Describing Self in the language of Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the temple of Hierapolis Jas Eisner Arguably, travel writing is always an act of compromise. Usually it com- prises a translation of the foreign into terms acceptable or understand- able to a home community, by an author whose own identity can hardly be disentangled from the act of writing. 1 The foreign is always trans- formed under the gaze and representations of its interpreter (framed as a specimen, perhaps, or disunited from the cultural coordinates which give it indigenous meaning, or actively misinterpreted and abused). 2 Yet its entry into a home culture (even the very possibility for that entry through some form of ethnographic or relativizing discourse) may transform that home culture too - nuancing both a collective cultural identity and the more personal sense of self of the traveller. 3 When such travel becomes inextricable from the problems of religion and the very powerful effects which religion exercises on subjectivity (as in the case of pilgrimage accounts), the problems and negotiations of the self may become more complex still. 4 Ultimately, everything may be at 1 On issues of cultural translation, there is a rich literature on the European discovery and assimilation of the New World: see esp., Greenblatt (1991), (1993); Pagden (1993); Rubies (1993). Specifically on the 'science of the Other' ('heterology'), the classic work is de Certeau (1986) esp. 67-79 and 137-49 on writing and travel with Giard (1993). On the problems of ethnography see Boon (1982); Clifford and Marcus (1986); Pratt (1992); Schwartz (1994). For accounts of the ancient geographic framework within which the De Dea Syria was written, see Jacob (1991) and Romm (1992). 2 As a polemical position on the cultural assimilations of travel writing, this is famously the argument of Edward Said (1978). Like all polemics, the argument is too extreme. See Eisner (1994) 226-30. 3 On the development of technologies to assimilate travel accounts in the Renaissance - simultaneously a way of legislating for the framing of the Other and of reconstituting systems of knowledge in home cultures in order to accommodate the foreign - see Stagl (1990) and Rubies (1996). For a subtle account of how self-confident identities can be undermined in confronting others, see Rubies (1999). 4 Interestingly, the literature on pilgrimage has hardly explored the effects of travel as as- similation of the Other, though see now Williams (1998) 249-96, (1999). In part this may be because the Other which is the pilgrim's goal is also (usually) the sacred underpinning of the pilgrim's sense of self. For that goal as a kind of intersubjective ideal ('communitas') 123 Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2010 available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511627323.005 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Oxford, on 28 Dec 2016 at 09:27:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,