Among the dissenters: reciprocal ethnography in nineteenth-century Inglistan

The emergence of ‘fieldwork’ as a technique for gathering knowledge was part of a reciprocal process of two-way observation between Europeans and Asians. The methods of language-learning, cultural immersion, and note-taking that were eventually canonized in the discipline of anthropology were no more unique to Europeans than the writing of the learned travelogues through which they first found expression. In the early nineteenth century, Asian travellers were observing and taking notes on the English at home as part of a reciprocal pattern of exchanges made possible by the new commercial and diplomatic contacts of the age. This thesis is demonstrated by using the Persian travel diary made by an Iranian ‘fieldworker’ to reconstruct in detail the methods and conditions of his ‘ethnographic’ tour of the English West Country in 1818. In the reversal of a familiar trope of European ethnography, the diary described meetings with the ‘sects’ and ‘mystics’ of the English provinces in the very same years that saw the first English accounts of Persia religiosa. Using numerous contemporary English sources to build on the Persian field diary, the article reveals the multiple patterns of reciprocity by which knowledge was gained through a ‘scientific’ epistemology of observation and experience. From Unitarianism to Baha’ism, the collaborative knowledge so created led to changing intellectual attitudes among both European and Asian scholar-travellers. The well informed of all denominations are the most liberal.(W. J. Fox, A sermon on free inquiry in matters of religion, 1815)