Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial
expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims
such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial
gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on
nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new
view of those early European explorers and their encounters with
Africans. "Out of Our Minds" shows explorers were far from
rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states
influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence.
Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source
material, and points to its implications for our understanding of
the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes
an important contribution to current debates about the intellectual
origins and nature of anthropological inquiry.
Drawing on travel accounts--most of them Belgian and
German--published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian
describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans
they met. He argues that the loss of control experienced by these
early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural
understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange
facts and customs. Fabian's provocative findings contribute to a
critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of
ethnography, illuminating the relationship between travel and
intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and
ethnographic knowledge.
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