In a keynote address at an academic conference in Mexico about a decade ago, I recall historian Walther Bernecker making a case for the utilization of travel and exploration literature to reconstruct local conditions. The scarcity of archival sources, Bernecker explained, made travel accounts an especially important source. Clearly, Bernecker was taking a position in the debate over the usefulness of foreign travelers/explorers accounts to gain insights into local conditions and cultures. Bernecker was pushing back against the idea that texts—in this case, travel accounts—didn’t provide a window into an underlying material reality. In other words, Bernecker rejected the argument that texts constructed reality, a contention that could lead to the conclusion that it was impossible to find some underlying truth about material conditions beyond the text itself. This debate, of course, isn’t unique to the history of exploration, or even the discipline of history more broadly. Academic scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences, has changed focus over the past several decades. While a positivist pursuit of truth hasn’t been abandoned, there has been more focus on representations of reality (especially in texts and images) as an object of study. Perhaps loosely informed in some ways by concerns of postmodernism, this focus on representations has become somewhat generalized in modern scholarship. Without necessarily explicitly engaging theoretical issues like the role texts play in constructing reality, there seems to be a general scholarly acknowledgment that representations do play a role in shaping existence. A good example of this academic trend that analyzes representations is the way some scholars interpret travel and exploration accounts, central sources in the history of discoveries. One of the assumptions much of this scholarship on representations calls into question is the idea that eyewitness accounts are accurate recordings of reality and transparent snapshots of local conditions. Rather than a comprehensive discussion of challenges to this assumption, I will briefly mention some alternative approaches, methods that might be loosely divided into literary and

中文翻译：

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在发现的历史交涉

在墨西哥大约十年前一次学术会议上发表主题演讲，我记得历史学家瓦尔特BERNECKER使旅行和探索文学的利用率，重建当地条件的情况下。的档案资料稀缺，BERNECKER解释，使旅行占特别重要的来源。显然，BERNECKER当时正在过外国游客的有效性辩论的位置/探险帐户，以深入了解当地情况和文化。BERNECKER正在推动针对文本，在这种情况下，旅游占-didn't提供一个窗口，一个潜在的物质现实的想法回来。换句话说，BERNECKER驳回了这一论点是文本构成的现实，竞争可能导致的结论是，这是不可能找到超越了文字本身的物质条件一些潜在的道理。这场辩论，当然，是不是唯一的探索，甚至更广泛的历史学科的历史。学术奖学金，特别是在人文和社会科学，改变重点在过去的几十年。虽然真理的追求实证还没有被抛弃，出现了更多的专注于现实的表示（特别是在文本和图像）作为研究对象。也许松散在某些方面受后现代主义的担忧获悉，这家专注于陈述变得有些在现代学术推广。而不必明确从事类似文本构建现实中发挥的作用的理论问题，似乎有一种普遍的学术承认，即表征确实在塑造存在方面发挥了作用。那分析表示这种学术思潮一个很好的例子是一些学者解读旅游探险账户，在发现的历史中心资源的方式。其中一个很大的假设这个奖学金上表示质疑的是想法，目击者是现实的准确记录，并因地制宜透明快照。而不是挑战这个假设一个全面的讨论，我将简要地提及一些替代方法，这可能是松散分为文学的方法和 那分析表示这种学术思潮一个很好的例子是一些学者解读旅游探险账户，在发现的历史中心资源的方式。其中一个很大的假设这个奖学金上表示质疑的是想法，目击者是现实的准确记录，并因地制宜透明快照。而不是挑战这个假设一个全面的讨论，我将简要地提及一些替代方法，这可能是松散分为文学的方法和 那分析表示这种学术思潮一个很好的例子是一些学者解读旅游探险账户，在发现的历史中心资源的方式。其中一个很大的假设这个奖学金上表示质疑的是想法，目击者是现实的准确记录，并因地制宜透明快照。而不是挑战这个假设一个全面的讨论，我将简要地提及一些替代方法，这可能是松散分为文学的方法和