Cultural superiority toward foreigners predated and transcended Western Orientalism

Evidence

In his remarkable study of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, Mu-chou Poo (Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes Toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005]) offers a textured narrative of the stereotypical views that these civilizations held vis-à-vis the foreigner, views that seem to be based in cultural difference, rather than in race or even ethnicity: “Even though Mesopotamia was a multiethnic society, there was still a sense of the unity of ‘Mesopotamian/we’ people, as opposed to ‘foreign’ or ‘enemy/they’ people.… When the Egyptian texts mentioned a foreign people or country outside Egypt, they often employed stereotypical and hostile expressions to characterize the foreigners.… In the theological line of representations, the foreigners were of necessity evil force from without” (147). “In fact, even the Greco-Roman rulers, or their representatives in Egypt, found no need to discontinue the traditional hostile or condescending attitude” (149). … In fact, a sense of cultural superiority existed in all the three civilizations studied here” (152). — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 625

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how civilizations construct ‘us/them’ identity — parallels the clothing/sumptuary work and cross-cultural comparisons of moral others. — connects to: Western audiences explain away Asian creators’ skills through exoticizing frames — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame…, 127; Claims of absolute cultural difference merely displace older Orientalist slogans — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2172
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does cultural superiority rest on cultural difference rather than race even in Mesopotamia/Egypt/China, and what does that do to the claim that racialized dehumanization is distinctly Western-modern?