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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Nancy P. Appelbaum (2016)

By Madeleine Olson

What occurs when elite driven narratives about national identity dramatically different differ from the realities people experienced? During the nineteenth century throughout Latin America, when national boundaries were just beginning to become coherent, the upper echelons of society constructed tales about their nations that often vastly differed from lived experiences.

Between 1850 and 1859, the Chorographic Commission traveled the territory of present day Colombia in an attempt to map the land and the people who lived there, using chorography, or detailed representations of a particular region. Sponsored by the government of New Granada (an older name for Colombia), the commission produced a wealth of maps, texts, illustrations, as well as travel journals and diaries, in order to construct the image of a unified nation. Implicit in the commission’s initial mandate was the assumption that it would justify the existing administrative order by making that order appear natural.

The visual culture it produced, however, depicted a nation that was far from cohesive, with regional individuality and diversity.  Instead of portraying a unified nation, the commission presented the country as fragmented into different, and often opposing regions, inhabited by racially and culturally distinct races, that reinforced assumptions of Andean and white mestizo superiority. In this new book, Nancy Appelbaum expands our understanding of this central paradox, demonstrating that the commission’s materials reveal some of the ways that Colombian elites grappled with the challenges posed by varied topographies and diverse inhabitants.

The leaders of the Chorographic Commission included both foreign members and others who were born and bred in New Granada. Two of the key figures on the commission, whose writings play an important role throughout the book, were Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar. Born in Italy’s papal states and a Napoleonic war veteran, Codazzi was in fact first contracted to map the Venezuelan provinces, which had seceded from Gran Colombia, in 1830. The secession precipitated Gran Colombia’s dissolution into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. Manuel Ancízar, a Colombian lawyer, writer, and journalist, joined Codazzi on the Commission in 1850.

Gran Colombia and modern countries (via Wikimedia Commons).

Using personal correspondence between Codazzi and Ancízar, Appelbaum argues that although the creation of the commission reflected nationalist aspirations of the government, it was fundamentally shaped through its leaders’ own exposure to foreign culture. The geographic writings of Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, as well as Italian Adriano Balbi, strongly influenced Codazzi’s and Ancízar’s initial overviews, as they “draped themselves in the ‘mantle of Humboldtianism’ to emphasize their own scientific legitimacy.” Inspired by Humboldt, Codazzi divided the terrain of New Granada according to the differing altitudes, winds, and vegetables that he encountered. The ideological influence of Humboldt, together with Balbi’s schematic list methodology, helped the Commission create a novel and distinct approach to chorography that was more affordable than the fashionable trigonometric survey.

The detailed accounts produced by Codazzi and Ancízar on the commission’s initial expeditions to the highland region of Antioquia and the Pacific lowland, comprised not only field reports, but also included detailed watercolors created by the commission’s first illustrators in order to depict the populations they encountered.  Through comparing the perceptions noted in the field reports with the pictorial representations, the tension comes out between the inclination to show these regions as homogenous when the commission clearly experienced great heterogeneity of the people and customs.

William Price, Typical Inhabitants of the Province of Medellín (via World Digital Library).

This visual culture reflected a literary and artistic current in nineteenth-century Latin America called costumbrismo, or using descriptive prose and dialogue to verbally paint a local scene,  emphasizing the customs and particularities of that locale. Within these works, tipos “types” that organized the population into component parts defined by race, occupation, and place, were created to provide both a visual and discursive way to manage the heterogeneity that the commission encountered. In William Price’s Tipos de Medellin, the commission’s artists displayed idealized images of people one would encounter when visiting these places. These images of the racial types that the commission produced updated the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings for the republican era.

