Pre-colonial social order lacked the inside-outside split moderns assume

Evidence

The image of the body was powerful because it provided the separate elements of the human world with their intelligibility, revealing the meaningful relations between them. The living body was an image that expressed an order of things that was given in the nature of human existence, from which could be deduced how the social world should be arranged. It demonstrated hierarchies of task and position, by showing the connections linking different groups into a continuous whole. ‘Just as every limb and organ of the body has a function to perform by nature, and one part does not consider its task honorable nor another contemptible but each simply performs that for which it was created … so the individuals of the community each have a function they must perform.’ Like the circle of eight words mentioned earlier, this continuous whole was not an order conceived in the image, common to us today, of an inside versus an outside, a material world versus its structure, or a physical body versus a mental entity called ‘the mind’. Thus the rulers corresponded simply to a particular organ of the body. Just as writing was not thought of in the simple terms of the metaphysical presence of an author’s meaning in a physical text, in the image of the body there was no abstract authority, no invisible interior source of power governing a physical exterior. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 487

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Mitchell’s central claim: the possibility of authority without an interior/exterior split, tying the body metaphor to the absence of ‘the mind’ as an entity — dense and paradigm-shifting for how we conceive power.
• XREF: Builds on Mitchell’s earlier argument about writing lacking the author-as-interior-presence model, and parallels his ‘circle of eight words.’ Also resonates with Bruno Latour’s rejection of the modern constitution’s inside/outside divide. — connects to: the MOC “The Violence That Builds: How Modern Order Is Forged, Not Broken, by Force”