Colonial ethnography and schooling jointly manufactured the native ‘character’ as a governable object

Evidence

The Egyptian ‘mind’ or ‘character’ is formed in such ethnographic decription as a solid object, the object upon which the educational practices in which the writer was engaged could work. ‘Ethnology shows us the effect, history gives us the cause. But it also indicates to those who would profit from its lessons, the remedies to those ills that the neglect or the harmful influences of preceding ages have created.’ The descriptive process of ‘ethnology’ and the disciplinary practice of the school worked together in this way to create the new subject of colonial politics, the individual character or mentality. Like the more sophisticated ethnographic concepts that would replace it – first ‘race’ and later ‘culture’ – the concept of character was to acquire explanatory force by representing the historically moulded ‘nature’ of both the individuals and the society studied. ‘The national character’, wrote the Inspector-General, drawing analogies from biology and geology, the major sciences of the day, ‘is the slow but constant product of the historical events that the nation has had to traverse. Resembling those alluvial plains to which each passing flood has added another layer, this character forms, condenses little by little, and, just as each different geological layer indicates to us a new natural phenomenon, so each physiological peculiarity leads us to a new phase of formation.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 344

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how ‘character’ functioned as an early forerunner of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ as ethnographic explanatory concepts.
• SEED: Angle: how the ‘alluvial layers’ metaphor from geology/biology lent pseudo-scientific authority to colonial descriptions of national character.
• XREF: connects to: Settler schooling functioned deliberately as deculturalization of native peoples — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1197