the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:
Indeed, a strong case can be made for the real origins of the ‘Western gaze’ – that rational, supposedly objective way of looking at strange and exotic cultures which came to characterize later European anthropology – lying not in travellers’ accounts, but rather in European accounts of precisely these imaginary sceptical natives: gazing inwards, brows furrowed, at the exotic curiosities of Europe itself.
