GSSC Seminar Series
14 October 2025
In the Land of the Lacandón: The Story of a Story
Steven Van Wolputte (KU Leuven)
12:00-13:00
In 1935 a French adventurer, Count de Colmont, set out on two expeditions into the Chiapas jungle. De Colmont saw himself as a man of nature, while one of the many press releases described him as “[an athlete whose] nerves, muscles, and skin that thanks to good training, but above all to a strong will, have (…) regained their most natural qualities.”
De Colmont’s quest was to find the last descendants of the Maya civilization, “hiding in the impenetrable jungle” of the Mexican-Guatemalan borderland. Celebrated in the French and American press, his expeditions tied in with the popular literary genre of celebrity explorers into Africa, South-East Asia or the Arctic. Like in numerous films or comic books of the interbellum until now, its central tropes included a moral discourse on “nature” and masculinity that anchored and justified Europe’s colonial expansion in the popular imaginary.
My talk draws on a graphic history Richard Ivan Jobs and myself (with Manuel Pale Bolom, a Tsotsil creative writer and poet) have produced on the Colmont’s expeditions and focuses on some of the practical and ethical issues we encountered in drawing and telling this history of exploration, science, and media and how it shaped and popularized a particular imagination of people and nature.
Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte (with Manuel Bolom Pale). In the land of the Lacandón. A graphic history of Adventure and Imperialism (McGill University Press, 2025).
Steven Van Wolputte is professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Leuven. Among his recent work is a graphic novel he published with Rick Jobs (Jobs, R. I. and S. Van Wolputte (with Manuel Bolom Pale) (2025). In the land of the Lacandon: a graphic history of adventure and imperialism. Montreal, McGill Queens University Press; with clemens Greiner and Michael Bollig he co-edited Greiner African Futures (2022). Leiden, Brill.