“We can learn a lot about seventeenth-century Asia by reading travelers’

Orientalism and the Traveler

We can learn a lot about seventeenth-century Asia by reading travelers ' accounts like those written by Francois Bernier or Engelbert Kaempfer

To evaluate the above statement , these things should be considered : the reliability of travel accounts in general , and the perspective from which an account was written - which , in this case , is proposed to come from European . These two things are mostly related in the sense that they both question travel writing 's credibility

The first point to discuss is the nature of travel accounts . Travel

writings have long served as significant documents for historians (Campbell 4 . Engelbert Kaempfer , for example , gave the most detailed s of the behavior of common men and women in seventeenth-century Japan , making his accounts most valuable - both to Japan and the West - in the contemporary age now that historians are centering investigation on the life of the ordinary person (Kaempfer 10 . However , there are points of dispute when it comes to the accuracy of these accounts . The translator Christian Wilhelm Dohm once opined that Kaempfer 's s of Japan were too positive , warning readers that the writer might have seen Japan through rose-tinted spectacles (Kaempfer 10 . These problems arise because of the very characteristic of travel writing itself . First and foremost , it is a literary genre in that its narrative is borrowed from that of fiction or creative non-fiction (Blanton 5 . Although the accounts are supposed to be factual , there is no stringent policing of the truthfulness of its every detail . In this sense then , it is misleading to say that a traveler 's account is an enriching source of information regarding a historical period of a country . Mary Campbell , in her book The Witness and the Other World , says travel writing includes the manipulation of rhetorical figures for ends other than ornament ' - and what possible ends ' these may be will be discussed later - also that it contends with representational dilemmas of self , and the other and external world (6

Compared to most writing genres , travel writing relies extremely on the manner of representation travel literature concentrates on the interplay between observer and observed , between a traveler 's own philosophical biases and preconceptions (Campbell 6 Blanton 5 . If one were to continue with this thought , questions on how much of the traveler 's preconceptions influence his or her writing would arise . The answer would be a lot ' since no account can really be objective in the true sense of the word , or there still is no method of arriving at such a characteristic - in the end , the writer has all his or her partialities to bear (Said 10 . Therefore , every account may be doubted as to the embellishments they may contain

The statement proposes European travel accounts as valuable knowledge sources on seventeenth-century Asia . Here , it should be noted that accounts mentioned came from persons foreign from said continent . This brings us to the issue of Eurocentrism , a perspective that envisions the world from one privilege point ' which...