As Said demonstrates, there is a vast discursive archive of writing on and images of the Orient for the specialist academic or political interest as well as the popular imagination (and its commercial handmaiden) to draw upon. Diverging from his broad Foucauldian framework, Said (1978, 23) notes ‘the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism’. He argues that the discourse acted as a framework wherein authors, popular as well as academic, drew upon one another as authorities ‘whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or thinking about the Orient’. Moreover, Said (ibid, 224) specifically singles out non-academics like Burton and Bell as being of particular importance as travellers who did not simply represent the East from afar but developed praxes for effective access to, movement within and management of Oriental difference in-situ. Burton, alongside other traveller-writers in the East was a resource drawn upon and added to by Bell in later years. These accounts, in turn, were disseminated and enjoyed popular reception in Britain and other Western countries alongside similar accounts. So, while the selection of the diaries of Burton and Bell does not indicate their singular status as forerunners of contemporary expectation of the Islamic East we argue that their importance lies in their particular historical situatedness as works that, respectively, offered up and drew upon a textually ‘managed’ East at key moments of Western encroachment on the Islamic Orient. Their importance therefore, is as key points of punctuation in the solidification of a popularly received discourse that has assembled and temporally flattened moments of Orientalist discourse. Said (1978, 157) subdivides travel writers into three intentional categories. These are:
Burton and Bell’s dairies show that there are a total of 158 scenes where hospitality is proffered in the home or consumed in commercial terms. That Bell records no instances of engaging with commercial hospitality highlights the difference in the way she and Burton travelled and consumed hospitality. Burton moved in a more independent manner, whereas Bell was often the guest of dignitaries or statesmen because of her diplomatic role in the post-Ottoman Orient. Consuming the hospitality received in the Orient The analysis and discussion now focuses on the inherent behaviours that related to the expectation of being received in the Orient. Both diarists observe the customary and time-honoured context within which hospitality was provided. A typical example is taken from () “The very essence of Oriental hospitality, however is the family style of reception, which costs your host neither coin nor trouble. I speak of the rare tracts in which the old barbarous hospitality still lingers. You make one more at his eating tray, and an additional mattress appears in the sleeping room. When you depart, you leave if you like a little present, merely for memorial, with your entertainer; he would be offended if you offered him openly a remuneration, and you give some trifling sums to the servants. Thus you will be welcomed wherever you go”. The lack of expected reciprocation for hospitality is associated with religious devotion “Human nature feels kindness is displayed to return it in kind. But Easterns do not carry out the idea of such obligations as we do.” (Burton 1855, 40). He goes further to express the difference from Oriental culture and his own by stating, “It is true that if you save a man’s life, he naturally asks you for the means of preserving it. Moreover, in none of the Eastern languages with which I am acquainted is there a single term conveying the meaning of our ‘gratitude’” (Burton 1855, 40) Burton’s latent Orientalist (Said 1978) gaze emerges as a result of the perceived difference in the nature of the hospitality ‘expected’ of the East. Commercial