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CHAPTER 2

Subjective Beginnings

Autoethnography and the Partial Gazes of Gerald of Wales

The earliest ethnography of Europe emerged from its borders, particularly as they underwent expansion in the twelfth century. Representative texts of such “border ethnography” include Adam of Bremen’s account of Baltic peoples, and his continuator Helmold’s description of Slavic customs, as well as a proliferation of texts about Britain’s natives, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots, viewed by Anglo-Normans coming into contact with them along Britain’s Celtic periphery. Gerald of Wales stands as the most important of these ethnographic border writers of the Celtic periphery, and among the most important ethnographers of the medieval period.

Gerald wrote his four Celtic works in the span of less than a decade, from the Topographia Hibernica (The topography of Ireland) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (The conquest of Ireland) in 1188 to the Itinerarium Kambriae (The journey through Wales) in 1191, to the Descriptio Kambriae (The description of Wales) in 1194. While Gerald called these his “minor works,” and felt the need to defend his choice to expend “the flowers of my rhetoric” on “those rugged countries, Ireland, Wales and Britain,”¹ his Celtic works have in fact attracted more scholarly attention than any of his other writings. The Journey through Wales and the Topography of Ireland, in particular, have been the subject of numerous recent scholarly treatments, many of them interested in Gerald’s construction of medieval Welsh and Irish identity and ethnicity at a time of pressing Anglo-Norman colonial incursion into the Celtic periphery.

But it is with the Descriptio Kambriae that Gerald managed the striking feat of reviving the classical genre of ethnography, a work devoted centrally in theme to the description of the life and customs of a single people, for the medieval period. Gerald begins his Description of Wales much as he did his earlier Celtic treatise, the Topographia Hibernica, with a physical description of the contours of the land, a move traceable within British historiographical tradition as far back as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and, of course, earlier still within Gerald’s classical sources like Caesar’s Gallic War. What comes next is far more innovative: in chapter 8 of book 1 of the Descriptio, Gerald turns his attention to the “natura, moribus, et cultu”—or nature, manners, and customs—of the Welsh people, and sustains that focus on Welsh manners and customs for the remainder of his treatise.² Writing without direct access to the major works of classical ethnography and anthropology such as Herodotus’s Histories, Tacitus’s Germania (also known as On the Origin, Location, Customs and Peoples of the Germans) (c. a.d. 98) or Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Gerald nevertheless manages to reproduce in the Descriptio a form of writing not seen in the West for over a thousand years, the ethnographic monograph.³

We can tell Gerald thought that he was doing something new from his strain, also visible in the report of William of Rubruck, for adequate words to describe his task. In attempting to define his relation to his project and to the Welsh, Gerald works by way of metaphor. In the introduction to book 2 of the Descriptio, he likens himself to a historian, noting that he writes the Descriptio “more historico” (in the manner of a historian), a key methodological passage to which I will turn at the end of the chapter. And in the “First Preface” as well as again in the introduction to book 2, Gerald likens himself to a master pictor or painter, turning to the visual arts to capture the relation between himself and his object. In titling his work a “descriptio,” Gerald is, of course, already invoking the visual arts. Indeed, the Descriptio Kambriae forms part of the rise in visual empiricism generally in the twelfth century. Evidence for such a “visual turn” has been found particularly in the cultural production of twelfth-century Anglo-Normans, including the Normans’ use of visual evidence as “witness” to hereditary claims to land; the writing of social and natural histories supported by eyewitnessing claims; the proliferation of new genres of observation such as topographies of castles, towns, and cities, and descriptions of social customs of local inhabitants; a heightened use of character sketches, anecdotes, and trivial detail in history writing; and a rise in naturalist illustrations and illuminations of plants, animals, and birds.⁴

If Gerald himself was at the forefront of a general visual turn in twelfth-century cultural production,⁵ there is no contemporary analogue for the extent and scope of his ethnographic achievement in the Descriptio Kambriae. His Topographia Hibernica, which prepared the way for the Descriptio, mixed history and myth with ethnographic description.⁶ Other ethnographic endeavors of the twelfth century appeared as short excurses within long historical chronicles, as was the case with Otto of Freising’s contemporary description of the Magyars in the Gesta Frederici and the ethnographic excurses on Celtic life and customs in works by William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, and the author of the Gesta Stephani. What, then, explains the way in which the Descriptio Kambriae emerged seemingly ex nihilo as a full-blown ethnographic monograph?

