alien music, knowing only that a tale is being told, I allowed my mind to wander and discovered that I was telling myself one of the stories from the Arabian Nights, the tale of Sinbad and the roc. If it is true, as Walter Benjamin writes, that every real story 'contains, openly or covertly, something useful',¹ then that tale, of diamonds, deep caverns, snakes, raw meat, and birds with huge talons, must have impressed itself upon my prepubescent imagination as containing something extremely useful, something I should never forget. The utility, in this particular case, has remained hidden from me, but I am reasonably confident that it will be someday revealed. And I remain possessed by stories and obsessed with their complex uses.

The appeal of Halliburton's Book of Marvels is less easy to explain. Halliburton was a popular American traveler and journalist. He wrote in what now seems to me a dismayingly exclamatory and hyperventilating manner, as if he believed in some part of himself that his marvels were not all that marvelous and needed to be rhetorically enhanced for the marketplace. But, even in a debased form, The Book of Marvels was in touch with what Michel de Certeau calls 'the joyful and silent experience of childhood:…to be other and to move toward the other.'² And I suppose that my suburban soul, constricted by the conventionality of the Eisenhower 1950s, eagerly embraced the relief that Halliburton offered, the sense that the real world was full of wonder, the wide-eyed account of exotic travels—Iguassu Falls, Chichén Itzá, the Golden Gate Bridge. It was Halliburton's trademark to put himself into danger in order to witness or verify his marvels: he flew a light plane perilously close to the raging waters of Iguassu Falls, he jumped into the Pool of Sacrifices at Chichen and swam to safety, I suppose he drove at rush hour across the Golden Gate Bridge. I shouldn't make light of his daring; as if to prove that the risks he was taking were real, Halliburton disappeared on one of his voyages and was never heard from again.

At a certain point I passed from the naïve to what Schiller calls the sentimental—that is, I stopped reading books of marvels and began reading ethnographies and novels—but my childhood interests have survived in a passionate curiosity about other cultures and a fascination with tales. It will not escape anyone who reads this book that my chapters are constructed largely around anecdotes, what the French call petites histoires, as distinct from the grand récit of totalizing, integrated, progressive history, a history that knows where it is going.³ As is appropriate for voyagers who thought that they knew where they were going and ended up in a place whose existence they had never imagined, the discourse of travel in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance is rarely if ever interesting at the level of sustained narrative and teleological design, but gripping at the level of the anecdote. The sense of overarching scheme is certainly present in this discourse, most often in the conviction of the inexorable progress from East to West of Christianity or empire or both, but compared to the luminous universal histories of the early Middle Ages, the chronicles of exploration seem uncertain of their bearings, disorganized, fragmentary. Their strength lies not in a vision of the Holy Spirit's gradual expansion through the world but in the shock of the unfamiliar, the provocation of an intense curiosity, the local excitement of discontinuous wonders. Hence they present the world not in stately and harmonious order but in a succession of brief encounters, random experiences, isolated anecdotes of the unanticipated. For the anecdote, which is linked at least etymologically with the unpublished, is the principal register of the unexpected and hence of the encounter with difference that is at once initiated and epitomized by Columbus's marvelous landfall in an unimagined hemisphere that blocked his access to the eastern end of the known world.

If anecdotes are registers of the singularity of the contingent—associated (to introduce the Mandevillian terms I will discuss in the next chapter) with the rim rather than the immobile and immobilizing center—they are at the same time recorded as representative anecdotes, that is, as significant in terms of a larger progress or pattern that is the proper subject of a history perennially deferred in the traveler's relation of further anecdotes. A purely local knowledge, an absolutely singular, unrepeatable, unique experience or observation, is neither desirable nor possible, for the traveler's discourse is meant to be useful, even if the ultimate design in which this utility will be absorbed remains opaque. Anecdotes then are among the principal products of a culture's representational technology, mediators between the undifferentiated succession of local moments and a larger strategy toward which they can only gesture. They are seized in passing from the swirl of experiences and given some shape, a shape whose provisionality still marks them as contingent—otherwise, we would give them the larger, grander name of history—but also makes them available for telling and retelling.

My own traveler's anecdotes are bound up with those that I study, shaped by a similar longing for the effect of the locally real and by a larger historicizing intention that is at once evoked and deflected. An example: in August, 1986, on a tourist's typical first night in Bali, I walked by moonlight on narrow paths through silent rice paddies glittering with fireflies. I reached a tiny village which in the darkness I identified less by the low, half-hidden huts and temples than by the frenzied barking of the dogs at my approach. I saw a light from the bale banjar, the communal pavilion in which I knew—from having read Clifford Geertz and Miguel Covarrubias and Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead—that the Balinese gathered in the evenings. I drew near and discovered that the light came from a television set that the villagers, squatting or sitting cross-legged, were intent on watching. Conquering my disappointment, I accepted the gestured invitation to