Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Abstract

This chapter addresses the spatial mobility of knowledge in a dual context: the role of local knowledge in geographical exploration during the age of empire, and the presentation of that theme within a recent exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in London. In some respects, as suggested by recent work in the history of cartography and botany, the process of exploration can be conceived as a form of “knowledge transfer,” in which indigenous knowledge was absorbed into European systems of knowledge. Yet on closer examination it becomes clear that the knowledge thus “transferred” was not always strictly local or indigenous—and in the often uneasy process of translation, intermediaries such as guides, brokers, and interpreters played a significant role. In seeking to bring this agency into view, the author draws on the experience of research for an exhibition informed not only by subaltern and postcolonial perspectives but also by more material, indeed spatial design strategies. The chapter emphasises the mutability as well as the mobility of knowledge in both the nineteenth-century culture of exploration and its re-presentation in physical and digital form today.