Historical examination and contextualization rarely support the emergence of novelty ex nihilo, and the case of Gerald’s literary production is no exception. In this chapter, I turn to the context in which Gerald wrote in order to argue that the Descriptio Kambriae was an improvised, textual response to the perceived threat of cultural loss of traditional Welsh byways, a work designed to salvage a contemporary snapshot of “Kambriae nostrae,” his “own Wales.”⁷ In writing the Descriptio, Gerald was enacting an early form of “salvage anthropology,” the salvaging of native materials against the losses born of colonial incursion.⁸ The Descriptio stands, as such, as an example of the improvised novelty of cultural production in “contact zones,” spaces of dynamic, uneasy, and often asymmetrical colonial encounters that allow for new, dialogically derived cultural understandings and subjectivities.⁹ Gerald’s own hybrid identity is, of course, itself a product of the contact zone of the Celtic periphery, namely South Wales, which underwent steady Norman infringement throughout the twelfth century. The grandson of the Welsh princess Nest and the Norman Gerald of Windsor, Gerald is at once Norman and Welsh, a Cambro-Norman by-product of the Norman colonial project in Wales and especially its marcher borderlands in the South.

But Gerald’s ethnography is as hybrid as his person, and as such is irreducible to a single language or function, even the striking one of salvage work. Instead, in its duality of languages, functions, and even audiences, I argue, the Descriptio may be viewed as an early form of “autoethnography” as theorized by Mary Louise Pratt: a native ethnographic self-description in dialogue with metropolitan representations of that self in ways that intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic texts are, importantly, not “autochthonous or ‘authentic’ forms of representation”; rather, they are hybrid documents featuring “a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or conqueror… merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms.”¹⁰ The Descriptio’s ambivalent mixture of two contradictory languages—the one Anglo-Norman, the other Welsh—each aware of and responding to the other, I argue, ultimately undermines the stability of metropolitan or colonial viewpoints. Finally, in addition to being “bilingual,” the Descriptio is scrupulously bifocal: it is twice interrupted in order that its author may approach his object of study from an opposing gaze. In what follows, I examine the implications of this duality of discourses and gazes for Gerald’s ethnography of the Welsh, and for medieval ethnographic poetics generally.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND DOUBLED DISCOURSE IN THE DESCRIPTIO KAMBRIAE

In keeping with the connections between ethnography and the description of cultural practices marked as alien from those of the writer and audience, Gerald opens his description of the Welsh thus:¹¹ “Kambriae nostrae descriptionem, gentisque naturam, aliis alienam nationibus et valde diversam, hoc opusculo declarare” (I now propose, in this short treatise, to write a Description of Wales, my own country, and to describe the Welsh people, who are so very different from other nations) (“First Preface,” 211). Already Gerald’s signature ambivalence becomes visible: the grandson of Nest in one breath authorizes his decision to write a descriptio of the Welsh on the basis of its being “nostra” and declares the Welsh utterly different from other peoples, “aliis alienam nationibus et valde diversam.” The components of Welsh—and, nearly always simultaneously, Irish¹²—“alienness” that follow are largely shaped by the developmental anthropology of his day, according to which difference was measured by the yardstick of distance from Anglo-Norman norms (see Chapter 1). But as I show below, the Descriptio Kambriae’s participation in the distinctly colonial idiom of developmental anthropology is disrupted and offset by its selective appropriation of powerfully resonant native Welsh themes, so doubling its languages and functions.

Anglo-Norman discourses on Welsh incivility or savagery are prominently voiced in Gerald’s ethnography of the Welsh, whether he is considering their “good points” in book 1 or their “less good points” in book 2. Gerald wastes little time in getting to a depiction of Welsh incivility in the Descriptio: to his initial announcement of subject matter, the mores of the Welsh, is appended “Et primo de audacia ejusdem, agilitate, et animositate” (Their boldness, agility and courage). Welsh boldness and agility easily shade into excessiveness and ferocity in what follows: the Welsh are, Gerald declares, a “gens armis dedita tota” (an entire people trained in war) (1.8); they are “Vindicis enim animi sunt, et irae cruentae” (vindictive by nature, bloodthirsty and violent) (1.17). Gerald here follows the barbarian script: an inexplicable ferocity is a fixed feature of Celtic difference and of “barbarians” wherever twelfth-century German and French writers—among them Otto of Freising, Adam of Bremen, Gunther of Pairis, Helmold, the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani, William of Newburgh, William of Malmesbury, Gervase of Tilbery, and Gerald of Wales—came into contact with them.¹³

