Colonial observers constructed themselves as the normative middle between two caricatured extremes.

Evidence

However, as with Mill, few Britons considered either community superior to their own. In this manner, Britons often positioned themselves as the normative middle ground between two extremes of human behavior and belief. If most Hindu men seemed passively effeminate and Muslim men fanatically violent, then the British man represented the proper poise of action and restraint. If Hinduism promoted a retrograde idolatry similar to Catholicism and Islam represented an apostate’s arrogance similar to heresy, then the Church of England provided the truth of the only god. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s tree/architecture thinking — how a self-image (the ‘proper poise’) is built by defining two foils.