ABSTRACT
What do we talk about when we talk about the exotic? This depends, in part, on when we do the talking, though there may be no better time to listen in on the conversation than the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the talk was relatively thick. Consider: Georg Rumphius — also known as Plinius Indicus for his monumental contribution to the natural history of the East Indies — spoke of the “imperfect chaos” of the exotic world that he assembled in his massive studies of Asian marine and plant life, The Amboinese Curiosity Cabinet and The Amboinese Herbal, both composed at the close of the seventeenth century. This and other remarks by Rumphius on the unwieldy business of ordering tropical naturalia reflect perhaps the finicky anxieties of a scholar. By contrast, Engelbert Kaempfer — the “Humboldt” of the Indies, as he came retrospectively to be known — praised the “pleasures of the exotic.” Here the emphasis lay on the readers’ reception of those tomes chock-full of Near and Far Eastern exotica compiled by Kaempfer in the late seventeenth century, and on the effect that these stunning descriptions, visual no less than verbal, presumably had upon their audience. And then there is the commentary of Arnoldus Montanus. Neither a Pliny nor a Humboldt was this modest schoolteacher turned geographer who delighted in the “novelty,” “variety,” and “strangeness” of those exotica collected in his vast, rambling books of “wonders” that explored the terrain of Asia, Africa, and America at the twilight of the seventeenth century. 1
