True philology makes a hospitable place in the mind for the foreign Other

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Framing the Other’s political vocabulary through eroticized etymology infantilizes and discredits them; National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry; Philology is the foundational interpretive art, not an archaic curiosity (+1 more)

Related

• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools (similarity 0.91)
• Perceptions of the Other are always filtered through one’s own cultural narrative forms. (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural domination shapes working-class perception without fully occupying the mind (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry #expands (0.75)
• Philology is the foundational interpretive art, not an archaic curiosity #expands (0.72)
• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools #expands (0.70) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351