Travel Writing

"If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.

The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude.

Enter Rane Willerslev, a young Danish anthropologist who ventures into this frozen land on an idealistic mission to organize a fair-trade fur cooperative with the hunters. From the outset, things go terribly wrong. The regional fur company, with ties to corrupt public officials, proves it will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly: one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir business partners is arrested on spurious charges of poaching and illegal trading; another drowns mysteriously. When police are sent to arrest him, Willerslev fears for his life, and he and a local hunter flee to a remote hunting lodge even deeper in the icy wilderness. Their situation turns even more desperate right away: they manage to kill a moose but lose the meat to predators and begin to starve, frostbitten and isolated in the frozen taiga.

Thus begins Willerslev’s extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.

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"ABSTRACT
“Oklahoma – Nararachi, peyote road landscapes” puts together  science and art knowledge, this thesis work deals with images and words, memory and identity, travel and trance to build landscapes. Traveling by car, on the road,  trip starts in Oklahoma, goes on through Texas, Arizona, California, and New Mexico, crossing the border towards Chihuahua, to finish at the Sierra Tarahumara. It is an artistic exploration and research work conducted as a work in progress, following the contemporary Cheyenne poet Lance Henson.
This work provides a crossing of glances crossing photography (Cabanzo Francisco, visual artist), documentary film (Federico Lanchares, documentarist) and poetry languages (Lance Henson, poet and writer, Sundance ceremonial dancer, Dogsoldier clan member, trip guide). This effort helps make landscapes emerge, overlap, contrast or be complementary,  the documentary trip format, “road movie”, adopted reinforces the idea of the transit: creative action as  trance practices, transit as process of self-conscousness, life itself as time-space transit, existence transcendence linked to transitory identities, to flowing of situations and places, construction of transitory characters and identities mixing and contamination, mutations of ambiguous spatial and symbolic syncretism.
Research work has been functionally focused towards a  documentary project, begining with research assistance, the construction of the characterizations, and the hypothetical trip routes formulation. The work was extended in it’s objectives and results horizon. It developed into a work in process project a three hands storyboard, and preproduction successive re-project drafts writing. It also envolved direction assistance and project production management filming in Italy and then in the United States and Mexico. And finally visual and written results edition, treatment and interaction within public in the form of an artist book and an exhibition installation. The outcome of the field investigation, in addition to the results refered above, consists in a theorical and conceptual state of arts revision related to trascendcental arts.
The thesis is presented in three parts:
Part ONE contains the artistic and field work results. Photographic record of trip, scouting backstage and impressions of daily life (white and black) contrasting with insights and trance moments (treated polarized color and sound sequences), poetry writings facsimile (digital treatment) to add the ‘trip diary’ poems and writings. An artists book format is used for images and texts contrast contents within an interactive exhibition format conceived as a space installation mixing texts and photos with traces and objects collected during the trip. Sculptures of spatial archetypes help expectators-participants interaction activating trance sequences and sounds. The intraction helps to build his own experience from his own point of view, both perceptive and cultural.  Building new landscapes. Closing the installation, people can see  two documentaries loop, "Words from the edge" and "impressions from peyote road", (two pieces, of an unfinished  triptych).
Part TWO contains a secondary sources review, as part of field work preliminary research. The theoretical framework, the focal orientation, as well as  the characterizations of characters, situations, ceremonies and places, plus hypothetical routes and the research and artistic experimentation conclusions. The project remains open, conclusions are partial and presented as impressions besides possible transcendental art research and experimental developments.
Part THREE annex contains partial fieldwork results. Interviews and diaries, online key words information research and poems analysis. Significance territory density tables and maps. Exhibition installation and documentary projects.
NOTE FOR THIS RESUMED VERSION
Readers will notice a great difference between this resume and the complete version of this thesis, composed by three parts in two volumes. First of all, this is the resume of the second part, in which images or any visual material were taken away. It also lacks the artistic graphic and video material contained in part one plus two DVDs with videos.
The thing is that as there has not still been invented a method, or a language, able to resume images and sounds, and an effort to do so would have finished by just “cutting” ones or “leaving” others, with no plausible solution in terms of content and significacy. Therefore the choise was to eliminate them all. The absence of any visual material underlines the value of arts and visual discourses by themselves in the epistemological order, as vicual and sound information is crucial for art’s process of building discourses and knowledge.
This text also has no references or notes, just surnames of authors in parenthesis. Secondary information elaborations are contained in part three. No examples and cases that support the hipotesis are contained here, they can be found in the part two of the thesis.
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"En esta obra, prototípica del género de viajes femenino latinoamericano, se despliegan los detalles de la vida típica del Estados Unidos decimonónico –en particular la de la mujer, incluyendo sus nociones sobre la moda, peculiaridades domésticas, comportamiento social y aspiraciones profesionales– observados por la autora a través del prisma de su propia cultura y de su aguda capacidad de análisis.

En su estudio preliminar, el Prof. J.P. Spicer-Escalante examina la evolución del género de viajes en el mundo occidental en general, y la aparición y la relevancia de los textos de viaje femeninos latinoamericanos en particular. En su análisis de la obra de Mansilla de García, explora la intersección entre la vida de la escritora y su producción literaria, focalizando la génesis de Recuerdos de viaje , la voz y el estilo literario que adopta la autora en la obra y las valiosas peripecias sociopolíticas que la obra contiene, con una reflexión sobre el papel que la autora ayuda a crear para la mujer escritora hispanoamericana en general."

"Breaking Ground examines travel writing's contribution to the development of a Russian national culture from roughly 1700 to 1850, as Russia struggled to define itself against Western Europe. Russian examples of literary travel writing began with imitative descriptions of grand tours abroad, but progressive familiarity with the West and with its literary forms gradually enabled writers to find other ways of describing the experiences of Russians en route. Blending foreign and native cultural influences, writers responded to the pressures of the age--to Catherine II, Napoleon, and Nicholas I, for example--both by turning "inward" to focus on domestic touring and by rewriting their relationship to the West. This book tracks the evolution of literary travel writing in this period of its unprecedented popularity and demonstrates how the expression of national identity, the discovery of a national culture, and conceptions of place--both Russian and Western European--were among its primary achievements. These elements also constitute travel writing's chief legacy to prose fiction, "breaking ground" for the later masterpieces of writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. For literary scholars, historians, and other educated readers with interests in Russian culture, travel writing, comparative literature, and national identity.
"A fully mature and original book that may be read for pleasure and enlightenment by literary scholars and historians alike. It accounts for the rise of travel literature as a genre and the concomitant rise of cultural and national self-consciousness, and it puts this national self-consciousness in European literary and historical perspective." -Professor William Mills Todd III, Harvard University.
"Russia has always had plenty of space, and in this wonderfully interesting narrative of case studies and literary- historical watersheds, Dickinson shows how Russia found a national voice by moving away from, toward, and around that space. A new and more mobile look at European Romanticism." -Professor Caryl Emerson, Princeton University.
"The fascinating story of how educated Russians in the process of traveling increasingly come to terms with their own cultural identity; a 'Bildungsreise' of the Russian mind." -Professor Emeritus Joachim Klein, University of Leiden.
"A truly refreshing and enlightened study that goes well into the heart of Russian national consciousness. Dickinson uncovers major facets of early modern Russian cultural history with energetic strokes, demonstrating both elegance of mind and attention to detail." -Professor Alexander Levitsky, Brown University."