Original scientific paper
Analysis of the "Travelogue Records of the Travel to the Land of Slavs from the South" (Recuerdos de un viaje al país de los Eslavos del Sur) by Georges Perrot
Sonja Leboš
; Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
In a broader sense of its connotative meaning, this article is a contribution to retrospective ethnological work or historical ethnology, the last syntagm corresponding to the Jacques Le Goff's concept. These perspectives are to be seen through comprehending the article as an attempt to find analytical tools for re-reading the re-discovered travelogue ‘Recuerdos de un viaje al país de los Eslavos del Sur’, which was written by Georges Perrot in the years which follow the travel that took place in 1868. The text elaborated in this article was published in Barcelona in 1878. This attempt includes re-reading the Perrot’s work as a kind of report on un-known, but clearly framed, territories, which was presented to his Spanish audience through series of structured descriptions and critical comments. While partly transfering sequences of Perrot’s thick descriptive figures to Croatian language, the author of the article emphasises the tendency of his suggestive text to, with its descriptive techniques which are at the same time part of literary as well ethnographical descriptive practices and traditions, inform readers about the country of South Slavs in a popularly scientific and, at the same time, literary manner. However, the point of this critical reading of Perrot's text is exactly in juxtaposing those truly meaningful and creative way of transforming experiences of people and places into the text which are to be read from subjective descriptions, and, on the other hand, to criticize the way in which Perrot, while trying to be highly objective in his comments, steps into critical field of subjective judgemental thinking and writing about people and places. In trying to penetrate the layers of complex life styles and manifold forms of habitats of the Un-known and Other, while supporting his statements with data and numbers, according to the author of the article, he speaks as much about the culture of his origin as about the culture which he describes. In this particular travelogue, the described culture, or the culture of the Other, is the culture of South Slavs, while the culture of the origin of the Observer, or the Writer, is blurred on the horizon as the ideal and dominant one. In conclusion, the subjectivity of Perrot's thick descriptive technique is seen as the utmost quality of his travelogue 'Memories from the Journey to the Country of South Slavs', though some judgemental syntagms with which French writer attributes described societies (like patriarchal communism, e.g.) the author of the article, in her attempt to do retrospective ethnological analysis, would not discard as groundless.
Keywords
travelogue; text; interpretation of culture; cultural catalogue; etnography; literature; identity; subjectivity
Hrčak ID:
22132
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2007.
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