Elevated views: Sven Hedin’s expeditions and the world from above 1900-1935
The modern era has seen an emergence of technologies for portraying the earth from above. Balloons, aircraft and satellites have literally produced pictures of the whole world. This project explores the emergence of such viewpoints. It investigates the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin’s expeditions to Asia between 1900 and 1935, and contributes to knowledge about how current global visions of the earth from above – e.g. climate models or photographs of the whole planet – have a history preceding the late modern era of globalization. First, the project studies how Hedin constructed elevated views through texts and images. Second, it investigates how elevated views were mediated through techniques of display which portrayed far away places and how they shaped sensory experiences of the world from up high. Third, the aim is to understand the connections between elevated views and turn of the 20th century imperial power. Hedin harboured an imperialistic worldview, but how did that affect his efforts to create visions from above? The project analyzes Hedin’s books, articles, photographs and drawings. It will consist of three case studies: the Mountain, the Panorama and the Aircraft. Taken together they indicate how Hedin climbed higher to create overviews of geographical patterns in nature. The project places the Swedish explorer in broader cultural and scientific currents, where elevated views of earth were pursued.
Final report
The project Elevated Views: Sven Hedin’s Expeditions och the World from Above 1900-1935 has studied the history of a perspective: seeing the Earth from above and as a whole. The project originally aimed to study the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin (1865-1952) and how he created viewpoints in text and images that moved the gaze to high altitudes to produce large geographical patterns, while claiming a scientific understanding of these.
The project was undertaken by starting from a couple of Hedin's most influential books about his trip to Tibet from 1906 to 1909. These were contextualized against a broader history of techniques to create overview. As a result, the project developed empirically by tracing more actors, publications and empirical examples, mainly through secondary literature in the field. I carried out the project through first writing two articles on Hedin's overviews. I then wrote a third article dealing with aerial photography in the interwar period. During the latter half of the project, I also wrote a book manuscript synthesizing the results. The third article as well as the book manuscript outline the longer history of overview.
The main findings are, first, that the overview has been a recurring perspective in the history of Western science and culture. Although it has been given different meanings, it is a repeated viewpoint invested with hopes of specific knowledge. The project's second key finding is that different media formats have shaped and disseminated overviews. The third important finding is that, although the overview has been described as a rational understanding of landscapes, it has also been combined with emotions that have contributed to its meaning and strength.
The project's most substantial publications are the monograph Terranauterna: Drömmar om överblick, to be published by Norstedts (one of the major Swedish publishing houses) in 2023, the article "Lifting off, looking down and flattening out: Interwar airplane photography and cultural techniques of the view from above", the article "Elevation and Emotion: Sven Hedin's Mountain Expedition to Transhimalaya 1906-1908" and the book chapter "Panoramic visions: Sven Hedin in 'Transhimalaya' 1906-1909" (see publication list below).
As already stated, the first important finding of the project is that the overview as a perspective has a long history. It dates back to antiquity, but gained in importance from the 16th and 17th century maps and cosmographies produced by Europeans discovering the “new world”. In the 18th century, the overview became scientific knowledge, mainly through voyages of discovery and mountaineering. A global nature was described, laying the foundations for an understanding of major patterns in nature. In the 19th century, the world as a whole was represented by new media techniques such as georamas. They portrayed a world that was growing and assumed to be more global. Sven Hedin and his travels to the high mountains of Tibet in the early 20th century were therefore part of a longer history, which also continued with new vigor in the 20th century through aerial photography, post-war atlases and space photography. These technologies took man to new and extreme heights, but they also revealed a world that could be seen from many perspectives at once. In the post-war period, overviews also led to ideas about the environment as a crucial and vast natural system. The significance of the overview was transformed. It was now thought to describe man's problematic approach to nature. Finally, the project has shown how overviews have also created notions of the global as a community, as well as dreams of world citizenship.
Overviews have shaped the modern worldview through science, art and media for hundreds of years. It has given people knowledge about nature and society. But it has also been about the quest for domination of the earth and is intimately linked to European imperialism. Overview media have been used with claims to knowledge, but also as public attractions. The project has thus shown how the overview is a recurring but varied theme that also operates in today's discussions on the environment and globalization.
Secondly, the project has used media history to show how different forms of media have influenced and disseminated overview. Sven Hedin was among those who contributed to a broader panoramic media culture at the turn of the 20th century through his images from the highlands of Tibet. These images can be understood through the concept of "intermediality". Media formats such as photography, drawing, watercolor and text together opened up landscapes to the viewer. The formats were descriptive layers that reinforced each other. Through using such descriptive layering, Hedin managed to balance overview and detail so that a summary understanding of the landscape from above became possible. In addition, text and images together helped to transport the view of the landscape from Asia to fascinated audiences in Europe.
Hedin dreamed of using aerial photography. The project has deepened the study of the history and impact of aerial photography, but in a different empirical context, namely articles in The Geographical Journal, Nature, Science, Scientific American and The New York Times. There, aerial photography was described and discussed in the 1920s and 1930s. Overviews were captured from aircraft and in photographs. Aviation was described as a breakthrough that revealed a bird's-eye view previously unattainable. At the same time, aerial photography was incorporated into a longer history of flat representations of the world from above.
