Today that the earth has been explored in full, it is possible to find the real or imaginary places which evoke a lost place in the middle of nowhere. Denunciation of tourism, nostalgic evocation of elsewhere, reverie on our last spaces of freedom ?
Here is a book, or rather an atlas, which will allow the reader to disorient himself and decentralize. Disorient, because it leads us to search for literary and/or geographic lost holes, sometimes located at the end of the world, sometimes in the middle of nowhere – as the title indicates. Decentor from the present, too, because the author offers a historical and idiomatic analysis. This is what he calls “ PETAOUCHNOK (s) ».
Exoticism here and there
The Riccardo Ciavolella project, anthropologist researcher at Cnrsis to study the real and imaginary places of the different civilizations which evoke either the end of the world, or a place lost in the middle of nowhere, or the two. The author starts from the observation that the earth, at the start of the XXIe century was explored in full. For him, the latest traces of freedom reside in the imagination. In doing so, he seeks exoticism in literary and historical margins and wonders if they have a real transcription-that is to say geographic.
To carry out his non -exhaustive atlas, he relied on his experiences of past land, documentary, archival and digital research. Besides, he uses artificial intelligence to help him in his linguistic research, in order to understand the ways of saying “ palm “,” tataouine “,” petaouchnok In other idioms. Methodologically, he built his petaouchnok (s) in alphabetical order, in the form of identity sheets with title, idea mentioned by this word or this expression, geographic context (a small geographic map localizes the literary place), typology and etymology, and if there is a real geographical application in our world.
Then come a few pages explaining the origin of this expression and its evolution over time. Ciavolella thus offers us a world tour in 80 alphabetically ordered entries – in the blink of an eye to World tour in 80 days of Jules Verne. A two -part card allows us to have a total vision of these petaouchnok (s) distributed over the planisphere.
Take some examples. The author recalls that China, now at the center of the worldwide chessboard at XXIe century, in the past was considered the “ end of the world By Europeans, while, for the Chinese, Japan constitutes a distant margin during the Han dynasty. We could also cite Kamchatka, Katmandu, the province of Saskatchewan. In Rwanda, the term “ Ikantarange »Means a distant place not defined geographically on the fringes or outside the country where expatriates and people of the diaspora are present.
The same goes for the “ vacuum diagonal In France, Tweebuffels-Meteenskoot-Morsdood-Geskietfontein Located somewhere in South Africa, Black Stump in South Australia or kilombo, a lost place that is located either in Angola or in Brazil. It is interesting to learn that Serendip, that we owe to the English writer Horace Walpole, is the old name of Sri Lanka and that it means the place that we find without looking. Now, anthropologists attribute to the serendipity a state of mind quick to find what we did not look for.
From the Philippines to Honolulu
The majority of these petches have the characteristic of being this “ end of a world “Or this” middle of nowhere For a community that shares this opinion due to the difficulty of access – when these places exist. Transport play a major role in the creation of imaginary positions positioning distant places. Sometimes the installation of a station is enough to open up the place concerned, but the imaginations persist which claim this distant now disappeared.
Several geographical spaces cited in the book refer to island territories: Macarabomba in Cuba, Tahiti, Australia, Bondocks in the Philippines, Costicati in Sicily, Japan, Eketahuna in New Zealand, Honolulu. These ends of the world, because they have not been easily accessible for a long part of history, retain these characteristics in mentalities. At the same time, certain ends of the world constitute terrestrial ends, such as Patagonia in southern Argentina and Chile, Nouadhibou in Mauritania, finished terrae located either in Galicia or in Brittany, Gokk in the north of Norway. It is surprising not to read there that a few ends of the world are located in Arctic or Antarctica.
The author’s work is connected to several research relating to the conquest of the territory, to the evolution of tourism and, more broadly, to travel. By proposing a semantic analysis of the real, mythical or literary places characterized by a certain marginality, Ciavolella is part of the vein of the works of Georges Vigarello on the history of the distant and Alain Corbin circumscribing the terra incognita. These two authors map in time and space the erasure of white spots on geographic cards, while Ciavolella endeavors to bring them up, asking the question of whether they had really disappeared or, on the contrary, had moved to the rhythm of conquests and territorial discoveries.
The anthropologist shows that, despite our knowledge of heights, seabed and poles, prejudices remain, sometimes from colonization. What the exhibition held in 2024 perfectly recalls at the Lyon municipal library, entitled “ Represent the distant ».
SURPOURISE AND DETERISM
This movement to re -enchant spaces is very present in tourism. We saw this during the COVID crisis, where tourism players promoted local tourism due to the closure of borders. Long before this globalized event, the sociologist Rodolphe Christin criticized tourism and encouraged individuals to look at the premises again, to exotize it rather than to believe it not able to disorient us.
So we must fight against the attraction of “ Magnificent names », Mentioned by Bénédicte started. New York, Samarcande, Venice, Rio de la Plata can and must play equal game with Trifouilly-les-Oies. The future of tourism as well as the future of the planet, the two being intimately linked. Sylvain Venayre speaks of “ drainage “, Which consists in trying to imagine playful space practices. Detourism is the passion for detour, a term in general associated with the imagination of the adventure and therefore with the borders of the world, but of which it is a question of applying the virtues of curiosity, meeting, discovery, unforeseen event that we know best, that of our place of life. It is a bit of the idea contained in the famous formula “ The adventure is at the corner of the street “, Which dates from the moment when we begin to criticize this imagination of the borders, and according to which the adventure is in the individual who lives it more than in the world around him. And that it is possible, without swallowing the kilometers, to experience emotions, to feel sensations which are the very one of the great literature of adventures as it has been formed since the end of XIXe century.
We could see the work of Ciavolella as a Talisman to protect himself from tourism which is actively embarking on space conquest. For the moment, space tourism is only in its infancy, reserved for a wealthy elite, as was the big tour XVIIe century, before gradually democratizing.
It is not a bad thing in itself, but we see, three centuries later, the persistent negative effects of tourism – pollution, surcourism, economic and social inequalities, etc. Otherness is at our door and the anthropologist shows it to us through our idiomatic expressions and specific places. This extends the work of Rodolphe Christin staged in the exhibition “ Should we travel to be happy ? »Was held at the Foundation EDF In Paris in 2023-2024 and which praised, through postcards, the suburbs of Grand Paris as tourist places to go see. As for Jean-Christophe Gay, he analyzes the phenomenon of surcourism.
The nearby of the distant
By proposing to bring up places surrounded by a certain mystery, Ciavolella enters the macabre dance of world tourism, as Rodolphe Christin could affirm, or does he make the promoter of the equalization of territories ? It is interesting to oppose this reading to that of the anthropologist Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke, who explains her disillusions of elsewhere on the grounds she visited.
This debate of the loved one and the distant, always existing in anthropology, is somewhat exceeded by Ciovolella, since it nuances these two notions which are only points of view of individuals, likely to evolve. For real and imaginary places of the end of the world, it would have been interesting to prioritize the petaouchnocks chronologically, to see their quantitative evolution: are we going to “ less ” Or “ more »From Petaouchnoks ? An evolving cartography would have been interesting here, in order to show the geographic advances in human sedentarization.
The work-dictionary of the anthropologist Ricardo Ciavolella decentses the gaze and the imaginary in time and in space. It offers in questioning the concepts of center and periphery. He comes at the right time by re -enchanted a certain exoticism various nearby or distant territories, real or imaginary, past or present.