A deceptive disguise let Lane appear immersed while keeping objective distance

Evidence

It was Edward Lane who found the ideal device for meeting this double demand, to immerse oneself and yet stand apart. The device was that of hiding beneath a deliberate disguise, rather like the tourist in coloured spectacles or the photographer beneath his cloth. In order ‘to escape exciting, in strangers, any suspicion of … being a person who had no right to intrude among them’, Lane explained, he adopted the dress and feigned the religious belief of the local Muslim inhabitants of Cairo. The dissimulation allowed him to gain the confidence of his Egyptian informants, making it possible to observe them in their own presence without himself being observed. His ethnographic writing seems to acquire the authority of this presence, this direct experience of the real. But at the same time, as Said points out, in a preface to his ethnography Lane carefully explains the deception to the European reader, thus assuring the reader of his absolute distance from the Egyptians. The distance assured by the deception is what gives his description its ‘objectivity’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 114

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ethnographic trick by which ‘objectivity’ was manufactured from feigned immersion — a key mechanism of Orientalist knowledge production.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s ‘complaints/immodesty’ article theme of dress as identity signaling and deception, and to Said’s Orientalism.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — Lane’s adoption of local dress as a deceitful instrument of observation is a striking inversion of dress-as-identity-signaling.