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A young man with a pigtail hairstyle, seen in profile, Kenya, Kikuyu people, photo Bedřich Machulka (Af II 2161)
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The way in which the Czech public in the late 19th and early 20th centuries learned about exotic lands was primarily dependent on travellers' abilities to present their findings in literature or to mediate their experiences directly, by means of lectures. From the 1890s onwards, lectures were accompanied by slideshows. The Náprstek Museum contains...
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Citations
Enrique Stanko Vráz (1860–1932) was a multifaceted individual known for his roles as a traveller, photographer, hunter, and collector of natural history specimens and artifacts from non-European cultures. While travelling through equatorial South America up the Amazon River from 1892 to 1893, he amassed a remarkable collection of four hundred ethnographic artifacts from two dozen groups of Indigenous peoples. More than one hundred and thirty years after the acquisition of this collection by the Náprstek Museum, the first part of the collection is published – a collection of feather ornaments. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances of the acquisition of the objects from the Indigenous peoples, their use by the ethnic groups visited, their transport to Europe and their further handling. The inspirational sources of E. S. Vráz’s ideas, which were also reflected in his contact with the Indigenous people and his collecting activities, are briefly presented.
This study focuses on a description of the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing, in the first months of 1901, written by E. S. Vraz during his second journey to China. Enrique Stanko Vraz (1860–1932) was a Czech naturalist and explorer, renowned for his travels to Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which he depicted in a series of books addressed to a broader public. His travelogue on Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion is particularly engaging, since it shows the country in the midst of great turmoil and chaos, just after the uprising had reached its climax. It is also extremely interesting from the ethnographical and anthropological perspective, because Vraz not only comments on the activities of the allied forces in China, but he also describes the Chinese people, their customs, Chinese culture and society, and in doing so develops an interpretation of the kingdom, governed by the dichotomy between ‘civilization’ and modernity, on one hand, and ‘barbarism’ and obscurantism, on the other. Vraz’s narrative therefore seems to be inexorably bound to an ethnocentric paradigm, so characteristic of travel writing at the beginning of the 20th century. I argue, however, that this statement is oversimplifying, and that Vraz’s text is self-aware of these antagonisms and therefore defies any straightforward reading.
The way in which the Czech public learned about exotic countries at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries was dependent above all on the ability of travellers to convey their experience in literary form, as travelogue, or to communicate their experiences directly - in lecture form. From the 1890s lectures were accompanied by the projection of slides. One of the best-known travellers, and an excellent lecturer, was Enrique Stanko Vráz (1860-1932). The Náprstek Museum holds an extensive collection of glass slides from his estate. Vráz filled the periods in between his various world travels with intensive lecture activity, and the themes of his lectures grew wider with the increasing number of journeys he undertook. Information gained from Vráz's lectures had a marked effect on the outlook of broad swathes of the population of the Czech lands on the life and cultures of non-European areas.
