Bodies Real and Virtual: Joseph Rock and Enrico Caruso in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

In the early 20th century, botanist Joseph Rock spent 28 years wandering West China, accompanied, much of the time, by thirteen men from one small village in Northwest Yunnan Province. In this talk, I take up Rock’s wanderings as part of a larger inquiry into the seam between archive and experience in the botanical exploration of West China. What specific processes translate from experience to archive and vice versa? How are particular social relations fed as walking is rendered into diaries, plants into specimens, observations into route surveys, glimpses into photographs? In Rock’s case, these processes were mediated by the twin technologies of camera and gramophone. In this talk I follow Rock through West China, as he struggled to transform a landscape he found unbearable (engulfed in slime) into a habitable place by using these two technologies to replace his eyes and his voice in efforts to reshape social relations.