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Bodies Real and Virtual: Joseph Rock and Enrico Caruso in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2011

Erik Mueggler*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Michigan

Extract

In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis Charles Rock made a brief trip to England. He clipped the obituary of an old friend from the Times and pasted it in his diary. On the facing page, he pasted a photograph two decades old, and wrote this caption:

J. F. Rock (standing) with his older friend Fred Muir, Entomologist at the Haw[aii] Sugar Planter's Exp[eriment] Sta[tion], Honolulu. Photographed in our home in Liloa Rise (Breaside), Honolulu in the spring of 1913, while our phonograph played Spiritu Gentile, Caruso singing.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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References

1 Joseph Francis Charles Rock, Diary, 25 Mar. 1934, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (hereafter RBGE). While copies of parts of Rock's diaries exist in several locations, the complete, original notebooks are kept at the RBGE.

2 Rappaport, Roy, A., Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24Google Scholar.

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4 A selection of the literature on colonial photography that has influenced my approach here includes: Edwards, Elizabeth, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Landau, Paul and Kaspin, Deborah, eds., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas, eds., Photography's Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pinney, Christopher and Thomas, Nicholas, eds., Beyond Aesthetics: Art and The Technologies of Enchantment (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar; Poole, Deborah, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Kaplan, Ann E., Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar; Harris, Clare and Shakya, Tsering, Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947 (Chicago: Serinda Publications, 2003)Google Scholar; Ryan, James R., Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997)Google Scholar.

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19 Rock, Diary, 10 Jan. 1922.

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26 Rock, Diary, 13 Feb. 1931.

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29 Ibid., Rock's emphasis.

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31 See, for example, Liang, Linxia, Delivering Justice in Qing China: Civil Trials in the Magistrate's Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Joseph Rock, “Bandits—a Government Asset,” unpub. MS, Arnold Arboretum.

38 Rock, Diary, 14 Dec. 1924.

39 Rock, Diary, 4 and 5 Apr. 1925.

40 Rock, Diary, 11 Apr. 1925.

41 Rock, Diary, 9 May 1926.

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48 Rock, Diary, 13 May 1926.

49 New York Times, “America's Advance Guard,” 5 May 1910: SM2.

50 New York Times, “Thrills in Motion Picture. ‘The Wild Heart of Africa’ Shows Game at Close Range,” 27 May 1929: 20, 3, quoted in Gordon, Robert J., Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925 (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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