ABSTRACT
The chief aim or function of colonial ideology, it is often asserted, was or is the affirmation of the superiority of white colonizers over non-Europeans or natives. It can hardly be disputed that reinforcement of such a basic racial hierarchy is conspicuous, but one premise of a more adequate account of the representations produced by colonial travelers and ethnological writers might be that they were (and are) concerned, not simply with white superiority, which of course was often too obvious a "fact" to require substantiation, but with the superiority of some indigenous peoples over others. In any journey, a traveler encountered a variety of groups; administrators were likely to deal with distinct populations; and the ethnological theorist was of course often specifically concerned with defining and ranking different "races." Despite their inevitable diversity and inconsistency, these comparisons did not proceed in a totally haphazard way, but tended to be reiterated to the point that they acquired, as Edward Said says of the basic geographic difference between East and West, the status of an external and axiomatic truth. On the other hand, what was at issue in such discriminations, what kinds of criteria mattered, might be disputed and might vary over time.
