Een wereld van verschil: De receptie van het Verlichtingsdenken in de reisverslagen van de Forsters

The accounts which Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg have written of the voyage with Captain Cook have always been considered being representative of the Enlightenment. In this article this assumption is put to the test: it traces Enlightenment theories and concepts in the Forsters’ representations of non-western peoples. It analyses descriptions of the peoples of Tahiti in Polynesia and Tanna in Melanesia, following the rules of poststructuralist textual analysis. The analysis shows important differences in the Forsters’ perceptions of society, in particular of the ways in which living standards can be improved. Furthermore, the authors have different views of femininity, resulting in different assessments of ‘the situation’ of women. Because their concepts of ‘woman’ have specific connotations of civilisation, these impact not only the relations between the sexes in indigenous societies but also the evaluations of these cultures at large.