LAUSR

In a keynote address at an academic conference in Mexico about a decade ago, I recall historian Walther Bernecker making a case for the utilization of travel and exploration literature to reconstruct local conditions. The scarcity of archival sources, Bernecker explained, made travel accounts an especially important source. Clearly, Bernecker was taking a position in the debate over the usefulness of foreign travelers/explorers accounts to gain insights into local conditions and cultures. Bernecker was pushing back against the idea that texts—in this case, travel accounts—didn’t provide a window into an underlying material reality. In other words, Bernecker rejected the argument that texts constructed reality, a contention that could lead to the conclusion that it was impossible to find some underlying truth about material conditions beyond the text itself. This debate, of course, isn’t unique to the history of exploration, or even the discipline of history more broadly. Academic scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences, has changed focus over the past several decades. While a positivist pursuit of truth hasn’t been abandoned, there has been more focus on representations of reality (especially in texts and images) as an object of study. Perhaps loosely informed in some ways by concerns of postmodernism, this focus on representations has become somewhat generalized in modern scholarship. Without necessarily explicitly engaging theoretical issues like the role texts play in constructing reality, there seems to be a general scholarly acknowledgment that representations do play a role in shaping existence. A good example of this academic trend that analyzes representations is the way some scholars interpret travel and exploration accounts, central sources in the history of discoveries. One of the assumptions much of this scholarship on representations calls into question is the idea that eyewitness accounts are accurate recordings of reality and transparent snapshots of local conditions. Rather than a comprehensive discussion of challenges to this assumption, I will briefly mention some alternative approaches, methods that might be loosely divided into literary and