On uncensored photos with broken bodies: "These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward- that is, poor - parts of the world.

These Cambodian women and men of all ages, including many children, photographed from a few feet away, usually in half figure, are - as in Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, where Apollo's knife is eternally about to descend - forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged.

Pratt brilliantly explains the unwitting complicity of naturalist and travellers in the imperial project in the so-called New World.
Terms introduced here: contact zone, anti-conquest, bodyscape. Not a light read, but will change the way you read travelogues.