Europeans made sense of the world through an inside-outside binary framing

Evidence

The dynamic relation between openness and closure was the corollary of an urban life that refused to make something stand apart as its framework. Without the urban effect of a framework there could be no fixed division into outside and inside. To this division there corresponds, in turn, a question of the city’s ‘meaning’. A city with no fixed exteriors, after all, is a city generally without façades. The significance of this can be drawn from the experience of the European visitor. Whether tourist or scholar, the European expected to find an order in the form of an unambiguous line which, like the gates of the exhibition or the cover of a book, separates what is inside from what is outside. This separation was how Europeans made sense of something, how they read it. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 192

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the concept of the ‘framing effect’ as how Europeans read order — an outside observer separating a visible exterior from hidden interior.
• XREF: Builds on Edward Said’s Orientalism and the broader postcolonial critique of how European observers ‘read’ non-Western cities as representations. — connects to: Hayek believed European experience of civilization’s decay gave European thinkers unique lessons. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 69