ABSTRACT
Author's title originated in the following passage from John Barrow's Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798, published in London in 1801. It is an excerpt from a fairly lengthy portrait describing the Bushmen: In his disposition he is lively and chearful; in his person active. His talents are far above mediocrity; and, averse to idleness, they are seldom without employment. In the case of Barrow's Travels, manners-and-customs descriptions of indigenous peoples are appended to or embedded in the day-to-day narrative of the journey. In contrast to what we might expect, that day-to-day narrative is most often largely devoted not to Indiana Jones–style confrontations with the natives but to the considerably less exciting presentation of landscape. The ideology that construes seeing as an inherently passive and innocent act cannot be sustained, and Barrow's discursive order breaks down along with his humanitarian moral order.