This historicization was done through the concept of “flattening” as a “cultural technique”. A cultural technique is an operation that sits between nature and culture and has cultural and epistemological effects. Flattening was an operation to write down the complexity of landscapes on flat paper. It meant turning nature into text and image. In doing so, aerial photography contributed to a long history of transforming three-dimensional landscapes into two-dimensional inscriptions.
Although media such as maps, atlases and photographs varied and emerged in different periods, flattening remained a stable operation over time that also had epistemological effects. It shaped an opportunity to know a multidimensional global terrain as a coherent world, visible in revealing snapshots. The transcription of landscapes contributed to a Western relationship with the earth: the possibility of opening up and presenting large natural phenomena, even the planet itself.
The third key finding of the project is that the overview, perceived as a scientific viewpoint, was also discursively combined with emotions. In his books from his journey to Tibet, Sven Hedin not only contributed to the way geographical science portrayed the earth from above. He also combined a rational overview with emotional experiences of the high altitude. The latter included feelings of vertigo as well as physical experiences of collecting data in Tibet's extreme environment. Hedin's outlook was characterized by a historically specific 'emotional economy' of scientific investigation. His overviews of the world were structured by contextually productive and legitimate emotions. Such scientific emotions spoke to both knowledge production and public fascination. The project has therefore contributed with knowledge about the function of emotions in the history of science.
COLLABORATIONS AND DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS
In addition to five publications (see list of publications), the project’s results have been disseminated through several collaborations, as well as at a number of conferences, workshops and seminars (see list of conference presentations below). In September 2018, I participated in a session on "Verticality in the history of science" at the biannual meeting of European society for the history of science in London. After a workshop in Berlin, the collaboration resulted in a special issue of the history of science journal Centaurus (see publication list).
In addition, I have presented my project at international workshops at Södertörn University and at KTH (see list of conference presentations below). I have also been invited as a key note to two different workshops to talk about the history of knowledge and emotion based on the project. The first, “Emotion Knowledge”, took place in Lund in 2021 and the other, “Sensory and emotional experience”, took place in Zurich in 2020. In addition, I was invited to present the project at a colloquium at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for History of Emotions in Berlin in December 2020. In April 2021, I was also invited to present the project at the History of Technology and Science seminar at Chalmers University of Technology.
Based on the project, I have also been involved in three national collaborative projects. Firstly, the project's first case study, "Panoramic visions" was included in an anthology that was a collaborative project on the concept of "intermediality" at my home department. Through the collaborative work on the volume, my project was thus integrated with research by literary scholars, art historians, theatre scholars and music scholars. Secondly, I have edited a special issue on "History of Feeling" for the journal Lychnos together with historians of ideas from Södertörn and Lund. Thirdly, based on the project, I have also been one of three editors of the anthology “Konsten att kontextualisera”. This was a collaboration with colleagues in History of Ideas at Stockholm University. The book is aimed at students and other interested readers to introduce and discuss how historians work with historical contexts. My chapter discusses how I worked to recontextualize Sven Hedin's voyages of discovery.
The project was undertaken by starting from a couple of Hedin's most influential books about his trip to Tibet from 1906 to 1909. These were contextualized against a broader history of techniques to create overview. As a result, the project developed empirically by tracing more actors, publications and empirical examples, mainly through secondary literature in the field. I carried out the project through first writing two articles on Hedin's overviews. I then wrote a third article dealing with aerial photography in the interwar period. During the latter half of the project, I also wrote a book manuscript synthesizing the results. The third article as well as the book manuscript outline the longer history of overview.
The main findings are, first, that the overview has been a recurring perspective in the history of Western science and culture. Although it has been given different meanings, it is a repeated viewpoint invested with hopes of specific knowledge. The project's second key finding is that different media formats have shaped and disseminated overviews. The third important finding is that, although the overview has been described as a rational understanding of landscapes, it has also been combined with emotions that have contributed to its meaning and strength.
The project's most substantial publications are the monograph Terranauterna: Drömmar om överblick, to be published by Norstedts (one of the major Swedish publishing houses) in 2023, the article "Lifting off, looking down and flattening out: Interwar airplane photography and cultural techniques of the view from above", the article "Elevation and Emotion: Sven Hedin's Mountain Expedition to Transhimalaya 1906-1908" and the book chapter "Panoramic visions: Sven Hedin in 'Transhimalaya' 1906-1909" (see publication list below).
