Tupaia shows us how to embrace diversity

Misunderstanding is an important yet underappreciated philosophical category. I would say that my work as a philosopher essentially consists of unearthing and unravelling misunderstandings, and then seeking out narratives in which everyone can, in some way, recognise themselves and rediscover their own perspective without setting aside the perspectives of others. History is littered with documents that reveal misunderstandings; the one I find most fascinating is the so-called Tupaia map.

What a huge misunderstanding! Because this isn’t a map. It looks very much like a map – it really does look like a geographical map – and we know it depicts islands in the sea. But it isn’t a map.

Let’s put it this way. Some extraterrestrials come to visit you; you get to know one another, communicate and, in a way, bond; they invite you to join them on their return journey to the distant planet they come from. You’re curious: what a magnificent opportunity for a change of scenery, to satisfy your thirst for adventure! And you’ll be the first Earthlings to set off on an interstellar journey! On board, they show you various navigation instruments you’ve never seen before. For example, they hand you a luminescent tube on the surface of which moving dots appear. They point to one of those dots and tell you that it is Earth. They ask if you could indicate where you imagine the other planets of the solar system to be located on the tube, to understand how you orient yourself. You have a good knowledge of astronomy; you used to be a pilot and a navigator, and you feel you can answer the question. But why on earth a tube and not a sphere or a sheet of paper… This document is not the result of a close encounter of the third kind. Or perhaps it is, in a special sense. European navigators are still portrayed as ‘discoverers’ of ‘remote’ civilisations, as the ‘first’ to venture into ‘distant’ if not ‘exotic’ seas. But in reality, aided by luck and using colossal yet rather inflexible technologies, they landed on lands inhabited by millennia-old civilisations.

Let’s put it this way: you are a community in Tahiti, 450 years ago. A complex community, with farmers, soldiers, priests, traders, fishermen, towns, and a nimble fleet that enables trade with neighbouring and distant islands – and therefore sailors, and therefore shipwrights. Your boats are light and fast, with a outrigger; they have no stern or bow and are symmetrical about the transverse axis. Your captains know the stars, the waves and the currents; they navigate the vast open sea thanks to a long-standing oral tradition passed down from generation to generation – without writing, without instruments. And then, at a certain point, a strange floating spacecraft arrives in the harbour, with towering sides and a bizarre shape – without a centreboard, symmetrical along the longitudinal axis, with three enormous masts, limp sails, slow and clumsy. Lettings full of pale, foul-smelling humanoids disembark, babbling in an unknown language. In a local account, they are described as demons: they are said to have eyes at the back of their heads, since ‘they row with their backs to the land they are heading towards’. The landing of the first European navigators on the Pacific islands is every bit as dramatic as a Spielberg film.

Encounters between civilisations have resulted in arduous, often violent and often asymmetrical alignments – as in the case of European colonisation, which brought other civilisations into line. Now, nestled within the folds of these synchronisations lie thousands of misunderstandings, both minor and major: linguistic and ritual misunderstandings, tentative attempts to make sense of the Other, misleading translations, and obscure and ambiguous territories into which one need not venture. Yet these are also creative spaces, for everything must be invented: gestures, offerings, exchanges of craft practices. And it is in these spaces that great minds operate, fuelled by an unquenchable and indomitable curiosity, as recounted in a beautiful book by Antonie Lilti.