ABSTRACT

For centuries, Europe has affirmed its identity in relation to ‘others’ based on ‘fears, fantasies and demons’ which have inhabited ‘the Western mind from Herodotus to Pliny, and from St Augustine to Columbus’ (Sardar et al. 1993: 1). The European ‘discovery’ of Africa in the fifteenth century, as well as Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas, meant that these new geographical spaces, and in particular their inhabitants, had to be re-inscribed in European discourse. As Michel de Certeau has noted:

In history, which leads from the subject of mysticism in the sixteenth century to the subject of economics, primitive man lies between the two. As a cultural (or even epistemological) figure, he prepares the second by inverting the first, and by the end of the seventeenth century, he is erased, replaced by the native, the colonized, or by the mentally deficient.