Fata morgana have long astonished travellers, and “waterless seas” have beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Complex cultural histories long predate the first English usage of the term “mirage” in 1800. Chinese and Japanese poetry and images depicted fata morgana as exhalations of clam-monsters, whereas Arab, Persian and Indian sources related “inferior” mirages to the “thirst of gazelles”, a metaphor for the nullity of desire. Mirages have been observed wherever there have been sufficient temperature gradients to generate the necessary refraction. This talk will focus chiefly on eastern or “Oriental” mirages that frequently conjoin the desert, Islam and the Ottoman Empire. These emblematize the antithesis of Tocquevillean “spectatorial democracy” in which politics was positively correlated with transparency. Islam exemplified an occlusion of which the mirage became a negative, but also enchanted, emblem (on first seeing the Kaaba in Mecca Richard Burton refers to “the mirage medium of Fancy”). The conclusion explores the way in which recent fata morgana (eg ones seen in Guangdong in 2015) feed into modern conspiracy theories which repeat the clash between “spectatorial democracy” and its occluded other. Finally, the philosophical importance of mirages, which are “real” but not “true”, is explored.
Christopher Pinney is an anthropologist and art historian. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. Pinney's research has a strong geographic focus in central India: initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-resident factory workers. Subsequently he researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. He is currently interested in cultural spaces which conventional social theory has tended to neglect: “more than local and less than global”, and spaces of cultural flow that elude the west.
The Jour Fixe is a regular event of the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" held two times during each semester. It is organised by the four research areas of the Cluster and their speakers Prof. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos (Area A), Prof. Christiane Brosius (Area B), Prof. Joachim Kurtz (Area C), and Prof. Monica Juneja (Area D).
Visit the Jour Fixe website for more information.