Oman from exploration to tourism: the images of the country in early travellers’ tales, travelogues and travel brochures (1838-2001)

This thesis uses early travel accounts (1838-1959), travelogues (1996-2001) and travel brochures (2001) to investigate the image of Oman and its people in British travel texts. Although there have been a number of imagery studies within the field of tourism over the last two decades, they have been recently criticised by Gallarza et al. (2002) for their lack of theoretical orientation. This thesis is intended to be a modest step in addressing this criticism by re-appraising Said's well known work on Orientalism (1978) and works that foreshadowed it, by testing their political, theoretical and polemical propositions against detailed evidence to be found in case study evidence derived from close analysis of English texts on one country; Oman. The thesis investigates the extent to which these texts confirm/disconfirm Said's predominantly critical evaluation of Western (particularly British and French) representations of the east through the construct he calls 'Orientalism'. Through exploration of the imagery attached to Oman, this analysis is intended to contribute to the wider "Othering" debate in suggesting how people of a developing country are defined and gendered by people from developed ones. The thesis, which is based on three genres of travel texts, suggests a much more complex picture of the mechanisms of representations than Said (1978) suggests, showing, for example, that each textual category (travel book, travelogue, and brochure) had its own distinguishing variations in terms of ideological perspective, mode of address and substantive content. For example, political and imperial discourses were widely present in early travel accounts, while, by contrast, travelogue and travel brochure data were more constituted by discourses of consumerism and commerce, with residual I'olitical and imperial traces either silenced, muted or reconstituted as forms of nostalgia, or a depoliticised, sometimes, aestheticised, historic heritage. Moreover, although some early accounts contain negative denotations and connotations relating to Oman and its people that would support Said's broadly critical deconstruction of "Orientalism" as an ideological mechanism of control and appropriation, all three media representations, historical travel texts included, were far from presenting a uniform, or even predominant construction of Oman and its people that would support Said's critique. In two contextual chapters, this thesis appraIses historical encounters between Omanis and Westerns with focus on the British and Omani relationship, and offers an overview ofthe development of tourism in Oman. On the methodological front, the study is unusual as an investigation that combines inductive with deductive approaches, quantitative content analysis with qualitative semiotic analysis. Content analysis was used to examine the images of Oman reproduced in the three media. The quantitative findings were analysed qualitatively by using semiotic analysis to explore and interpret the meanings behind the quantitative results

Forms of Global Health

My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between both representational modes, where metaphors for space work with microbial notions of contagion to define disease and shape policy. Reading for such complicity, I argue, recasts tropical medicine as a confluence of scientific and literary traditions. It also complicates contemporary notions of medical literature developed after World War II, the birth of the World Health Organization, decolonization and the emergence of global health, and it enables the field of literary studies to enter into debates about the ethics of public health endeavors from a vantage point unique to the study of representations of disease

A Study and Analysis of the Bible Lands Travelogue-Archaeological Approach in Public Evangelism

To investigate the method of a selected number of evangelists who are using the Bible lands travelogue-archaeological approach, to ascertain what they consider as the most significant and seemingly effective characteristics of their methods was the purpose of this project. Then, incorporating these findings, to develop an approach that may help the author and other evangelists to use this method effectively in public evangelism, has been the problem under investigation in this study. The project was organized into three main parts. The first searches for a justification for a Bible lands travelogue approach. The second analyzes the method as it is being used by other evangelists and reports on the answers to a questionnaire administered to a sample group of them. The third part deals with the strategies/ methods, and techniques suggested by the author for the use of this evangelistic approach. The information provided by other evangelists who use this method suggests that part of the strength of this approach—its usefulness to attract large audiences—is lost as far as number of accessions to the church is concerned, when Bible lands travelogue and archaeology are used primarily to attract people. Based on his own experience, the author suggests an approach that makes Bible lands archaeology and travelogue an integral part of the nightly program throughout the crusade, linking in a natural way Biblical archaeology and geography with Christian doctrine

It’s not all about the music:online fan communities and collecting Hard Rock Café pins

Previous studies of music fan culture have largely centered on the diverse range of subcultures devoted to particular genres, groups, and stars. Where studies have moved beyond the actual music and examined the fashion, concerts, and collecting ephemera such as vinyl records and posters, they have tended to remain closely allied to notions of subcultural distinction, emphasizing hierarchies of taste. This paper shifts the focus in music fan studies beyond the appreciation of the music and discusses the popular fan practice of collecting souvenir pins produced and sold by the Hard Rock Café (HRC) within a framework of fan tourism. Traveling to and collecting unique pins from locations across the globe creates a fan dialogue that centers on tourism and the collecting practices associated with souvenir consumption. Collectors engage in practices such as blogging, travel writing, and administration that become important indicators of their particular expression of fandom: pin collecting. Membership requires both time and money; recording visits around the world and collecting unique pins from every café builds fans' cultural capital. This indicates an internationalization of popular fandom, with the Internet acting as a connective virtual space between local and national, personal and public physical space. The study of HRC pin collecting and its fan community suggests that HRC enthusiasts are not so because they enjoy rock music or follow any particular artist but due to the physical ephemera that they collect and the places and spaces they visit

Growing up and growing old with television: peripheral viewers and the centrality of care

This essay draws on feminist work on the ethics of care to both (re)establish an alliance between the very young and the very old and to begin to challenge the normative models of subjectivity and spectatorship that circulate within film and television studies. Through textual experiences of time and space and the operations of care, we emphasize the reciprocity and interdependence between generations. This recognition, we argue, offers a new mode of engagement with the challenges of ‘growing up’ and ‘growing old’ on and with television. In our alignment of older and younger audiences we challenge the normative chain of associations where ageing is represented as growth, and growth is associated with development. For the child, this model appears unproblematic even inevitable: ageing = growth = development. In contrast, ageing for older individuals is associated not with growth and development but with decline. A positive alignment between childhood and old age may offer an understanding of this motion (between the status, capacity and experience of child and older adult) as continuous, as an oscillation that is often made evident in the interdependence between child and adult. This, we believe, is mirrored in certain textual and experiential characteristics of television, and we explore it through close textual analysis of children’s programmes Katie Morag, Old Jack’s Boat and Mr Alzheimer’s and Me. These are programmes that not only offer representations of caring intergenerational relationships (of grandchild and grandparent) but express, in their seaside locations, an ebb and flow that is mapped onto experiences of both television and of intergenerational care

Seeing sense: the visual culture of provincial Ireland 1896-1906

The objective of this research is to examine what is meant by visual culture in the context of provincial Ireland between 1896 and 1906 and the argue for a particular conception of its meaning, range and influence. This study defines visual culture in terms of the interaction between viewer and viewed, recognising the complex interplay between the images produced and circulated within a culture, the viewing apparatus(es) by which such images are made available and the cultural consciousness, competences and preferences which accompany and influence our viewing experiences. By surveying the reception of Magic Lantern and Cinematograph entertainments in rural Ireland between 1896 and 1906, it becomes possible to suggest a distinction between historically and culturally grounded ‘ways of seeing 5. In presenting evidence of a complex of receptive patterns, it is argued that the exhibition and reception of such media in conjunction with cultural repertoires and ideological influence forms the basis from which the era’s visual culture can be described and mapped