Tactile Vision and Othering: Ethnographic Engagements and Racial Differentiations in 19th Century Travelogues

Abstract

The transmission, emergence, and dissemination of features of racial differentiation are based on the interplay of different sensory perceptions, as this contribution will illustrate. For this purpose, examples from ethnographic travelogues from German East Africa and from the time of German colonial rule were selected to examine the functioning of tactile perception by means of the descriptions of skin colors and skin decorations. The source material reveals multisensuality in the form of synesthesia of the sense of sight with the sense of touch, in that the perception of tactile stimuli is determined less by direct touch and more by the visual representation of haptic properties.