Elizabeth Sutton's new book examines the visual culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ethnology. Though her principal focus is Pieter de Marees's Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602), the earliest illustrated Dutch account of West Africa, she devotes considerable attention to several additional and related topics. These include the career of de Marees's Amsterdam publisher, Cornelis Claesz (ca. 1551–1609); the latter's place in and contribution to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch print culture; and the development of ethnology, natural science, and the discursive categories of race more generally. Her work thus considers ethnographic imagery as a visual counterpart to the comparatively well-studied fields of travel writing and cartography.
After an introductory chapter that surveys the historiography of early modern cross-cultural encounters, ethnography, and exoticism, the second chapter explores the contemporaneous development of Dutch print capitalism and overseas company imperialism, which Sutton nicely illustrates through a detailed account of Claesz's career, professional networks, and readers. Devoted to the description of the wider world, the latter emerges as a Dutch counterpart of Richard Hakluyt or Giovanni Battista Ramusio. The third chapter considers de Marees, his Description, and its engravings, offering speculations about the author's life and milieu and exploring his partnership with Claesz and his artists. The fourth and fifth chapters consider the engravings in de Marees's work as ethnological representations, focusing on their informative and entertaining dimensions and their contribution to the developing discourse on African societies and culture. The final two chapters examine the reverberations of the Description; the sixth considers cartographic imagery as a counterpart to ethnographic illustration, while the seventh explores the influence of the Description and its engravings on subsequent scholarship. A brief epilogue reflects upon the interface between entertainment and information.
The book's great strength is its nuanced exploration of the stylistic and thematic links between the engravings in the Description and Dutch visual culture and ethnology more generally. Blending formal analysis with intellectual and cultural history, Sutton convincingly demonstrates that the prints rehearse a transitional stage between analogic and classically informed ethnology, on the one hand, and an empirical, hyper-aggregative ethnology, on the other. As was typical of early modern African studies, orientalism, and proto-anthropology more generally, old and new ideas were incoherently intertwined, with fascinating results. Sutton convincingly demonstrates how the Description's engravings fused classical sources and precedents, humanist morality and ideals, Dutch subjectivity, and a pretension towards verisimilitude that corresponds to the textual turn towards eyewitness reportage. Sutton usefully terms this confusing array ‘the tension between empiricism and the visual tradition’ (p. 3).
Though Sutton conceptualizes the Description both as a product of Dutch culture and ‘a document of African history’ (p. 7), her primary interest is incontrovertibly the former, particularly in terms of what it reveals about Dutch culture and early modern book and art history. This is perfectly fine, but it may disappoint Africanists. One basic problem is the historicity of de Marees's account and its specific contribution to the development of early African studies. Though Sutton devotes considerable attention to subtle symbolism and visual rhetoric of the engravings, the actual contents of the text – which informed readers' understanding of the imagery, and which attracted later generations of European scholars interested in Africa – is essentially ignored. Thus her account of the Description and its legacy is partial, and it is difficult to appreciate its place in the canon of early modern Africanist scholarship. Related to this problem is the question of the value and limitations of the Description as a primary source. It is perfectly reasonable to claim that the text and its accompanying images reflect the mental worlds of their creators more than the historical reality they purport to describe, but for a fifty chapter work devoted to the taxonomic description of ‘people, customs, zoology, and botany’, including an Akan vocabulary, such a claim requires some explanation. This lacunae is complicated by Sutton's claim that Africanists have uncritically used this and other travelogues as simple sources of fact (p. 197), but this is clearly a positivist straw man belied by her own references (see also p. 17, n. 2, and p. 230, n. 22). It would be interesting to learn what facts the author of the Description chose to relate, and why, since these bear directly on the value and limitations of the text as a source. They surely informed how the Description's readers understood its engravings.
Ultimately, this is a sound and truly interdisciplinary study of the cultural and intellectual underpinnings of an early and widely reprinted contribution to African ethnography. Scholars interested in the history of anthropology, Western images of Africa, and the visual culture of early modern imperialism will profit from reading it.
