have recently begun to unearth and examine the region’s cultural losses with respect to Gaelic law, language, and the very memory of the Gaelic past.26 Likewise, first in marcher Welsh and then native Wales over the course of the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman literary culture penetrated indigenous literary traditions, transforming them such that in Wales too it would be possible to discover “the themes, topoi, and literary sentiments common throughout the court circles of the Anglo-Norman world,” in Welsh scriptoria, the insular scribal tradition became edged out by Anglo-Norman script, and native Welsh church buildings began to reflect Romanesque patterns.27
A close reading of the Descriptio Kambriae suggests that these processes of social and cultural accommodation, well under way in the period in which Gerald wrote, may have motivated his composition of the novel treatise. For just as in the nineteenth-century European incursion into Asia, Africa, and the Americas gave rise to the widespread appeal to anthropological “salvage”—the call to preserve traditional cultures from the ravages of modernity and acculturation—so too in the medieval era’s greatest period of expansion, we find that same call in the work of the twelfth century’s most accomplished ethnographer of the Far West. In the “First Preface” of the Descriptio, Gerald speaks of “my own native land”28 with the romantic sentimentality proper to salvage work: “Nos, ob patriae favorem et posteritatis, finium nostrorum abdita quidem evolvere, et inclite gesta, necdum tamen in memoriam luculento labore digesta, tenebris exuere, humilemque stilo materiam efferre, nec inutile quidem nec illaudabile reputavimus” (my italics) (I have been inspired to think that it may be a useful and praiseworthy service to those who come after me if I can set down in full some of the secrets of my own native land. By writing about such humdrum matters I can rescue from oblivion those deeds so nobly done which have not yet been fully recorded). And in the “Second Preface,” similarly, “et posteritati consulens, inclita nostri temporis acta sub silentio perire [perish] non permisi” (my italics) (For the benefit of those who will come after, I have also rescued from oblivion some of the remarkable events of our own times). Given that Gerald—whose attitude generally displays the realism and lack of nostalgia characteristic of Cambro-Norman society—nowhere else characterizes the processes of accommodation that were proceeding all around him as forms of loss, instead setting about to fix and record soberly such native Welsh customs as still existed for posterity, these small expressions of the importance of memory and of acting against the ruins of silence ring out with disproportionate power.
In writing the Descriptio as a work of salvage, Gerald, I believe, displays what Mary Louise Pratt calls a canny “autoethnographic” consciousness: “a particular kind of cultural self-consciousness … of one’s life-ways or customs as they have been singled out by the metropolis, be it for objectification in knowledge, for suppression or for extermination” (original italics), that is, processes of colonization and conquest. Autoethnography, Pratt shows, “selectively appropriates some tools of objectification … to counter objectification (‘We are not as you/they see us’).”29 In splicing and recombining colonial developmental discourse with the redemptive voices of Welsh mythology, Gerald manages to exceed and disrupt colonial discourse and outlook. Gerald also frequently manages, of course, to confound his audiences. Autoethnography’s rhetorical heterogeneity makes it legible in different ways to differing audiences, thus by nature liable to semiotic slippage or indeterminacy. But it is most confounding to those who approach its representative texts, or for that matter cultures themselves, “as discrete, coherently structured, monolingual edifices.”30 Instead of expecting the Descriptio to express a single or “pure” position, we need to recall that autoethnographic texts are distinctly impure and inauthentic forms of self-representation. Autoethnographic texts are, moreover, frequently penned by mixed-race authors who are ambivalently positioned as cultural intermediaries in a colonial administration, figures who could as readily turn “native informant.”31 Gerald, for instance, acted as a royal clerk for ten years, in which time he served as colonial surveyor of Ireland for Henry II, and acted as cultural liaison between the king and the various princes of Wales, many of them Gerald’s blood relations.
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