Exploration: Too much of a colonial thing?

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Exploration: Too much of a colonial thing?

"'It is one of the things that you have expressed criticism of, that the coverage is promoting raw colonial era ideology'...

'I do think that, and I think it's really important in this discussion, and I've actually engaged with Ben on this before, because we don't agree. This isn't about the individual motives of people who go off to seek contact with hitherto uncontactable people. This is about a system and a context, and I think it's a bit unfortunate that Ben compared this to Blue Planet or wildlife series for example, because that is essentially the problem.

I think for centuries, if you look at the history of explorers and the genre of explorer writing and adventure telling, it is often to find black and other non white ethnic groups, cultures and people, and treat them in the same way as they would treat an exotic species of plant or wild life. And it's this gaze that regards the European as the civilized person who travels around exposing the exotic and other parts of the world that I think is troubling and it's historic.

And if you look back at some of the adventure writing from the 15th and 16th century that described savages and the word that was often used, I see a real continuity with some of the language and the press coverage around explorers today and now that's not to say that individual explorers are trying to be racist in any way, but it's, when you see a photo like the one of Alan with the Yahta [sp?] people in Papua New Guinea, to me, it's an unbroken legacy of the same images we saw during the colonial era of missionaries and explorers standing with so called primitive people and showing their readers back home that-'

'But isn't that in the eye of the beholder? I mean if you look at that was a photograph of what, where they were and who they were with?'

'No, it's a context. It's a framing. I think there's two things. There is the image itself, which very much centres these people as Other. You have these explorers in the centre, they're people we recognize wearing clothes we recognize, and then around them, they have other people dressed up in the most exotic and unfamiliar dress that no doubt they have available to them.

And secondly, there is the way we portray it and it is about the eye of the beholder, but I am also the beholder. There are British people for whom these are being written, who will relate more to the ethnic group that's being written about than the explorer, and it's very problematic and often offensive for people like us'...

'*motherhood statements about being a white male* For me, I've never seen anything like this exploitative. To be clear as well, the idea of getting in contact with uncontacted tribes is wrong. I've never done that. I've been off to meet the beautiful Masai people. I've been off to meet Maori people, and it's more in my mind about sharing with people. And that's probably the context I gave to Blue Planet.

It's not about a sort of a domineering European perspective. It's more about a beautiful insight into people who are under threat. Many of these tribes are under threat from exploitation, mineral exploitation. And actually when I went to Papua New Guinea, we were embraced, we were with a community that had met white people before, but they said to us, you could save us economically. If you shine a spotlight on us and you bring tourism to us, you could change our fortunes. They had tears in their eyes when they said, and I'm not saying that's across the board, but I'm saying that there is another side to this'...

'That photograph that you criticized, what else would you have them? That's what they wear, and that's what they look like'

'Ben just delivered a kind of pristine example of a white savior narrative, which is that white people, Europeans have this somehow predestined role to go around civilizing and saving people around the world. That is exactly the ideology on which the empire was built. There were many people in the empire who had excellent intentions. The reality is it ended up drawing on pseudoscience, scientific racism and propagating this idea that there was this inherent superiority in the European race to go and save people around the world.

Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be interested in groups who are under threat. Of course I think that's an essential project. I welcome the idea that people are interested in the cultures that they haven't previously experienced, but it's who's telling the story and what their perspective is. And I think that many people... are not conscious of the extent to which they have themselves absorbed this imperial narrative, and it's not necessarily something they're doing consciously, but it's something I see very much in the narrative and the images that are being disseminated'"


Apparently exploration should not be about seeing new things and people who are different from us. I thought appreciating diversity was supposed to be a virtue

Post-colonial perspectives are superior to the voices of the people concerned, apparently

Of course, if the natives were photographed wearing Western clothing, this would be erasure of traditional culture. So once again, the white man is evil