European curiosity was framed as natural, masking its own historical construction

Evidence

But there is also the implication that this ‘attitude’ – if that is how it should be understood – was in some sense natural. Such curiosity, it seems to be suggested, is simply the unfettered relation of a person to the world, emerging in Europe once the ‘loosening of theological bonds’ had brought about ‘the freeing of human minds’. Fewer people would question this assumption. In fact I would argue that the notion of ‘theological bonds’ that loosen or become broken, leaving the individual confronted by the world, continues to govern our understanding of the historical encounter of the Middle East with the modern West, and even of political struggles in the Middle East today. The reason for my detour through this mischief is because I want to examine the way of addressing the world that Middle Eastern writers found in Europe as something not natural but mischievous – dependent, so to speak, on a certain theology of its own. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 59 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Even if we leave aside “the new and totally different” and therefore (by assumption) pure intellectual curiosity — which no one else who has tried to read and interpret a text has ever been fortunate enough to possess — there is much too much to be accepted on faith here. From reading such cultural and colonial historians as Donald Lach or J. H. Parry, one would conclude that European interest in alien cultures was based on actual encounters with those cultures usually as a result of trade, conquest, or accident. “Interest” derives from need, and need rests on empirically stimulated things working and existing together — appetite, fear, curiosity, and so on — which have always been in play wherever and whenever human beings have lived. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 307 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Disinterested curiosity about alien cultures is largely a Western European trait; European curiosity required mechanisms that rendered the world into objects; European curiosity was itself a theology-dependent mode, not natural unfetteredness — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 59 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• European curiosity was itself a theology-dependent mode, not natural unfetteredness #corroborates (0.94) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 59
• European curiosity about alien cultures grew from trade, conquest, and need #complicates (0.78) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 307
• European science advanced because of cultural immersion, not despite it #complicates (0.74)
• Direct experience of the Orient confirms imagination over reality for the European sensibility. #complicates (0.74)
• A diasporic vantage yields critical insight from being in but not of Europe #complicates (0.73)