Porosity, agency and religious gazes in British travel accounts of the long nineteenth century

This interdisciplinary study applies insights from the ‘new materialisms’ and related ideas from assemblage theory, Actor-Network Theory, Entanglement theory, ecological and cognitive psychology, and anthropology, with the ‘material turn’ in religious studies, to the study of British travel writing in the long nineteenth century. Religion and theories of the object offer a fertile but underdeveloped field for scholarship of travel literature. Religion structured the lifeworlds of travellers and the people they met, complicating the hegemony of colonial and tourist gazes, yet has not had the scholarly prominence it warrants. This thesis shows the embodied and interpersonal operation of religious gazes, and the agency of religious objects in events of travel. A ‘flat ontology’, placing the human and nonhuman, the material and discursive, on the same plane of agency, shows agency in events of travel to be emergent, distributed and intersubjective. While considering a range of accounts of travel, the thesis gives extended analyses of six British travellers’ published accounts of travel to Abyssinia, Persia and Japan, countries free from formal European imperial control. The thesis deconstructs ‘the traveller’, as a social being, into an ‘assemblage’ of co-opted human and nonhuman agents. The traveller is ‘porous’ to the travel environment and ‘extended’ into it. The travel account, as a networked textual object, mediates the traveller and other agents in the event of travel. Building on these foundations, the thesis examines the traveller’s religious gaze, constituted both by the traveller’s disposition to see and their visual behaviour as they encountered religious spaces, events, declarations, rituals, objects, and persons (human and supernatural) in different bodily, affective, social and cognitive configurations. ‘Religious’ entities – now including amuletic scrolls, the Bible, Providence and sorcery – exercised agency in events of travel, and left their traces in accounts of it, through complex entanglements with the traveller’s subjectivity.