Geographic expansion forced Europeans to reconceive their binary self-other worldview

Evidence

It is clear that the European view of “self” and “other” came under considerable pressure at the outset of European expansion. With the discovery of the American continent in 1492 and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope a few years later, Europe was obliged to expand its sense of an essentially binary European-Mediterranean world to include a new and undiscovered Africa as well as a new and distant American occident that kept moving west as the years went on. Anxieties about how to define the other in such new circumstances led to a new interest in questions of origin and language among others. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 308

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘crisis of representation’ theme found in early-modern travel literature; connects to how expanding world-maps unsettled European categories. — connects to: Daily machine experience, not logical necessity, steered Europe’s choice of worldview — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 853