Travel and the human subject

In the introduction to BMT, Anthony Bale asserts that “Travel in Mandeville’s Book is not so much a way to see the world but an allegory of how people understand their place among others in this world” (XXIII). Bale goes on to suggest that Mandeville’s depiction of “others”  demonstrates an interest in “cultural relativity” (XXIII). How might Mandeville’s specific documentation of other people, ostensibly human subjects, compare to depictions of the world’s peoples found in modern imaginative texts? Why does the modern “post-human” world always seem to be shown as homogenized? How does Mandeville arrive at a representation / definition of the “other” ?

8 thoughts on “Travel and the human subject

  1. The modern posthuman world is often homogenized because they are created anew. Mandeville is traveling (or at least writing about traveling), and so discovering new people who already exist. It seems that most of our modern texts focused on humans creating new life-forms, or newly created beings struggling to fit into a human world. The people Mandeville writes about exist already, and fit into their own societies. Modern posthuman works often have relatively few posthumans, and they are in the early stages of developing a society. In addition, Mandeville catalogues the people he encounters, and rarely assigns moral values to certain peoples, save for the Jews and the Bedouins. On the other hand, most modern posthumans are written to make a certain point about human societies and thus have certain moral or ethical connotations.

    • I really like your post Hannah, but I wonder about your statement,

      “Modern posthuman works often have relatively few posthumans, and they are in the early stages of developing a society”

      How would this statement fit into the scope of maybe looking at a text like “Oryx and Crake” where we aren’t really at the beginning of a developing society, but rather the end of the human one with a newly formed race already working? All we are left with is an entire new race and one human (plus the few we meet at the very end?)

  2. Through his Ethiopian example, Bale specifies that Mandeville intentionally does not dwell on negative aspects of people’s physical appearances but rather emphasizes characteristics that identify them as a people, whether socially, culturally, or in other form. This widely contrasts depictions of the posthuman in modern imaginative texts because they utilize physical appearances in order to portray the intended stereotype and model for this type of people. I do not know if I fully agree though with the modern posthuman seeming homogenized, as representations seem to vary in order to apply to all types of people, throughout the span of the future. Mandeville arrives at a definition of the “other” through comparing and contrasting all of the others, deciphering mutual commons and contrasts.

  3. I agree with Hannah, in that Mandeville is writing about people that do exist in the world already, instead of coming up with new beings. I feel that Paige is also correct in saying that he’s not focusing solely on the physical aspect of people, whereas in modern posthuman works the focus is, a lot of the time, on they physical. This is especially true when it comes to cyborgs/robots, because modern works seem to emphasize and focus on how it’s different to the traditional human. I feel like Mandeville is more of a catalog of human existence, whereas modern work seems to always be making a point about aspects of the human experience.

  4. Mandeville and his work are both equally fascinating, especially when considering that it is possible that Mandeville might not have been real, just like many of the wonders he wrote about. As stated above, Mandeville doesn’t focus on the negatives in many instances and instead focuses simply on what is. This form of direction, this acceptance is something many post modern works struggle with; while Mandeville largely accepts the ‘other’ of the people that he encounters, that is not so in several of the works that we have encountered in class, like He, She, and It and Battlestar Galactica, where the ‘other’ are looked at as standing apart. All beings had a place in Mandeville’s balanced world view, a view that seems to not exist or to be very flawed in other post-modern works.

  5. Although thus far in the text we have not encountered too many “others,” in the first several chapters we do get a sense of Mandeville’s “interest in cultural relativity and his respect for other kinds of learning” (xxiii). We see this through his attention to various languages and alphabets—Egyptian and Hebrew (29, 54). Mandeville’s attentiveness to various elements of culture supports Bale’s assertion that Mandeville’s Book is an “allegory of how people understand their place among others in this world” (xxiii). This understanding and documentation of other people is quite different from interactions we have seen in modern posthuman imaginative texts. As Paige suggests, in the majority of modern posthuman texts we’ve encountered deal a lot with physical appearances to portray a range of stereotypes and models for different kinds of “people” in the future. And I’m not sure that I would agree with the suggestion that modern posthuman world is always homogenized as we have seen a range of different possibilities of a posthuman world. As we read further in the text and encounter more, and increasingly unusual “others” I think that we will see that Mandeville’s representation of the “other” will incorporate a similar attentiveness to strange physical appearances as well as a consideration for culture and other kinds of learning, subsequently creating a kind of posthuman allegory that will investigate how individuals understand their place in the world.

  6. Everyone had really spot on comments in response to your question. I, too, believe a stark difference between this Medieval text and the more contemporary ones we read is the fact that Mandeville seems just to be documenting diversity in the world while modern texts create a “new” or more “advanced” human in order to pinpoint a human essence or perspective like Hannah suggests.
    I would also like to add the difference of human involvement into the mix though. In the texts we’ve read so far, there has been a physical human separation of human and the “other”. In Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons are physically estranged based on their “unhumanlike” characteristics while in Mandeville, they are ever-present. In Never Let Me Go, the clones are in separate schools or facilities from the humans.
    Mandeville therefore comes to the representation of the other as simply this: a representation. He adds no overt negative or positive aspects to one group of people dramatically. He is simply cataloguing who/what he meets along the way to his pilgrimage site, Jerusalem.

  7. Unlike most representations of the Other that are wont to correlate physical deformity with moral deficiency, Mandeville’s descriptions of different societies draw distinctions between the body and morality; physical appearance is detailed rather objectively, and any moral criticisms come from Mandeville’s adamantly Christian perspective—but even his religious outlook, as Bale points out, does not prevent his “tolerant curiosity,” save his antisemitism, of course (xxiv). Certainly, Mandeville’s travels reveal diverse civilizations with their own established and unique histories, and I’d contend that this isn’t a far cry from modern post-humanism. As Miller suggested above, post-humanism isn’t always conducive to homogeneity—most post-human texts we’ve encountered portray a society in the throes of contentious division, far from being standardized. So far, we haven’t seen anything explicitly Other in Mandeville; therefore it’s difficult to categorize his particular representation of the Other. Like Bale writes in the introduction, Mandeville’s travels are a call for “cultural relavity” without the instant condemnation of Others, but rather a desire to understand and relate to their common humanity.

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