Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet, University of California Press, Berkeley 2011, 376 pages, $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper ISBN 978-0-520-26902-6 (cloth), 978-0-520-26903-3 (paper).

See Emily Yeh's most recent Society & Space contributions: Exile Meets Homeland: Politics, Performance, and Authenticity in the Tibetan Diaspora

The earth as a book: this is the ancient metaphor that animates The Paper Road, anthropologist Erik Mueggler’s majestic meditation upon the earth as a living, social, creative process.  Through stories of encounters and relationships between two Western botanists and two generations of Naxi men from the village of Nvlvk’ö in southwest China spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Mueggler contemplates how experiences become archives, and archives order experience. Put another way, he traces how different human bodies move over the earth, and how their perceptions are translated into the movement of pen over paper, shaping further encounters with the earth.  In the unfolding of multiple densely interwoven stories, Mueggler offers insights on everything from racial rules of empire to landscape to the phenomenology of the body as a worldly thing, unsettling accepted scholarly arguments about the imperial gaze, representation, and the role of the camera. At the same time, the astonishing scope of The Paper Road encompasses the history of conquest of the Mu empire, leading to the distribution of Naxi people in today’s northwest Yunnan province; the textual practices and pictographs of dongba, Naxi ritual specialists; and local histories of conflict and trade between Chinese Muslims and Tibetans in Amdo, or then-Gansu province, as they affected the violent and chaotic Republican period. Indeed, it is difficult to do justice in a short review to the lyrical erudition of The Paper Road, as complexly layered as the processes it describes.

Part One traces the collaboration of the Scottish botanical explorer George Forrest with a group of twenty-five or so men from Nvlvk’ö, led by Zhao Chengzhang, whom Mueggler calls “likely the most prolific Western botanical explorer of the early twentieth century” (page 8) for his unacknowledged role in the European cataloguing of world fauna that accompanied the consolidation of colonial empires.  The narrative arcs around the encounter of two “archival regimes” – two sets of rules, habits, and ideologies of seeing, walking, writing, collecting, organizing, reading, and transferring perceptions to paper: that of the British Empire, shaping Forrest’s explorations, and that of dongba texts, with which Mueggler argues the Nvlvk’ö men would have been deeply familiar.  Without the benefit of anything written by these Nvlvk’ö collectors and given Forrest’s erasure of their presence, Mueggler reads Forrest’s botanical reports and photographs against dongba texts to speculate on how the latter may have shaped the former’s botanical project, particularly his quixotic search for what he believed to be generative center of Rhododendron. Though he did not seem to realize it, Forrest’s enterprise was deeply shaped by the Naxi collectors, for whom the landscape was animated by ancestral journeys, place names, and histories invisible to Forrest.

Mueggler is not the first to explore the relationship between western botanists and local people, or to show how local knowledge has transformed Western botany while being written out of history.  What is unique about Mueggler’s account is his argument that any communication that did occur between these distinct archival regimes was enabled only through indexical processes in which the earth was a third party, to which the others constantly pointed, gestured, and referred. Moreover, to the extent they converged, they did so through affect.  Their ground of agreement was not meaning but rather “a kind of longing, which ‘meant’ different things in each case, but which…took its qualities from the dramatic and unavoidable material qualities of the earth” (page 146). Through its forceful shaping of the way it is perceived, setting the grounds for affective relations, the earth exerts social agency. This is another way of expressing the rather more clunky language of more-than-human geographies and non-representational theory.

Interwoven within this narrative are many others, about dongba writing and its approach to the landscape, as well as the theme of the gaze, to which Part Two returns.  Forrest could not stand to be “gaped” at, and it was because Naxi found staring impolite that Forrest was able to work with them.   That is, Forrest was acutely and painfully aware not only of his own vision but also of the gaze of others upon his body.  Thus, Mueggler argues, literature about the imperial gaze is problematic insofar as it assumes that vision could be “that of a sovereign master of two eyes, surveying the world and rendering it as representation” rather than being always embedded within “social fields of vision, composed of intersections of multiple pairs of eyes” (page 60). At the edges of empire, he suggests, the distance between the ideology of imperial vision and its actuality is clarified.

Part Two continues the theme of vision with a sustained exploration of American botanist Joseph Rock’s use of photography, which Mueggler suggests was his tool for negotiating a bearable relationship between himself and the world.   Soon after arriving in China, he met Forrest, who introduced him to Nvlvk’ö.  There, he hired sons and nephews of those who had worked with Forrest, and with them explored southwest China, including the kingdom of Muli in southern Kham, as well as much of the Tibetan area of Amdo.  Reading Rock’s extensive corpus of diaries and notes, Mueggler finds that Rock was obsessed with mucus and bodily filth, and found “having a body, moving through the world, seeing it, being seen in it…almost unbearable” (page 159). To deal with this, Rock replaced himself with the disembodied, virtual eye of his camera, staging his photographic subjects as specimens, producing a world of pure surfaces.  Despite his racism, his oddness, his need to control the eyes and silence the voices of others, Mueggler finds a sympathetic side to Rock in his sensitivity to the abject, whether in tending to dying victims in the war-torn regions in which he traveled, or insisting that prisoners he discovered in the kingdom of Muli have their chains and headboards removed.

The years of Rock’s adventures with his Nvlvk’ö “boys,” as he called them, were in Mueggler’s account a fitting lead-up to the labors that filled the second half of his life: the collection and translation of dongba texts that produced his “unreadable” “strange masterpieces,” Na-Khi Naga Cults, Ancient Na-Khi Kingdom of Southwest China and the Na-khi-English Encyclopedic Dictionary. As he began to study and try to understand dongba texts, Rock discovered that the landscapes he had traveled were densely layered with place names that indexed genealogies, routes, and stories. Like the dongba texts, which were not to be approached as “meaning” but rather through their recitation, Rock’s own prose became routes of place names, a way of moving over the landscape rather than meaningful narrative meant to be read (page 279). Ultimately, Mueggler states, Rock’s idiosyncrasies are worth paying attention to because of the way in which he made himself, and the others he enrolled in his project, “vehicle[s] for this open, moving, living process of using bodies and their technological extensions to generate words, images, lines, and texts from the earth; of folding them back into the earth; of making them part of the shape of the earth that is experienced by other bodies, other eyes and cameras, ears and pens” (page 290).  Landscape, this narrative imaginatively demonstrates, is an agentive, social process.

Rock had no use for latitude and longitude in the maps that he made, making them impossible to coordinate with existing maps.  Whether for this reason or some other, The Paper Road has no conventional maps.  I found myself wishing for one to orient some of the many place names covered, Rock’s understanding of “meaningless proper names” as “the foundational form of the earth’s textuality” (page 280) notwithstanding.  Occasionally, too, I wished Mueggler had elaborated further upon his evidence and his conceptual connections, as for example when he suggests parallels between the geographical botany of the first half of the twentieth century and current scientific investigations of the effects of climate change through fossil fuel burning (page 35).  These wishes in no way detract from the fact that The Paper Road is an absolutely captivating read.