As the commission moved into the tropical lowlands and the eastern plains, Appelbaum further elaborates how the illustrations were largely aimed at an external audience in order to attract immigrants and economic investment to the region. The commission’s efforts were not meant to simply represent the landscape, they were also to transform it in the service of economic advancement. Codazzi believed that these areas, rich in agriculture and livestock, could support many more people than their sparse, midcentury population.  Elites defined the tropics, for instance, as being filled with disease, poverty, and backwardness, making it a desirable region for colonization and improved methods of production. The commission took on an ethnographic dimension, as studying the population became an integral part in determining the economic capabilities of the land. Reports, maps, and paintings that Codazzi, Ancízar, and others, produced provided abundant information aimed to facilitate the conquest of the regions they mapped and studied.

Manuel María Paz, Provincia del Chocó: Aspecto esterior de las casas de Nóvita (via World Digital Library).

Applebaum goes on to discuss the methods that mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals living in the highlands around Bogotá employed to rationalize their claim over the local populations. By emphasizing the glorious origins and civilization of the Andean region around Bogotá, at the expense of lower “savage” climates, intellectuals reinforced Bogotá’s claim over this topographically disparate territory. Codazzi projected national history into the ancient past by weaving geology, archeology, and history together and referencing the past as “history” rather than prehistory. They placed themselves, not the local indigenous populations, who ultimately were the Commission’s guides, at the top of the intellectual scale to read the cataclysmic past.

Carmelo Fernández, Piedra grabada de Gámesa. Provincia de Tundama (via World Digital Library).

After Codazzi died in 1859, elites left behind tried to make sense of his project and battled each other over meanings and representations of the nation. Although members of the commission had high hopes for the mass reproduction and circulation of the materials they produced, that did not occur.  Chorography and the work of the Chorographic Commission died with Codazzi, supplanted later in the nineteenth century by newer forms of mapping which are still common today, such as topography.

Although the work that the Chorographic Commission created between 1850 and 1859 was not as widely received as hoped, the spatialized and racialized regional hierarchy inherent in its visual materials would be reproduced and refined within Colombian scholarly and popular discourse. By no means the originator of this fragmented discourse, the Commission’s cartographic project formed the basis for most maps of Colombia into the early twentieth century.

Gracefully written, integrating over thirty images and maps, Mapping the Country of Regions ­­­offers a fascinating window into both the visual culture produced during the nineteenth century in Colombia, and the ways that territories, boundaries, and state-lines are constructed. Appelbaum’s contextualization of her source base that she makes explicit within her analysis heightens her claims about the use of geographic, ethnographic, and visual methods to secure territory.  This theme of racialization of geographic hierarchy is not solely limited to Colombia, as ideas about how race and region have historically informed each other throughout Latin America. The blending of analysis with visual representation enables this book to be of use for those interested in not only Latin American nation-state building, but this  methodology of combining visual and textual analysis would be of value for anyone incorporating visual culture into their own work.

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).


Also by Madeleine Olson on Not Even Past:
A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism.

You may also like:
Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional, by Haley Schroer.
Casta Paintings, by Susan Deans-Smith.

 

Exploring the Silk Route

By Christopher Rose

It’s the afternoon of a hot summer’s day, and I am standing at the bottom of a staircase—with no handrails—that’s not so much set in to the side of a mountain as built on top of it.  The stairs look solid from way back, but now that I’m standing in front of them … they’re kind of crumbly.  And did I mention the part with no handrail?

Way up there, at the top of four hundred fifty five stairs, there’s a shrine whose gleaming silver dome is barely visible in the afternoon sun.  That’s our destination.

Am I really going to do this? I ask myself, gauging the heat and looking at my nearly empty water bottle, but knowing that the answer is yes.  Otherwise, why would I be here?

I’m in the Sentyab valley, somewhere on the border between Samarkand and Navoiy viloyets, in the Central Asia republic of Uzbekistan. I’m here with a small tour group of educators exploring the midsection of the Silk Route.

Sentyab is the site of Uzbekistan’s first, and as far as I can tell only, community-based tourism venture. There are four guesthouses in Sentyab, each owned by a family (ours was owned by two brothers) that welcomes visitors into their homes and offers a glimpse of life in an idyllic village setting.

