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 The Exotic |
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The horrors of abroad, of strange cultures, of people whose language you do not understand... together with the splendour of superb architecture and views you have never seen before... exotism. Nowadays it is possible to fly to the other end of the world within 24 hours, communication technics make it possible to chat with someone from anywhere on earth without delay, moving pictures take us in full colour to any place we virtually want to be. In every cosmopolitan city you can meet people from all over the world. The exotic has been tamed to the taste of Chinese take away food (1). The world was not always this small, I realised as I roamed through Seville. There was a time it took two or three days to travel from Amsterdam to Brussels - by steam train and steamboat. Seville could have taken months, and then, you had to go back again, too. Many people never left their home town, or only visited the next city when necessary. Abroad was a long way away, exotic cultures where unknown in real life to the common people. All they knew where stories, maybe some pictures, the real exotism stayed unknown. And what is unknown, can be quite disturbing, horrifying at times. In the 19th century you could travel to America by boat, but only few had the money to visit their homeland again, or to pop over for a cup of tea with a befriended emigrant. There were of course the colonies, where people could safely live out their own traditional Victorian culture in an exotic setting among the aboriginals. Not many foreigners travelled through the worlds lands, and if, they would be exotic and gazed upon as something strange. Travelling into strange lands costed money and time and a whole lot of courage. No Lonely Planet Guide to tell you where to go and what to do and how to behave (although there have been travel guides for centuries, but how to get hold on one that is accurate and covers the all places you would travel to?). You'd better find a human guide who could double as a translator if you'd like to enjoy the exotic things you would meet on your journey. The horror of strange cultures, the claustrophobic fear of being somewhere where you are not able to communicate with the locals in a civilised way (and to have to drop your dignity and talk with hands and feet), the pains to go through while trying to stay "gentlemanly" in a culture whose rules you don't understand is something I miss in many historic settings. Of course, in colonies the gentleman is the superior lord and master (well, directly after God and the Queen in most cases) of the surroundings and can act as he likes to. But in the tents of an Arabian prince, in the court of a Turkish sultan, in the palace of a Czar, it has to be different. Not to mention the even more exotic outskirts of the world. And, if you come from places that are my exotic, how exotic can Europe be? And if Steampunk technics make a world smaller, and the exotic comes nearer, what will be the effect on the exotic cultures? Will they somehow blend or blur with normal cultures? I would be interested in that... I see that technics has changed our world and our view to the exotic, how would that be in a Steampunk setting, and will the gothic horror of the unknown stay intact? © Yaghish 2003
Remarks: (1) I've got nothing bad to say about Chinese food (I like it), but most people I know have a drooling Pavlov reaction on the word "exotic" to the cuisines of various cultures. Their knowledge (in positive therms) of foreign lands does not go beyond the knowledge of food, anything else they know about the foreigners is that they are quite barbaric, unhygienic and uncivilised  |
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