Economic life takes a central place in delineating civil societies from savage ones according to classical developmental anthropology. Gerald clearly has in mind this model, made available to him from Lucretius via Cicero, when he writes of Welsh industry thus: “Totus propemodum populus armentis pascitur et avenis, lacte, caseo, et butyro. Carne plenius, pane parcius vesci solent. Non mercimoniis, non navigiis, non mechanicis artibus, nec ullo prorsus nisi martio labore vexantur” (In this way the whole population lives almost entirely on oats and the produce of their herds, milk, cheese and butter. They eat plenty of meat, little bread. They pay no attention to commerce, shipping or industry, and their only preoccupation is military training) (1.8). The eating of milk and meat rather than bread is shorthand for the presence of pastoral economies according to the developmental account of civility, where it occupies a middle space between complete savagery and urban civility, here marked by Gerald through the technologies of “commerce, shipping, or industry.” Gerald sketches the logic and stages of developmental anthropology most clearly in his depiction of the Irish in the Topography of Ireland (see Chapter 1), in which he groups civility, markets, town life, and the rights of citizenship, opposing these terms to barbarism or primitivism, country or woodlands living, and pastoral lifeways.

The developmental model linked habitat with civility, and the habitat of the Welsh and other Celtic peoples constitutes another category of their incivility according to Anglo-Norman writers. Celtic lands are frequently said to have open pastures and forests¹⁴ and these natural environments are, moreover, linked to the humans living in them, rendering them “uncivil,” as in the following treatment of Welsh habitat in the Descriptio: “Non urbe, non vico, non castris cohabitant; sed quasi solitarii silvis inhaerant. In quarum eisdem margine non palatia magna, non sumptuosas et superfluas lapidum caementique structuras in altum erigere, verum tecta viminea, usibus annuis sufficientia, modico tam labore quam sumptu connectere mos est” (They do not live in towns, villages or castles, but lead a solitary existence, deep in the woods. It is not their habit to build great palaces, or vast and towering structures of stone and cement. Instead they content themselves with wattled huts on the edges of the forest, put up with little labour or expense, but strong enough to last a year or so)” (1.17). According to this description, the twelfth-century Welsh are an antisocial, solitary people content to live in the woods, a seminomadic existence implied in the description of their huts as usibus annuis sufficientia (strong enough to last a year or so). That the passage describes the Welsh almost solely on the basis of what they do not do—“non urbe, non vico, non castris … non palatial magna, non sumptuosas”—suggests the extent to which Gerald is enacting an implicit comparison with contemporary Anglo-Norman life, which as we know from abundant contemporary evidence was indeed town oriented, and built around stone palaces and castles, those symbols of Norman conquest throughout England and Wales. Gerald’s description of Welsh forest dwelling is far from value free: as we know both from Ciceronian developmental anthropology and from stock medieval encyclopedic sources such as those of Pliny and Solinus, a people content to live in the woods win themselves the label of silvester (pl: silvestres, literally savages), from the Latin for forest, silva.

Welsh political life constitutes a final, major category of ethnographic interest to Gerald and other writers of Celtic custom. Anglo-Norman writers were here, too, most struck by the differences from the political organization of their own realm. Gerald is not alone in noticing the lack of centralized authority or single kingship in Celtic lands, though he is unusual for recommending against it as he does at the end of book 2. Observers found in Wales and Ireland, particularly the upland and western regions out of reach of the Anglo-Norman orbit, political organization more kin based than lord based.¹⁵ The overriding significance of kinship structures in Welsh life is not lost on Gerald, as we see at the end of the Descriptio when he notes the fractious effects of the “antiquus in hac gente mos” or ancient Welsh custom of “brothers dividing between them the property which they have” (2.4), that is, of Welsh partible inheritance. Similarly, he describes Welsh kinship: “Genus itaque super omnia diligent; et damna sanguinis atque dedecus acriter ulciscuntur. Vindicis enim animi sunt, et irae cruentae; nec solum novas et recentes injuries, verum etiam veteres et antiques velut instantes vindicare parati” (As they have this intense interest in their family descent, they avenge with great ferocity any wrong or insult done to their relations. They are vindictive by nature, bloodthirsty and violent. Not only are they ready to avenge new and recent injuries, but old ones too, as if they had only just received them) (1.17). Here Gerald refers to the practice of blood feud, in effect throughout the twelfth century in Wales and phased out gradually a century later when Wales began to assume the centralized organization of a feudal state.¹⁶ To Anglo-Normans, whose king had achieved a near-exclusive claim on war making and “had taken homicide out of the realm of private compensation and feud and subjected it to the processes of royal justice,”¹⁷ the blood feud, though subject to intricate laws, signaled utter disorder and violence.

