Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools

Evidence

The aim of all this is not so much to indicate a simple intercultural resemblance or to suggest that Afghanistan resembles the United States of 150 years earlier. Rather, it is to reveal how our perceptions of the Other are always fashioned with the cultural tools we have available to us. In Skelly’s case, these tools include imperial adventure fiction and the cowboy films and serials beloved of mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Edward Said, that most astute critic of the persistence of past ways of seeing, cites Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that “places—be it a problem suburb or ghetto or Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq or Africa—are phantasms, which feed on emotional experiences stimulated by more or less uncontrolled words and images, such as those conveyed in the tabloids and by political propaganda or rumor.” Afghanistan is another such place. To the regular news reports of war and tribal bloodshed we must here add that deeper and in a way more intangible myth of the primitive, in all its guises, on which Skelly initially draws. The point, however, is not to see this position as the final one but as a starting point from which to move forward, to reach out, to cross another kind of border. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a name and mechanism to how fiction inherits pre-existing perception: genres and images as the cultural tools that mediate any encounter with the Other.
• XREF: Bourdieu via Said on places as phantasms threads directly to the archive of prior stereotypes central to contesting vs reinforcing Islamophobia. — connects to: Sartre’s Other-concept fails for black consciousness because the white man is also master. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 965; Some cultures deliberately make their own origins humble and comic — , A Year of World Stories, 12308; Cultural domination shapes working-class perception without fully occupying the mind (+16 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351

Broader Connections

• Meaning in culture emerges only through interaction with other elements #corroborates (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 72
• Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors #expands (0.72)
• Culture requires routing one’s perfection through external objects and spheres #expands (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 555
• Structuralism inverts culturalism’s claim by making experience an effect of categories #expands (0.60)