Early European claims to civility rested on a culture-versus-nature frame, not cultural difference.

Evidence

A fundamental image was of civility as the result of nurture or taming of an originally wild, raw nature. This is what underlies the, to us, striking ethnocentricity of our ancestors. They didn’t see their difference from, say, Amerindians as that between two cultures, as we would say today, but as that between culture and nature. We are trained, disciplined, formed, and they are not. The raw meet the cooked. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 64

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that civility was conceived as taming of wild raw nature, a nurture/versus-nature polarity.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the polarizing mechanisms of the immodesty moral panics article: Others framed not as differently cultural but as un-formed/raw.
• XREF: The raw/the cooked echoes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist opposition between nature and culture in The Raw and the Cooked. — connects to: Europeans regarded the colonized as creatures of nature rather than culture — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1401; France’s civilizing mission was not chiefly about cultural assimilation; Contemporary European racism is a forward-looking product of cultural change, not a relic

Related

• Europeans regarded the colonized as creatures of nature rather than culture (similarity 0.82)
• Cultural difference was routinely misread as a difference in civility. (similarity 0.79)
• Civilizational and racial nativism differ in whether they define enemies or essence. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Europeans regarded the colonized as creatures of nature rather than culture #exemplifies (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1401
• France’s civilizing mission was not chiefly about cultural assimilation #corroborates (0.80)
• Contemporary European racism is a forward-looking product of cultural change, not a relic #expands (0.75)