Surekha Davies. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human

As Surekha Davies writes in her introduction, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human “demonstrates how maps illustrated human variation across the globe in new ways in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (1). Through exhaustive and careful comparative analysis of the descriptions of Amerindians both on European maps and in other literatures of ethnographic representation—travel literature, encyclopedias, natural histories and more—Davies shows “how maps made arguments about the relationship of human societies, bodies and cultures to their environments” (2) and so constituted a major source of Renaissance ethnographic thinking and practice. Defining ethnography broadly to include “all manner of descriptive writing and of the making of images and artefacts intended to represent peoples” (4 n. 9), her study is likewise admirably wide-ranging, including “six regional European mapping traditions; seven New World regions; visual, print and manuscript culture c.1450–1650; and classical, medieval and Renaissance cultural and intellectual traditions” (17) and an archive of some two thousand works of cartography.

Art · Art history · Ethnography · Sociology · The Renaissance · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies