Early ethnography arose from a project to define humanity as naturally industrious

Evidence

Ethnography emerged in the early nineteenth century, not just to describe the nature of man, but as part of a larger process of describing man as, by nature, productive. The first serious ethnography of the Middle East, Edward Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, was subsidised and published in England by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the organisation set up by Lord Brougham, as I mentioned earlier, to introduce books and schooling to the new industrial working class in order to teach them the virtues of industriousness and self-discipline. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 345

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how knowledge-production institutions (like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) served class discipline, echoing themes from earlier chapters on schooling. — connects to: Adam Smith’s homo economicus was culturally specific, not a natural universal type — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 86
• SEED: Essay angle: the colonial/class genealogy of ethnography as a disciplining genre born to prove humans must produce.