European Orientalist travellers pursued both detached representation and immersive experience of the Orient

Evidence

On the other hand, however, while setting themselves apart in this way from a world-as-picture, Europeans also wanted to experience it as though it were the real thing. Like the visitor to an exhibition, travellers wanted to immerse themselves in the Orient and ‘touch with their fingers a strange civilisation’. Edward Lane wrote in his journal of wanting ‘to throw myself entirely among strangers, … to adopt their language, their customs, and their dress’. This kind of immersion was to make possible the profusion of ethnographic detail in writers such as Lane, and produce in their work the effect of a direct and immediate experience of the Orient. In Lane, and even more so in writers like Flaubert and Nerval, the desire for this immediacy of the real became a desire for direct and physical contact with the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and to the ‘complaints/immodesty’ pattern of how Europeans read the exotic Orient; also relevéant to the world-as-exhibition theme that Mitchell develops throughout the book.