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140 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (im)possibility of writing a travelogue would depend’ (cf. Forsdick 2009: 299). Ramos (2018: 3) regards his sketches as likewise serving as aide-mémoires, although, as he stresses, he does not need to revisit his ‘graphic records’ in order for them to fulfil this function. As he emphasizes, the process of creating sketches during his travels helps him to fix his memories because it forces him to look at things more carefully, ‘to examine shapes, colours and events’ (Ramos 2018: 1). Comparable to the slow travel movement, which arose in response to the increasing speed of travel since the 1980s (Ouditt 2019: 231), sketching can be seen as a ‘slow’ form of documen- tation. A certain moralising tendency which Sharon Ouditt (2019: 231) detects in the works of proponents of slow travel can also be noted in Ramos’s explanations of why he prefers sketching over photography. Whereas using a camera makes him feel uncomfortable, sketching enables him to interact with people in a way that reduces the differences between him, the traveller, and them, the travellees. The practice of sketching thus makes travelling a bearable enterprise: Sketching […] is also a means of communication between me and the worlds in which I travel, and one that sometimes allows me to escape from the mould of otherness — that is to say, it renders me a little more human and, while it does not make me blend in or become part of a social world to which I remain alien, I can at least feel I am an exotic individual within an exotic group. (Ramos 2018: 2) In a certain way, while the practice of sketching during his travels reduces the difference between Ramos and the Ethiopians he meets, it also increases the difference between him and the other travellers he encounters — including other travel writers and other professionals who earn a living travelling and publishing about it (cf. Ramos 2018: 2). ‘Researcher’ and ‘traveller’ are categories that have overlapped for centuries, and much has been written on the category of the ‘scientific traveller’, which Byrne (2019: 17) helpfully uses in a broad sense ‘to refer to any travellers or explorers with an evident interest in gathering and disseminating scientific information’, thus providing travel accounts that are also part of the ‘scientific discourse’. Historically, much travel writing on Africa has been produced by travellers who fall under this category (see e.g. Youngs 1994 for British travel writing on Africa in the nineteenth century and Reimann-Dawe 2016 on German travel writing from the same period). While the natural sciences dominated much early travel writing, anthropologists of the twenti- eth century produced writings that lie at the crossroads of travelogue and ethnographic account (Ní Loingsigh 2019: 13 ff.).6 Ramos clearly falls under this latter category at first glance. A closer look at his oeuvre, however, makes clear that he differs from scientific travellers, whom Byrne (2019: 26) charac- terizes as ‘mediators — of forms of knowledge, of cultures, of language and expression — who spoke to and wrote for both ‘professionals’ in the sciences and outsiders […]’. In collecting oral history in Amharic and making it available to readers of his Portuguese and English books, he certainly conveys knowledge. In the travelogue parts of his books, however, Ramos aims not to explain Ethiopia to his readers but rather to enable them to share the experience of travelling there, with all the overwhelming and confusing impressions it involves. Sketches are the tools that allow him to do so. Whereas the etymology of the word ‘illustration’ ‘indicates the action or purpose of an 6 Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous work Tristes Tropiques (1961[1955]) is undoubtedly one of the best-known and most acclaimed travelogues written by an anthropologist.