Post 2: Tunisia and Historical Landscape

The manner in which a writer approaches landscape can point to many of their more general attitudes and objectives.  Beyond what the language itself tells you, the organization of their descriptions is indicative of the priorities of the writer and the intended audience.  Sometimes the most telling parts are those which the author leaves out.  

I examined a travelogue from 1903 by a Frenchmen named Guy de Maupassant.  He traveled through much of Africa and the Middle East, writing of his exotic journeys in a series of books.  I think its important to note that while the purpose of the reader buying this book would be to learn of far-off exotic locations, it is not written with real anthropological purpose.  It is written to be entertaining and exotic, not necessarily strictly factual.

One of the first things that struck me in his section on Tunisia was the order in which he addresses various features of the landscape.  His very first descriptions of the Tunisian landscape concerns the Romans and Carthaginians.  This fixation by Europeans with ancient Roman history is quite prevalent.  The current inhabitants of the land are of less importance than these ancient civilizations.  The cultural importance of Roman history and civilization to these Europeans plays out in their prioritization of these aspects of landscape over more immediate ones.  This can also be seen in the period's maps.  This is an 1889 map of the northern African coast:

Despite Carthage being an extinct civilization for several millennia they still use it to define the place.  The name is not used by the current inhabitants, nor does it really reflect the contemporary cultural composition, but this is of little import to European map makers.  This relates to professor Fennel's talk in terms of how one approaches the study of Africa.  At this point in time Europeans were still approaching Africa in a way that starts on their own cultural terms.  This is similar to how African American anthropological studies really started in the American south.  

The second topic which the author discusses is the physical landscape of the city of Tunis.  He describes in great detail the surrounding countryside and shape of the city.  While some of his descriptions are more neutral, he makes many references to how the people of Tunis are uncivilized and dirty.  The way in which he frames it gives the reader the impression of a stunning landscape being mired by its backwards inhabitants.

Altogether the travelogue is quite colorful and undoubtedly entertaining to readers at the time, but the blatant racism and cultural insensitivity infused in the text make it difficult for the modern reader to pay much attention to the actual landscape.  The physical/geographical observations are almost lost within the way Maupassant discusses the Tunisians themselves.  

Posting 1 - Africamap, Tunisia

Africamap demonstrates a range of features which can assist one in extricating a great variety of information on the African landscape.  The tool moves beyond using a map for simple physical reference and allows the user to compare and contrast elements of the more general landscape.  This idea of 'landscape' involves a variety of types of information which a traditional map can't really offer.  The various layers and points of interest can be used to illustrate connections between (among other things) physical presence, environmental factors, socio-political constructs, and historical positioning.  By combining these various features Africamap allows the user to take just about any location in Africa and construct a comprehensive landscape.

Tunisia:
One thing which struck me about Tunisia in particular while using Africamap was the tremendously long history of the place name.  Maps and atlases dating as far back as 1612 show Tunis on their maps, and throughout all of the various territorial changes and differences in mapping practice the name remains.  Many other areas in Africa change names a multitude of times, while Tunisia manages to remain relatively constant.  There are several possible explanations for this.

I think that one important explanation is simply the proximity of Tunisia to Europe.  Its location on the edge of the Mediterranean ensures a more or less constant level of contact with Europeans.  This level of familiarity ensures that place names endure because of frequent use and economic convenience.  It becomes much harder to constantly redraw borders and rename places (as they did in much of central Africa) when there is an established tradition and understanding of an area's place within the global network.

Another explanation concerns the cultural heritage of Western thought.  These ancient maps are cultural constructs as much as physical ones.  The ancient Greco-Roman world occupied an important place in Western cultural traditions, and as such the sites and sense of history are well preserved.  Tunisia was an important Pheonician colony since antiquity and was the location of the city of Carthage.  The Punic wars were a well documented cultural event, and Western scholarship has retained interest in them to this day.  Early modern maps were often colonialist or imperialist projections, but in this case the cultural aspects of Western-style imperialism take precedence.  The area is given identity based upon Western history rather than concurrent cultural/ethnic composition.

Ancient Roman ruins at Douga (Tunisia)