The village is spread out along a green valley on the north side of the Pemir mountains, a relatively low-lying mountain range that separates the more fertile part of the country where the main trunk of the ancient Silk Route runs from the drier steppes of Central Asia that expand north from where I’m standing to … well, they go a really long way.

On our arrival, we had been fed a typical “light” Uzbek lunch featuring the national dish, plov: a pilaf of meat, rice, carrots and currants. Also on the table was fresh bread—it’s always called non, cooked similarly to Indian naan in a tandoor-like clay oven—but the style differs from town to town with each region claiming its own as the country’s best. Apricots, apples, and mulberries were in season and served in abundance along with sweet melons, watermelon, salads of cucumber, tomato, and mint; fresh yogurt; and, just in case anyone was still hungry, toasted apricot seeds and dried fruits.

It’s little wonder that afterwards, most of us took a siesta on the veranda where we’d eaten, along the creek under giant mulberry trees, and then decided to take a walk through the village to wake ourselves back up. After all, dinner was coming in a few hours, and no one was even remotely hungry. What better to build up an appetite than walking up the side of a mountain?

As the others passed me, I slung my camera to one side and took the first few steps up the mountain.  Once we got above the trees, there was a nice breeze!  I quickly stopped counting the steps because the numbers weren’t approaching 455 as fast as I wanted.  As we went up, the mountainside retreated, and the rail-less flight of stairs rose out of the side of the mountain a couple of meters.  I focused on the dome above, trying to suppress my teenage vertigo.  Just a few more steps …

Finally, we were there, atop the stairs—which was not actually on top of the mountain but on a ridge on the side. The structure was smaller than I’d expected—from the other side of the valley it looked massive!
And here I discovered one of the things that makes Uzbekistan unique.  I’ve traveled in a lot of the Islamic world and it varies a lot from place to place. But here was something I’d never seen before.

“Is this a Buddhist shrine?” I asked our guide, slightly confused.
“No,” he said, pointing to the crescent on top of the dome.
“But … these are prayer flags.”

And, indeed, what I saw is almost identical to Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags in form and function.

The shrine is built over a spring whose waters are now diverted further down the mountainside.  According to local legend, a local goat herder had been shown the location in a vision of Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son in law. (This is a common story at many mountainside shrines; a much larger and more famous one is a pilgrimage site in the town of Nurota, where we stopped the next day on the way to Bukhara).  Even though the spring has been in use since pre-Islamic days, locals still insist that Imam Ali was involved with its discovery.

Pilgrims come to this shrine and, as tradition has it, they tear off part of their garments, make a wish, and tie the strip of cloth to the metal railing. Eventually the cloth disintegrates and the wish is blown up to God with the intercession of the saints who guard the shrine.

It’s a tradition from the steppe, one of the many signs that you can find in Uzbekistan that the country sits aside the road between east and west: a Persian style dome sits atop an Islamic shrine, decorated with what I mistook to be Buddhist prayer flags, at a site that’s been revered since Zoroastrianism predominated here over a thousand years ago.

As the sun began to set over the valley and the smoke from several dozen cooking ovens began to rise above the trees, we started down the stairs to the path that would take us past the fields with the cows and goats, and the rooftops laden with fresh apricots and mulberries drying in the sun, to enjoy another home cooked meal in the veranda under the mulberry trees along the creek.  We were the only visitors in the town that night, and every person on their way home from the fields greeted us warmly as we passed.

Uzbekistan, with its friendly people, natural beauty, and shimmering blue domed mosques and tiled minarets could very well be the next “hot” destination. I’m glad I got the chance to see it first.

Photo Credits: Christopher Rose

Stairs leading up to the Islamic Shrine at Sentyab

Sentyab Village

A “light” Uzbek lunch

View from the shrine

“Prayer flags” at the mountaintop shrine

The group with its Uzbek host family

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