Research Methods for English Studies (Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2013-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

Only recently has travel writing, ‘the varied body of writing that takes travel as an essential condition of its production’ (Rubiés 2002: 244), been accorded serious consideration within academia. This ‘vast, little explored area’ (Hulme and Youngs 2002b: 1) encompasses a range of different styles and approaches, including, among others, the travelogue, the autobiographical novel, the journalistic narration and the scientific report. Travel writing is interdisciplinary, covering, for instance, anthropology, geography, history, literature and media studies. Ethnography clearly has a place in some travel writing. As Rubiés asserts, ‘the description of peoples, their nature, customs, religion, forms of government, and language is so embedded in travel writing . . . that one assumes ethnography to be essential to the genre’ (2002: 242). Although it would overstate the case to see all travel writing as ethnographic – Bill Bryson’s travel novels, for example, are based primarily on autobiographical humour rather than ethnographic method (Hulme 2002) – an understanding of ethnographic research methods may be required in order to appraise, to analyse and, indeed, to produce travel writing.

Travel writing has a lengthy history. For as long as people have travelled they have narrated accounts of their journeys, in oral, pictorial or written forms. One need only think of the Bible and its numerous tales of travel (Hulme and Youngs 2002b: 2), Homer’s Odyssey , or more recently Don Quixote , to appreciate that well-established history. In the modern epoch, travel writing began to flourish in the sixteenth century with the greater global movements of people producing and requiring written documentation of journeys, for instance maps, accounts of lands visited, peoples and terrains encountered. Missionaries, explorers, sailors, pirates, ambassadors, scholars and merchants (among others) were all involved in the accumulation of travel writing in this period, which developed understanding of the physical and social world through first-hand observation and fed back into the huge expansion at this time of philosophical and scientific knowledge more generally (Hulme and Youngs 2002a; Sherman 2002).

Many of the early accounts draw on ethnographic research methods in their production. Indeed, we can see the early roots of ethnography in the travel writing of the sixteenth century. In this period a standard format for reporting information acquired through travel was established. ‘Relations’, as they were known, aimed to produce systematic accounts of the economic, geographical, social and political aspects of the place visited through supposedly neutral observation. Such was the organisation of the production of this knowledge that instructions were published for travellers detailing the ways in which information should be recorded, with suggested headings for the categories to be covered (Rubiés 2002: 252). As Rubiés asserts, ‘in the earlier centuries of European expansion, travel writing generated ethnography as a matter of course’ (2002: 243).

Between the nineteenth and twentieth century the more scientific travel writing generated by scientists, explorers, ethnographers and other travellers gave way to an upsurge in more literary styles of travel writing (Carr 2002; Hulme 2002; Rubiés 2002). From the twentieth century literary travel writing, while not

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