The Descriptio Kambriae, then, arguably functions as a work of colonial ethnography. Through his widespread application of developmental anthropology in the text, Gerald may have provided the Anglo-Normans with a cultural profile of their conquered subjects that buttressed their preexisting assumptions about their cultural superiority in relation to them. That Gerald had a primarily Anglo-Norman audience in mind for the Descriptio Kambriae is suggested by its Latin-language composition, as well as his dedication of it to an English ecclesiast, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury.¹⁸ Gerald, moreover, notoriously ends his ethnography of the Welsh by offering military advice to the Normans on “How the Welsh can be conquered” and “How Wales should be governed once it has been conquered.” These combined textual features appear to place the dual-affiliated, Cambro-Norman Gerald in the uneasy position of playing “native informant” to the colonizer. Other features of the text, however, overtly challenge the Anglo-Norman viewpoint and champion Welsh ones. That Gerald’s military advice to the conquering Normans is immediately countered by advice to the Welsh on resisting the Normans—suggesting that at times, Gerald had a native Welsh audience in mind as well—is altogether typical of his ambivalence and duality of perspective. These alternative perspectives sit uncomfortably together in Gerald’s treatise on the Welsh, just as they reside uneasily in his own hybrid body, forcing him to occupy what Jeffrey Cohen has aptly called a “difficult middle” between two seemingly opposing states.¹⁹

Uneasy though it may be, the hybridity of the Descriptio Kambriae is pervasive, extending from its deployment of contradictory language to its unfixed functions and even audience. To begin with its doubled discourse, Gerald’s lengthy Anglo-Norman viewpoint on native Welsh life and customs is countered in the Descriptio with a radically different voice emerging out of the Welsh’s own mythic narratives of resistance and redemption. Having dismissively waved away the “remarkable” and “completely wrong” prophecies of Merlin (2.7), Gerald reconjures their essential content soon thereafter in the words of another prophet, an old Briton living in Pencader,²⁰ with whose prophetic voice he ends the Descriptio. The old man of Pencader, not unlike Gerald, is of mixed affiliation, having sided with Henry II against his own people in the expedition of 1163 against South Wales. But when asked by King Henry “what he thought of the royal army, whether it could withstand the rebel troops and what the outcome of the war would be,”

respondit, “Gravari quidem, plurimaque ex parte destrui et debilitari vestris, rex, aliorumque viribus, nunc ut olim et pluries, meritorum exigentia, gens ista valebit. Ad plenum autem, proper hominis iram, nisi et ira Dei concurrerit, non delebitur. Nec alia, ut arbitror, gens quam haec Kambrica, aliave lingua, in die districti examinis coram Judice supremo, quicquid de ampliori contingat, pro hac terrarum angulo respondebit.”

(“My Lord, King,” he replied, “this nation may now be harassed, weakened and decimated by your soldiery, as it has so often been by others in former times; but it will never be totally destroyed by the wrath of man, unless at the same time it is punished by the wrath of God. Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgment any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.”) (2.10)

The old man of Pencader answers in the language of Welsh political redemption, announcing the return of the not-to be-repressed colonial remnant of the British Isles, its mythic, native Welsh. While the resistance sounded by this Welsh voice finds striking context as a final note for the Descriptio Kambriae, it is otherwise in no way unusual or atypical as Welsh expression: throughout the twelfth century, such prophecies figured prominently in contemporary Welsh narratives as the means for Welsh deliverance from foreign domination, forming the “cardinal axiom” of Welsh historical mythology that Britain would one day be reunified and returned to the rule of the Welsh.²¹ Gerald has, then, concluded his ethnographic treatise by speaking in a characteristically native Welsh idiom.

