Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World.

• Author: Kacar, Fatmanur
• Position: Book review

Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World

Edited by Dane Kennedy

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, xiii + 236 pages, 64.00 [pounds sterling], ISBN: 9780199755332.

Edited by Dane Kennedy, Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World sets out to provide readers with multifaceted narratives on exploration with a focus on a broad intellectual agenda. In the beginning, there was the word; however as well as the word, there was also the immediate urge to explore. The content of the concept of exploration has changed, and it has been reinterpreted over time, but, finding its place in almost all fields of life throughout the ages, exploration has maintained its dynamism and importance and has not ceased to alter the ways in which people perceive the world. Structured into two main parts and ten chapters, the volume provides the readers with enriching and comprehensive perspectives on how different parts of the world have been subjected to exploration by the West. While the first part traces these explorations' connection to science and reiterates the intertwined relations between the two, the second part offers more thematic narratives based on specific territories including Russia, the Pacific, Eastern Africa, Central Asia, and Antarctica.

Throughout the volume, the contributors highlight the ways in which exploration and explorers have been attributed a mythic status through European historical experiences, since they signify Europe's triumphal entry to the world stage in broad terms and have been regarded as a symbol of state power and national prestige in European countries, e.g. Christopher Columbus for Spain, Vasco de Gama for Portugal and Sir Francis Drake for England. The authors also associate the term 'exploration' with modernity in the European cultural imagination, which reached its peak with the Enlightenment. Thus, this term connotes scientific and technological achievement as a source of energy, enterprise, and inventiveness as well as state power and national prestige. Because of the challenges posed by various meanings of exploration in recent years, one objective of the volume is to reveal the epistemological foundations of exploration and to provide criticism of its ideological agendas while the second aim is to identify differences between explorers' experiences and the ways in which they portrayed those experiences for public consumption. Besides these intentions, the overall objective can be stated as being...