Reimagining words as mere representations made a people’s distinctive mentality accessible as an abstraction

Evidence

Language was to be considered part of an ideal realm, like law and custom (and later culture or social structure), the realm that gives ‘form’ to people’s ordinary life. This form was something unique to a particular people. Such forms or structures had not been visible to nineteenth-century Orientalists, who had mistakenly argued that a people’s conceptual world was limited to the words one found in their vocabulary. For Bréal there was something more. ‘By not admitting a people to have ideas other than those that are formally represented, we run the risk of neglecting perhaps what is most vital and original in its intelligence … It does not suffice at all, in order to give an account of the structure of a language, to analyze its grammar and to trace the words back to their etymological values. One must enter into the people’s way of thinking and feeling.’ Once words were conceived as mere instruments of communication, mere representations of something, it became possible to move from the words themselves to this something, this larger abstraction – a people’s mentality, its way of thinking and feeling, its culture. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 446

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the construction of a discoverable ‘national mentality’ — the same move later applied to Egyptian ‘culture’ and national character. — connects to: Constructing a people reveals representation as the primary terrain of social objectivity — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 322; Speaking one’s own language makes a people’s worldview concrete and visible — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 566
• SEED: An essay angle: how the move from ‘words to mentality’ repeated itself in the modern ideology of ‘culture’ as a bounded discoverable entity — the genealogy of national-character studies.