Reading notebook: Umberto Eco, "From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Cultural Exchange" (selection)

"In a very curious sense we travel knowing in advance what we are on the verge of discovering, because past reading has told us what we are supposed to discover. In other words, the influence of these background books is such that, irrespective of what travelers discover and see, they will interpret and explain everything in terms of these books."

Key words: culture, conquest, cultural pillage, exchange, exoticism, background books

Summary: There are a number of ways in which cultures encounter each other, each of which has a different result. Eco examines closely the manner of encounter which he labels "background books" -- that is, an encounter of an individual or a culture with a foreign culture dictated by traditional cultural expectations -- he gives the example of Marco Polo seeing a rhinoceros and interpreting it as a unicorn, because he had been conditioned to expect a unicorn. For the rest of the selection, Eco discusses the interaction of European intellectuals with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, describing how their conditioning to search for a perfect, Ademic language influenced their studies.

Initial response: Eco's primary argument -- basically that what knowledge we are able to comprehend is dictated by what we have been culturally conditioned to expect -- seems fairly obvious, but the examples he gives are interesting and fun to read. His discussion of Kircher as the accidental father of Egyptology is intriguing, since it raises all kinds of issues about the way history progresses (contrary to the way history is portrayed as progressing).