Orientalist knowledge from the margins: The colonial entanglement of nineteenth-century Hungarian research on Inner Asia (original) (raw)

We do not have seas, nor colonies overseas where we could send scientific expeditions to expand the circle of universal science' , admitted Ferenc Toldy, the secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1842. 1 Yet he continued confidently, suggesting that Hungarians can compensate for their lack of overseas territories and trade networks because the 'only frontier where we, and we alone, can hope to make discoveries is the question of our origins and our linguistic kin. And instead of waiting-and waiting in vain-for foreigners, we must act ourselves. ' 2 Using such rousing rhetoric, Toldy was petitioning the Academy to provide financial support for the travels of Antal Reguly, a young orientalist scholar residing in Saint Petersburg at that time, hoping to do fieldwork among the Finno-Ugric peoples beyond the Ural Mountains (see Figure 8.1). 3 Toldy's argumentation illustrates how, due to the marginal and subordinate position of Hungarians in relation to imperial powers throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, the numerous Hungarian expeditions to the 'East' were conceived as being exceptional. Because these endeavours were regularly justified and funded as quests to find kin languages and the nation's prehistoric origins in Eurasia, orientalist projects were presented as national scientific missions with no colonial affiliations and no commercial interests attached. According to this position, still predominant today, Hungarian traveller-scholars engaged in a unique form of 'fraternal Orientalism'. This meant that they were not aiming to locate and rule over a radically different Asian 'Other' , but to identify and celebrate peoples seen as constitutive parts of the national 'Self '. Moreover, Toldy's rhetoric also points to the emancipatory aspect of Hungarian orientalist projects that repeatedly aimed disprove the essentializing discourses and denigrating taxonomies emanating from Western centres towards the margins of Europe. However, a closer look at the discourse and practice of Hungarian orientalist scholarship shows that-save, perhaps, for its self-perception and self-presentationthe field was neither fundamentally different, nor detached from the colonial world. Reguly, seen today as one of the forerunners of Hungarian ethnology and Finno-Ugric