ABSTRACT
The relevance of this debate on the future of anthropological theory, and ethnographical practice, becomes apparent when one of the major discursive points of origin for the discipline is considered: namely, travel writing. Offering a ready supply of ethnographical data through observations ‘on the spot’, the colonial expansion of countries such as Britain offered unprecedented access not only to the means of travel, but the objects of study themselves. Self-appointed objective travellers provided an early and valuable source of ethnographical information. Offering their writing as authentic reportage from the field, travellers used authorizing drives similar to those of the modern guidebook, namely, the erasure of the subject-position belonging to the individual author, the use of ‘on the spot’ information, whose veracity was entirely derived from the fact it had been seen and, of course, the authority of the published volume itself. Women had a special monopoly when it came to ethnographical work in the nineteenth century through their access to the lives, rituals and practices of native women; for once, women’s apparent disadvantages when it came to far or exotic travel became a distinct bonus. The five women under consideration in the present discussion can be traced in a lineage of British women’s interest in offering a sustained literary analysis of Greek life, and especially Greek women, through the course of their journeys. Rather than gauging the relative authenticity or truth value of the accounts, the discussion maps the varieties of ways women approached categorizing the Modern Greeks.
