burton, kingsley & pratt

7/27/2019 Burton, Kingsley & Pratt

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Jordan Voltz

Prof. Joshi

Engl - 210B Intro to English Studies

Prompt #3

10/13/13

The Familiar Exotic

While undoubtedly serving as enjoyable reading, 18th

and 19th

century travel writing had

the potential to be extremely harmfu. Richard Burton, in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage

to Al-Madinah and Mecca, and Mary Kingsley, author of Travels in West Africa, chronicle their

experiences in foreign lands by describing the cultures and lands they witness in terms and

concepts that are familiar to their European readers. This is problematic because these authors, in

making the cultures understandable by their European readers, fail to capture the intricacies of

these foreign societies, providing a discrepancy between their description of reality and reality

itself. In order to do this, these European authors craft an image of these foreign cultures which

their audiences would consider exotic and unique, yet uncivilized and savage. Mary Louise Pratt,

in her book Imperial Eyes, elucidates the issues with classifying these cultures as so; these

authors are cultivating the perception that these societies are prime for conquest and would

benefit from European culture and civilization1.

Burton and Kingsley demonstrate Pratt’s ideas of conquest through their descriptions of

the natives they encounter by applying their own foreign standards on appearance, religious

tendencies, and customs without understanding the functions of these elements within their local

society. This creates an exotic, yet familiar image of the native society which allows the

1Pratt, Mary Louise. From Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation (NY: Routlege, 1992) pg. 61



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Europeans to easily conceptualize the culture for the social and economic conquest discussed by

Pratt.

Burton and Kingsley, in their respective texts, describe the appearance of the native

inhabitants that they encounter from their own European perceptions, creating a misaligned view

of these cultures that is expressed within their writing. Pratt describes these actions as destructive

to the observed culture, creating severe misunderstandings of the existence of their society in

order to allow them to be classified inside of the European model of understanding2. In Burton’s

travels, he refers to a Meccan woman wearing a hija b as, “Here stalked the Badawi woman, in

her long black robe like a nun's serge, and poppy-coloured face-veil, pierced to show two

fiercely flashing orbs.3” In this quote, Bur ton classifies this woman’s hija b as a religious

garment, even though he only invites comparisons to it. The passage this quote is derived from

(as well as the near-entirety of the text) is primarily concerned with giving the reader a view of

the strangeness and similarities of Meccan religious customs, with the expectation that the “nun’s

serge” will be considered exotic, yet recognizable enough to include. However, Burton fails to

give any explanation for the function of the hijab within the culture and expects it to be passed

off as a curiosity that better indicates the similarities between his culture and Muslim culture.

Pratt understands this as a form of “systematizing nature”4

in which European naturalists

attempted to objectively verify their perceptions of the world, creating a clear standard of

“civilized” and “uncivilized”5.

Kingsley is primarily concerned with creating the perception of the uncivilized savage

when she describes the native chief as, “a villainous looking savage, [although] he behaved most

2Pratt 61

3Burton, Richard. From Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (NY: Dover, vol.2) pg. 173

4Pratt 25

5Pratt 32



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hospitably and kindly.6” In this quote, Kingsley is very clearly acknowledging that the chief’s

appearance is his defining trait and, although she does provide an aside reflecting upon his

personality, she is primarily concerned with how he fits into her uncivilized ideas of West

Africa. While Kingsley comes to the conclusion that the chief is uncivilized, she also provides

descriptions of his very civil behavior. This illuminates the interests that her society clearly

holds- a vested interested in the objectification of the European mindset and perspective which

invites alien cultures to exist as uncivilized within its shadow. Burton and Kingsley’s judgments

of these natives are based primarily upon their initial appearance, creating a disingenuous portrait

of these foreign societies in order to justify the author’s Euro-centric, classificatory mindset. In

further pursuit of this goal, these travelers also analyze the religion of these foreign societies in

an attempt to create analogues to their own, removing these rituals from their local context in

order to invite similarities.

Burton, in his journey through Mecca, describes the religious activities of the natives

through the lens of his own religion, applying Christian-centric vocabulary to describe Muslim

rituals and obscuring the significance these rituals hold within their society. Walking through

Mecca at night, Burton describes his experience with a Muslim man in the midst of a personal

religious ceremony,

“He threw his arms wildly about him, uttering shrill cries, which sounded like Ie le le le!

and held, he swayed his body, and waved his head from side to side, like a chained and

furious elephant straining out .the deepest groans. The Africans appear unusually subject

to this nervous state which […] would at once suggest "demoniacal possession”7

6Kingsley, Mary. From Travels in West Africa (Virago, 5

thed.) pg. 271

7Burton 175



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In this passage, Burton assigns the connotations of demonic possession to an intensely personal

Muslim religious ceremony. This is the most apparent discrepancy between the reality of events

and Burton’s perception of them because it immediately colors a Muslim religious ceremony

with the negative aspects of Christianity that Burton’s readers would be more than familiar with.

In addition, Burton furthers the collective image of uncivilized foreigners by depicting them as

exotic by comparing the man to an elephant, an exotic and representative image of Arabian

existence. This quote demonstrates Burton’s use of language in an attempt to portray this

ceremony as an exotic spectacle while still allowing it to be rationalized and understood in the

European mindset. These kinds of discrepancies are poisonous to the nature

Kingsley attempts to understand the function of marriage within the native society she is

studying, however, she does this by comparing their customs of marriage with the customs of

marriage that she is familiar with. “’The more wives, the less work,’ says the African lady, and I

have known men who would rather have had one wife and spent the rest of the money on

themselves, in a civilized way, driven into polygamy by the women.”8

In this quote, we can see

Kingsley entirely disregard the way in which partnership contributes to luxury in this foreign

society. Instead, Kingsley oversimplifies their social customs and applies her western

perceptions of partnership to this tribe, classifying them as polygamous. Doing so entirely

obscures the complexities in the native society’s marital structure which exists as a linear

structure (the quality of life increasing with each wife). This is opposed to Kingsley’s western

and dualistic classification of marital institutions that are solely defined by whether or not you

have one wife or many wives. . Branding this marital structure as polygamous and insisting that

her perception of this custom is not only absolute, but that it is crucial to the function of the

8Kingsley 212



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society, shows the inherent dangers in applying the European classification system-philosophy to

other systems of thought.

In their works, these travel writers subvert their subject’s culture by classifying them

within the European mindset and presenting them as an exotic, yet uncivilized society that would

benefit from European conquest. This is demonstrated by the ways in which the authors present

the native culture’s appearance, religious ceremonies, and customs through concepts that are

only familiar to a uniquely European audience. This allows the European reader to be convinced

that this foreign culture can be entirely understood and classified within their European mindset.

This, combined with the exotic and uncivilized perception of these societies that is perpetuated

by the travel writers, demonstrates Pratt’s idea that these travel writers were not harmless and

“served as handmaidens to Europe’s [conquest]”9.

9Pratt 34



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Works Cited:

Burton, Richard. From Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (NY: Dover, vol.2)

Pratt, Mary Louise. From Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation (NY: Routlege, 1992)

Kingsley, Mary. From Travels in West Africa (Virago, 5th

ed.)

burton, kingsley & pratt

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