But Gerald’s advocacy of the Welsh is, I believe, discoverable at an even deeper textual level of the Descriptio. Just as his choice to close his text with a paradigmatically Welsh voice disrupts the colonial ethnographic perspective of the Descriptio’s previous pages, so Gerald’s very composition of the Descriptio itself may be seen as an intervention in the colonialist agenda with respect to the Welsh: an improvised, textual response to the perceived need for cultural salvage against colonial incursion into local Welsh culture. For such widespread incursion and acculturation in the direction of the self-styled more “advanced” Anglo-Normans was precisely what Wales was undergoing within Gerald’s lifetime. In the span of the late eleventh through fourteenth centuries, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish societies underwent changes much like southern and midland England had undergone from the ninth through twelfth centuries, an “Anglicization” of the British Isles or “penetration of English peoples, institutions, norms, and culture (broadly defined) into the outer, non-English parts of the British Isles.”²² In Wales and Ireland, Anglicization proceeded through the establishment of English settlements, which aggressively asserted their own societal and cultural norms along with the English language in southern Wales and southern and eastern Ireland.²³ The impact of Anglo-Norman colonization expressed itself increasingly all over twelfth-century Wales, but especially in the south, through the changing of place names, the exploitation of native forest and fishery resources, the spread of arable cultivation, and the development of markets and gradually even of small towns.²⁴ By 1300, the British Isles constituted a world increasingly subsumed under a single economic orbit and a single currency, constituting, in R. R. Davies’s estimation, a “world in which Anglo-French cultural, architectural and ecclesiastical norms increasingly dominated, and even threatened, indigenous and local traditions.”²⁵ Scholars of medieval Scotland have recently begun to unearth and examine the region’s cultural losses with respect to Gaelic law, language, and the very memory of the Gaelic past.²⁶ Likewise, first in marcher Welsh and then native Wales over the course of the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman literary culture penetrated indigenous literary traditions, transforming them such that in Wales too it would be possible to discover “the themes, topoi, and literary sentiments common throughout the court circles of the Anglo-Norman world,” in Welsh scriptoria, the insular scribal tradition became edged out by Anglo-Norman script, and native Welsh church buildings began to reflect Romanesque patterns.²⁷

A close reading of the Descriptio Kambriae suggests that these processes of social and cultural accommodation, well under way in the period in which Gerald wrote, may have motivated his composition of the novel treatise. For just as in the nineteenth-century European incursion into Asia, Africa, and the Americas gave rise to the widespread appeal to anthropological “salvage”—the call to preserve traditional cultures from the ravages of modernity and acculturation—so too in the medieval era’s greatest period of expansion, we find that same call in the work of the twelfth century’s most accomplished ethnographer of the Far West. In the “First Preface” of the Descriptio, Gerald speaks of “my own native land”²⁸ with the romantic sentimentality proper to salvage work: “Nos, ob patriae favorem et posteritatis, finium nostrorum abdita quidem evolvere, et inclite gesta, necdum tamen in memoriam luculento labore digesta, tenebris exuere, humilemque stilo materiam efferre, nec inutile quidem nec illaudabile reputavimus” (my italics) (I have been inspired to think that it may be a useful and praiseworthy service to those who come after me if I can set down in full some of the secrets of my own native land. By writing about such humdrum matters I can rescue from oblivion those deeds so nobly done which have not yet been fully recorded). And in the “Second Preface,” similarly, “et posteritati consulens, inclita nostri temporis acta sub silentio perire [perish] non permisi” (my italics) (For the benefit of those who will come after, I have also rescued from oblivion some of the remarkable events of our own times). Given that Gerald—whose attitude generally displays the realism and lack of nostalgia characteristic of Cambro-Norman society—nowhere else characterizes the processes of accommodation that were proceeding all around him as forms of loss, instead setting about to fix and record soberly such native Welsh customs as still existed for posterity, these small expressions of the importance of memory and of acting against the ruins of silence ring out with disproportionate power.

In writing the Descriptio as a work of salvage, Gerald, I believe, displays what Mary Louise Pratt calls a canny “autoethnographic” consciousness: “a particular kind of cultural self-consciousness … of one’s life-ways or customs as they have been singled out by the metropolis, be it for objectification in knowledge, for suppression or for extermination” (original italics), that is, processes of colonization and conquest. Autoethnography, Pratt shows, “selectively appropriates some tools of objectification … to counter objectification (‘We are not as you/they see us’).”²⁹ In splicing and recombining colonial developmental discourse with the redemptive voices of Welsh mythology, Gerald manages to exceed and disrupt colonial discourse and outlook. Gerald also frequently manages, of course, to confound his audiences. Autoethnography’s rhetorical heterogeneity makes it legible in different ways to differing audiences, thus by nature liable to semiotic slippage or indeterminacy. But it is most confounding to those who approach its representative texts, or for that matter cultures themselves, “as discrete, coherently structured, monolingual edifices.”³⁰ Instead of expecting the Descriptio to express a single or “pure” position, we need to recall that autoethnographic texts are distinctly impure and inauthentic forms of self-representation. Autoethnographic texts are, moreover, frequently penned by mixed-race authors who are ambivalently positioned as cultural intermediaries in a colonial administration, figures who could as readily turn “native informant.”³¹ Gerald, for instance, acted as a royal clerk for ten years, in which time he served as colonial surveyor of Ireland for Henry II, and acted as cultural liaison between the king and the various princes of Wales, many of them Gerald’s blood relations.