European travelers abroad did not realize they had left the exhibition

Evidence

If Europe was becoming the world-as-exhibition, I am going to ask, what happened to Europeans who left and went abroad? How did they experience a life not yet lived, so to speak, as though the world were a picture of something set up before an observer’s gaze? Part of the answer, I will suggest, is that they did not realise they had left the exhibition. How could they, if they took the world itself to be an exhibition? Reality was that which presents itself as exhibit, so nothing else would have been thinkable. Living within a world of signs, they took semiosis to be a universal condition, and set about describing the Orient as though it were an exhibition. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to the reader’s existing interests in how representational habits get projected onto the colonized; also echoes Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah-adjacent notion of unreflective frameworks.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the tourist who thinks they’ve left the exhibition’ as a general model for how frameworks of perception travel — applicable to tech workers in the Global South, missionaries, journalists.