Colonial frontier zones produced mutual comprehension efforts between colonizer and colonized

Evidence

However it was only with the establishment of physical (albeit fluctuating) frontier zones with these exotic societies, frontier zones created typically at the beginning of the colonial era, that a real symbiosis started to occur. Symbiosis is perhaps not quite the mot juste; certainly in most cases Eastern and African societies were much more influenced by the West than the West was by them; nonetheless there was a flow both ways. Clearly in the sort of frontier situation typical of the colonial experience, a struggle for political as well as economic mastery is implicit and part of this struggle is the not entirely innocent attempt to understand the adversary better. Both sides were compelled to engage in this difficult exercise of comprehension. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later chapters of Orientalism and the Jews about how Western self-understanding was partially shaped by the colonized other; also resonates with how the same period’s Bible-as-map framing of the Middle East is analyzed throughout this volume.