As already stated, the first important finding of the project is that the overview as a perspective has a long history. It dates back to antiquity, but gained in importance from the 16th and 17th century maps and cosmographies produced by Europeans discovering the “new world”. In the 18th century, the overview became scientific knowledge, mainly through voyages of discovery and mountaineering. A global nature was described, laying the foundations for an understanding of major patterns in nature. In the 19th century, the world as a whole was represented by new media techniques such as georamas. They portrayed a world that was growing and assumed to be more global. Sven Hedin and his travels to the high mountains of Tibet in the early 20th century were therefore part of a longer history, which also continued with new vigor in the 20th century through aerial photography, post-war atlases and space photography. These technologies took man to new and extreme heights, but they also revealed a world that could be seen from many perspectives at once. In the post-war period, overviews also led to ideas about the environment as a crucial and vast natural system. The significance of the overview was transformed. It was now thought to describe man's problematic approach to nature. Finally, the project has shown how overviews have also created notions of the global as a community, as well as dreams of world citizenship.
Overviews have shaped the modern worldview through science, art and media for hundreds of years. It has given people knowledge about nature and society. But it has also been about the quest for domination of the earth and is intimately linked to European imperialism. Overview media have been used with claims to knowledge, but also as public attractions. The project has thus shown how the overview is a recurring but varied theme that also operates in today's discussions on the environment and globalization.
Secondly, the project has used media history to show how different forms of media have influenced and disseminated overview. Sven Hedin was among those who contributed to a broader panoramic media culture at the turn of the 20th century through his images from the highlands of Tibet. These images can be understood through the concept of "intermediality". Media formats such as photography, drawing, watercolor and text together opened up landscapes to the viewer. The formats were descriptive layers that reinforced each other. Through using such descriptive layering, Hedin managed to balance overview and detail so that a summary understanding of the landscape from above became possible. In addition, text and images together helped to transport the view of the landscape from Asia to fascinated audiences in Europe.
Hedin dreamed of using aerial photography. The project has deepened the study of the history and impact of aerial photography, but in a different empirical context, namely articles in The Geographical Journal, Nature, Science, Scientific American and The New York Times. There, aerial photography was described and discussed in the 1920s and 1930s. Overviews were captured from aircraft and in photographs. Aviation was described as a breakthrough that revealed a bird's-eye view previously unattainable. At the same time, aerial photography was incorporated into a longer history of flat representations of the world from above.
This historicization was done through the concept of “flattening” as a “cultural technique”. A cultural technique is an operation that sits between nature and culture and has cultural and epistemological effects. Flattening was an operation to write down the complexity of landscapes on flat paper. It meant turning nature into text and image. In doing so, aerial photography contributed to a long history of transforming three-dimensional landscapes into two-dimensional inscriptions.
Although media such as maps, atlases and photographs varied and emerged in different periods, flattening remained a stable operation over time that also had epistemological effects. It shaped an opportunity to know a multidimensional global terrain as a coherent world, visible in revealing snapshots. The transcription of landscapes contributed to a Western relationship with the earth: the possibility of opening up and presenting large natural phenomena, even the planet itself.
The third key finding of the project is that the overview, perceived as a scientific viewpoint, was also discursively combined with emotions. In his books from his journey to Tibet, Sven Hedin not only contributed to the way geographical science portrayed the earth from above. He also combined a rational overview with emotional experiences of the high altitude. The latter included feelings of vertigo as well as physical experiences of collecting data in Tibet's extreme environment. Hedin's outlook was characterized by a historically specific 'emotional economy' of scientific investigation. His overviews of the world were structured by contextually productive and legitimate emotions. Such scientific emotions spoke to both knowledge production and public fascination. The project has therefore contributed with knowledge about the function of emotions in the history of science.
COLLABORATIONS AND DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS
In addition to five publications (see list of publications), the project’s results have been disseminated through several collaborations, as well as at a number of conferences, workshops and seminars (see list of conference presentations below). In September 2018, I participated in a session on "Verticality in the history of science" at the biannual meeting of European society for the history of science in London. After a workshop in Berlin, the collaboration resulted in a special issue of the history of science journal Centaurus (see publication list).
In addition, I have presented my project at international workshops at Södertörn University and at KTH (see list of conference presentations below). I have also been invited as a key note to two different workshops to talk about the history of knowledge and emotion based on the project. The first, “Emotion Knowledge”, took place in Lund in 2021 and the other, “Sensory and emotional experience”, took place in Zurich in 2020. In addition, I was invited to present the project at a colloquium at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for History of Emotions in Berlin in December 2020. In April 2021, I was also invited to present the project at the History of Technology and Science seminar at Chalmers University of Technology.
Based on the project, I have also been involved in three national collaborative projects. Firstly, the project's first case study, "Panoramic visions" was included in an anthology that was a collaborative project on the concept of "intermediality" at my home department. Through the collaborative work on the volume, my project was thus integrated with research by literary scholars, art historians, theatre scholars and music scholars. Secondly, I have edited a special issue on "History of Feeling" for the journal Lychnos together with historians of ideas from Södertörn and Lund. Thirdly, based on the project, I have also been one of three editors of the anthology “Konsten att kontextualisera”. This was a collaboration with colleagues in History of Ideas at Stockholm University. The book is aimed at students and other interested readers to introduce and discuss how historians work with historical contexts. My chapter discusses how I worked to recontextualize Sven Hedin's voyages of discovery.