Now showing 1 - 10 of 104
  • Publication
    Climate Change: A Challenge to the Geographers of Colonial Asia
    (RFIEA, 2013-05)
    In this paper, I will both challenge current assumptions held on progress in climate studies, and reexamine past assumptions on the environment of ancient civilizations. I will touch on important themes, such as science policy in the early 20th?century and the relationship that Europe had with colonial Asia and withthe past environment of China, Turkestan and Persia. With its uniquely rich collections and experts on Asia, London was assuming one hundred years ago the prime responsibility of mapping the natural history of a continent the ‘Britishers' had largely colonized. The Geological Survey of China, the British Survey of India, scholarly societies in Berlin and Paris, private libraries in Yale and Stockholm were the privileged venues where new information and concepts were created, exchanged, assessed and recast. The explorers sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society of London (RGS) built a professional network that connected the deserts of Central Asia to mighty Europe and nurtured a relationship between London and peripheral centers of knowledge production. Scientific travel was one tool among many to expand the British Empire and add to its prestige, but exploration results could become irrelevant if they somehow challenged the colonial order by proposing disquieting theories on past trends. Since my objective is to deconstruct the notion on the stability of Asia that the geography community seemed to cherish one century ago, I must report on the ways in which fieldwork-based studies yielded a consensus that data on climate could not possibly back up. To examine the first debate geographers had on climate change I am intertwining scientific reports with the conceptual history of climate. Like Stephen Jay Gould, the main protagonist of the "Darwin Wars," I believe that biographies offer the most compelling way to present the emergence of theories that challenge conventional views. On the basis of extensive archives in London and Stockholm, I intend to provide a biographical account of the independent scholars who engaged a learned society as it disputed the existence and significance of climate change. Through them, I explain why and how the RGS challenged one key finding that emerged from repeated topographical expeditions - that the course of human history is linked to some degree to climate change and environmental crises?
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    Sven Hedin and the invention of climate change
    (Sällskapet för studier av Ryssland, Central-och Östeuropa samt Centralasien, 2008-11)
    In a bestseller that in 2003 entered the mainstream literature on global warming, Spencer Weart, a professor of physics history at Harvard, delivered a definitive account of the history of climate studies. Reviews of his popular book, The Discovery of Global Warming, have however been mixed. Reviewers, especially if they were Europeans and meteorologists, noted that Professor Spencer Weart often forgot to credit non-American scientists. As far as I am concerned, his book overlooked the significance of several areas: the contributions of field cartographers, of maps as tools for interdisciplinary communication, of the collecting of evidence of climate change either in geological ages or historical times, and of the topographical survey campaigns that, to allow for meaningful comparisons, were led at a sub-continental scale in the US Southwest, the Sahara, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Geographers had indeed begun probing new theories on climate change at the turn of the 20th century.
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    Type:
    Journal:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    Mapping ancient Chinese Antarctica
    (Oestasiatiska Museet, 2001)
    Western mass media have granted a spiritual character to Antarctica and described the continent as offering much more to the travelers than an exotic landscape of floating icebergs and crazy penguins. Antarctica provides a popular topic for introspective travelogues, science fiction novels, and accounts of British gallantry. More and more wealthy retirees, stamp collectors and mountain climbers travel there, but the continent and its islands have primarily remained the province of physical scientists. An American geographer noted with pride in 1912 that Antarctica was "the stamping ground of explorers and scientists, and it would seem therefore as if scientific geographers had full sway and should crystallize Antarctic names in accordance with the claims of discovery." The cartographic representation and the Chinese nomenclature of this stamping ground are what I am about to analyze.
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    Preliminary catalogue of the Sven Hedin map library
    (Dep. of Geography, 2000-02-01)
    Sven Hedin (1865-1952) is now remembered in continental Europe and Japan mostly for his travel accounts of Tibet and Turkestan, and not for his scientific survey of Central Asia. The English versions of his books have not been reprinted since the late1960's and are now collector's items. Who would resists the urge of paying good money for the 1941 edition of A Conquest of Tibet, that the book jacket describes as: "a hair-raising account of an actual journey into the barbaric interior of a strange, forbidden country." Dr. Hedin's talent for sharing with a popular audience tales of his feats as a Ladakhi merchant has somehow contributed to diminishing his scholarly status in our collective memory. The enthusiastic crowds that greeted him in 1909, when he received honorary doctoral degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and La Sorbonne, vanished a long time ago. His uncompromising pro-German position and his vocal support of the Nazi regime later turned him into an embarrassing academic figure who is now almost forgotten. [http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol19/iss1/8/]
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    The intended perceptions of the imperial gardens of Chengde in 1780
    (Taylor and FRancis, 1999)
    Imperial gardens have formed a particularly rich medium for the geographical analysis of interactions of culture and place. In the application of the methodology developed by recent scholarship for the study of garden history, I try to make use of contributions in landscape studies, cultural geography and cartography to reveal the Qing ideology of garden representation. I discuss the function of gardens in the expansion of the Qing empire and use as a case study the gardens of Chengde.
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    The Swedish conquest of Tibet : Sven Hedin's Moral Mapping of White Unexplored Patches
    (Nepal Studies, 1997)
    Research report on the exploration and survey of Tibet conducted by the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin in 1906-1908, and on the controversial discovery he made of the Transhimalayan mountain range
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
    Scopus© Citations 4