Page - 146 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

146 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (im)possibility of writing a travelogue Following a paragraph in which he comments on the role played by visual contact in human interaction and seduction that he noticed in Ethiopia, he concludes the entry by saying: I feel it has infected me. I surprise myself rising to the challenge, and I awaken my eyes, dulled by years of routine and of being used to familiar things. It is a close-up view, which the disciplinarian formatting of anthropology later turns into a “view from afar”. (Ramos 2018: 39) As the travelogue continues, Ramos eventually seems to have arrived in Ethiopia with his senses intact, and the text increasingly gives insights into his daily life while travelling, which is shaped by experiences such as the weekly power cut in the ‘tin shack Mercato district’, which ‘is when the contrast between the obscene luxury of the Sheraton and the misery of the Mercato imprints itself most strongly on the retinas of anyone who stands near the royal palace gates, on top of one of Addis’s hills’ (Ramos 2018: 41). Ramos’s thoughts increasingly turn to how he is perceived by the Ethiopians he meets on his travels. He feels that he has become an object of ethnographic interest to the locals, the consequence, he suggests, of the few Portuguese visitors to the coun- try, which results in his being regarded as rather ‘exotic’ (Ramos 2018: 53–55). Meetings with other Europeans trigger reflections on the impact that certain structural categories have on the way Europeans are perceived by Ethiopians. There is, for example, his encounter with a female British anthropologist who is met with mistrust by the local population, which, Ramos suggests, may have to do with the various intersecting layers of her identity: ‘The unfortunate combination of being a woman, unmarried, English and Catholic is the worst set of credentials that an anthropologist could present here’ (p. 65). Similarly, an Ethiopian man whom he meets on his travels recounts his own experience of Russia, which leads Ramos to reflect on how belonging is shaped by overlapping and competing identities, in this case, on the meaning of being African and Black (p. 87). At this stage of the travelogue, long quotes from conversations with Ethiopians are also included for the first time (p. 63 ff.). In the text, the chronology is thus an important element that gives insights into how Ramos’s experience of travelling evolved and changed over time. The sketches do not adhere to this chronological order, however. Only in some cases can the text be connected to a certain sketch after all, as in the case of the invitation Ramos received from the Spanish ambassador (p. 49), which is visually represented by a sketch of the entrance to the embassy, in front of which stands a guard (cf. p. 36). In the English version, the drawings are closer to the text insofar as coloured sketches occur throughout the book, whereas in the Portuguese versions these had to be placed in two sections of eight colour pages each, for tech- nical reasons (personal communication with Ramos, 20.9.2020) In the English version — following the preface and the introduction — there are twenty pages of sketches before the part titled ‘An Ethiopian Travelogue’ begins. The weight and importance of the sketches is thus clearly demarcated at the beginning of the book. Thereafter, throughout the travelogue part, a page of sketches is located on the left, whereas the written text is located on the right. Another thirteen pages of sketches in a row separate the travelogue part from the second part of the book, ‘Ethiopian Stories’. In this part, the written text is pre- sented without any inserted sketches. At the very end, another six pages of sketches round up the book. The ‘Ethiopian stories’ have their own visual component, however, in the form of the