ABSTRACT
In his essay “A Poetic for History” (Dening 1991, 1996), anthropologist/historian Greg Dening offers an “old joke that the world will not end with either a bang or a whimper. Instead, it will simply sink under the weight of old National Geographic magazines” (1996:46). If the “cargo” of National Geographic is large, Dening notes, “the sum total of the cargo of all the interpretive encounters of our world is immense” (ibid.).
